mountainriver

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (4 children)

If I recall Asimov correctly The Caves of Steel was human killed because mistaken for robot.

Robots of Dawn was robot killed because weird sex hangups (don't fuck the robot).

The Naked Sun I think is the one you are thinking about were robot killed human. Because reprogrammed to think human is robot or something like that.

In all cases the cop can eliminate all other options, and what remains blah blah. (Also does an inordinate amount of interstellar politics for a cop.)

In "Die, rich asshole, die" the plot will instead be that as the show goes on it turns out that everyone who has interacted with the victim has a motive, including the people on the other side of the planet he yells slurs at. Since they (for a pittance) operate the heavy machinery in his home that killed him, from a completely separate jurisdiction, the story takes a turn towards international relations. However, our protagonist gets a leak from a robot operator that anyone who knows the password can operate the robot if they know the password. All the robots are shipped with the password "password".

Armed with this knowledge our protagonist goes to the hacker of bright hair colours and indeterminate gender. The hacker first laughs at the protagonist for not knowing the password in the first place - it was in a post that went viral on Tumblr - and then accesses the robot. It turns out that not only did everyone have a motive, everyone was trying to kill him using the robot. One was poisoning the coffee, another one the cocaine. One was trying to electrocute him in the pool, on getting the chandelier to fall on him and so on.

Finally, the hacker helps our protagonist to trace the IP of the person that operated the robot when it strangled the rich asshole. Turns out it was someone accessing robots for fun to pretend they had come to life. The rich, high, somewhat poisoned, victim fell for it and got horny. He begged to be strangled a bit and unfortunately the person controlling the robot complied, not understanding the strength of the robot. It was an accident after all.

Our protagonist pours a whiskey, looks into the camera and says that you got to know that both you and your partner know what you are doing if you engage in strangulation. Also, don't be an asshole.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Next on your favourite murder show: rich asshole strangled by robot butler.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Starting a cult to build god, control god and upload your consciousness into god?

Well, at least it is an ethos.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 days ago (4 children)

One author (Daniel) correctly predicted chain-of-thought reasoning, inference scaling, and sweeping chip export controls one year BEFORE ChatGPT existed

Ah, this reminds me of an old book I came across years ago. Printed around 1920 it spent the first half with examples of how the future has been foretold correctly many, many times across history. The author had also made several correct foretellings, among them the Great War. Apparently he tried to warn the Kaiser.

The second half was his visions of the future including a great war...

Unfortunately it was France and Russia invading the Nordic countries in the 1930ies. The Franco-Russian alliance almost got beat thanks to new electric weapons, but then God himself intervened and brought the defenders low because the people had been sining and turning away from Christianity.

An early clue to the author being a bit particular was when he argued that he got his ability to predict the future because he was one quarter Sami, but could still be trusted because he was "3/4 solid Nordic stock". Best combo apparently and a totally normal way to describe yourself.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 days ago

It's easy to read it as first and fourth "world" but it's actually first and fourth "word". But the first and fourth word of what? Mein Kampf? The 18 words?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Sharing the suffering multiples the suffering.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

I usually go with "Scientology for the 21st century". That for most gives just "weird cult", which is close enough for most people.

For those that are into weird cults you get questions about Xenu and such, and can answer "No they are not into Xenu, instead they want to build their god. Out of chatbots". And so on. If they are interested in weird cult shit, and have already accepted that we are talking about weird cults the weirdness isn't a problem. If not, it stops at "Scientology for the 21st century".

 

Capgemini has polled executives, customer service workers and consumers (but mostly executives) and found out that customer service sucks, and working in customer service sucks even more. Customers apparently want prompt solutions to problems. Customer service personnel feels that they are put in a position to upsell customers. For some reason this makes both sides unhappy.

Solution? Chatbots!

There is some nice rhetorical footwork going on in the report, so it was presumably written by a human. By conflating chatbots and live chat (you know, with someone actually alive) and never once asking whether the chatbots can actually solve the problems with customer service, they come to the conclusion that chatbots must be the answer. After all, lots of the surveyed executives think they will be the answer. And when have executives ever been wrong?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Who in specific do you see voting for the next Dem who did not vote for Kamala?

Some of the 19 million 2020 Biden voters who didn't vote in 2024? Maybe some of the 5-6 million they lost one the issue of aiding and arming a genocide in Gaza?

No, going more Nazi must be the way. Much wise, much centrist. Much exhausting.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

The investors read "11x, the company's, revenue is 10 million" but what they missed was that the correct reading was "11 x [the company's revenue] is 10 million", so the actual revenue is less than a million. Easy mistake to make! Better luck next time investors!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, the exclusion of the dismal science got a chuckle out of me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Ok, that makes sense.

I was somehow under the impression that the main wild cat money to real money exchange was to USD, on account of the media about such exchanges. The rest followed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago (7 children)

Something I have been pondering is why when going after Bitcoin from crimes (ransom or stolen) they don't just declare the individual "coins" stemming from illegal proceedings and that when they show up the "coins" will be confiscated and the holders investigated for money laundering. They have a serial number of sorts, right?

It should decrease the trade value of the "coins", might even have the added benefit of scaring people of from the scam currencies. Ay, there might be the rub, for in this modern world of ours suppressing financial "innovations" is treated as worse than scams.

 

This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.

A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.

"No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.

Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.

In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.

In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.

If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.

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