Re: Guest Post: Bad bots, bad bots. Whatcha gonna do?

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My favorite bot is the one that finds unintentional haiku.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 5-25 9:33 AM
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Zuckerberg is going to use AI to create friends for lonely men to talk to and that's not at all like Norman Bates talking to his mom or Son of Sam to his neighbor's dog. Technology will save us.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 5-25 9:49 AM
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bon mots -> mo bots


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 05- 5-25 11:12 AM
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Mo botter blues


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 05- 5-25 11:13 AM
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The sports sub I frequent is in the middle of a huge power struggle with a moderator. It's gone into a spiral of stuff getting deleted, posts that say "maybe we should talk about the deletions in a civil way?" that get deleted, new people posting forbidden content which gets deleted, people reposting the deleted content, ad infinitum. Anyway, the mod just demolished one of the civil-discussion posts and went through systematically deleting each comment on it ("you! and you! and also you, and ESPECIALLY you, toxic_taco_929") but left mine up. Is there an antonym for "humblebrag"? I can't believe I'm this inoffensive.

Anyway, the article suggests that I may just have failed the Turing Test.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 05- 5-25 11:56 AM
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They were making me and every other person involved in medical research take ethics tests when it should have been the programmers.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 5:33 AM
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6: I also can't wait for computer engineers to be treated like real engineers and have to personally sign off on their designs' safety*

*my understanding of mechanical engineering courtesy of half remembered explanations of my father while driving over that one Quebec bridge that replaced the one that fell and his ring is from?


Posted by: hydrobatidae | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 9:16 AM
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Sauron?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 9:29 AM
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7: Jammies wears that silver ring, too!


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 9:33 AM
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I have a plutonium ring.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 9:46 AM
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Or platinum. I get those confused.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 9:48 AM
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When I was pretty little I visited my dad's workplace and asked him if the two men who wore rings with beavers on them were married to each other. That was hilarious to everyone.


Posted by: Megan | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 10:03 AM
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7: Newt, who has graduated from U Toronto with an EE degree, and has one of those Iron Rings, described his required Civ E class as being a bit cult-like along those lines. Multiple stories of what happens when an engineer designs something that fails and kills people, ending with "and then the engineer was found dead in an armchair, having presumably died of shame." Programmers never seem to die of shame.


Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 10:06 AM
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Is there a time limit? The bridge by me that collapsed was very old and it was a failure of maintenance, not design. Probably.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 10:21 AM
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7: When I was graduating college in 1986 I remember talking with "professional engineers" (PEs) who described this very thing to me. They had very real, very personal responsibility for their work, and took pride in it. We "software engineers" ain't shit compared to that. I remember in the 1990s when shrink-wrap licenses were becoming ubiquitous, and the "this isn't toothpaste, it isn't nutritious, it might kill you, and you agree to all this when you open the package" shit was just ridiculous. We've just let it all get normalized, and I don't know how we get that paste back into the tube.


Posted by: Chetan Murthy | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 10:44 AM
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This might be my last comment for a little while purely because I'm sick of seeing my pseud here, but did anyone read any of the OP articles and have any thoughts about this "experiment" and its apparent results?

So they headed to the aptly named subreddit r/changemyview, in which users debate important societal issues, along with plenty of trivial topics, and award points to posts that talk them out of their original position. Over the course of four months, the researchers posted more than 1,000 AI-generated comments on pitbulls (is aggression the fault of the breed or the owner?), the housing crisis (is living with your parents the solution?), DEI programs (were they destined to fail?). The AI commenters argued that browsing Reddit is a waste of time and that the "controlled demolition" 9/11 conspiracy theory has some merit. And as they offered their computer-generated opinions, they also shared their backstories. One claimed to be a trauma counselor; another described himself as a victim of statutory rape.
In one sense, the AI comments appear to have been rather effective. When researchers asked the AI to personalize its arguments to a Redditor's biographical details, including gender, age, and political leanings (inferred, courtesy of another AI model, through the Redditor's post history), a surprising number of minds indeed appear to have been changed. Those personalized AI arguments received, on average, far higher scores in the subreddit's point system than nearly all human commenters, according to preliminary findings that the researchers shared with Reddit moderators and later made private. (This analysis, of course, assumes that no one else in the subreddit was using AI to hone their arguments.)

I've never used this subreddit. Apparently it has a specific way for users to mark posts that change their minds, and this is what the study was measuring. The study will apparently not be published and so these results can't be evaluated at all.


Posted by: lurid keyaki | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 12:15 PM
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Since it's never going to be published, we also can't know if "a surprising number of minds appear to have been changed" means 10% vs baseline 5%, or 60%.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 12:50 PM
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I guess my other thought is the nature of the subreddit (people open to having their minds changed as a metadiscursive matter, or at least interested in seeing it happen) makes it pretty questionable how extrapolatable the result is.


Posted by: Minivet | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 12:54 PM
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18: Yeah, I've read posts at the sub before, but never been tempted to participate. It seems hard to take seriously about anything that actually matters.


Posted by: Cyrus | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 1:07 PM
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15: I was talking the other week to an RNLI volunteer who made exactly this point. The RNLI employs its own naval architects who design its lifeboats. They're employees - they get paid, and pensions and all that - but they are also required to be volunteer crew. So a) they know exactly what the users are like who will use their products, because they know and work with the users, and indeed they are users themselves, albeit not typical ones, and b) they know that there is a very good chance that they themselves will go out on a shout on a boat that they designed themselves, or that one of their fellow architects designed, and which is crewed and maintained mostly or entirely by spare-time volunteers.
This, he said, has a remarkable tendency to focus the architect's mind. The result is that RNLI boats are very robust, very reliable, and extremely easy and intuitive to use and maintain.


Posted by: ajay | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 1:31 PM
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Royal Navy (Long Island)?

I thought we settled that back in 1783. Or 1815 at the latest.


Posted by: Doug | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 2:40 PM
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Just because of the subcontinental situation, they turned more tvs to CNN at the gym.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 2:46 PM
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And technically, every part of every continent is subcontinental.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 3:15 PM
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Did the Navy used to lose planes this often and it never made the news?


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 5:29 PM
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The one that rolled off the end of the floating airport? or a new one?


Posted by: heebie | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 6:11 PM
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They can't sell either as new now.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 6:16 PM
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The lack of an iron Ring of Power is the reason software engineers are just 'developers.' 'Move fast and break things' is the antithesis of dying in the armchair, of shame.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 7:13 PM
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||

"As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale," Carney told Trump in a mostly convivial exchange in the Oval Office. "Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign . . . it's not for sale. It won't be for sale, ever."
|>


Posted by: mc | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 7:59 PM
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ajay @ 20: when I was doing last-ditch troubleshooting for IBM, and basically cleaning up the intellectual vomit the fucking architects were cooking up, I repeatedly argued that instead of the last-ditch troubleshooters being people who did the work as a speciality (like me), they should all be the senior architects of Software Group. So that if you designed some steaming piece of shit, or if you stood silent while one of your colleagues did so (and got it past th Architecture Review Board), you would stand a decent chance of having to clean it up, and of course failure to clean it up would be career-ending.

I was of course never able to convince people to implement that. B/c reasons.


Posted by: Chetan Murthy | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 8:02 PM
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24 this is the third, after the "rolled off rhe hangar deck" incident last month and the shoot down by the Gettysburg in December.


Posted by: Ajay | Link to this comment | 05- 6-25 10:57 PM
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I don't understand why Biden is continuing to let American military power decay, is it because of Obama's malign influence?


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 12:22 AM
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27: Yes exactly. IRL I don't call them software engineers.

I have started to point out to my SO that basically the programming he does is just editing. Making sure all the ))) and /// are in the right places. I laugh at least.


Posted by: hydrobatidae | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 6:04 AM
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I'm in the process of de-internetting my life, because of the bots and the time suck, but mostly because of the oligarchs. But it's hard.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 6:16 AM
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Don't cancel your subscription to an eclectic web magazine, your imaginary friends would miss you.


Posted by: Doug | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 6:26 AM
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Not that. I'm just trying to disintermediate myself. Or to use the non-monopolistic intermediaries.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 6:33 AM
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As long as you disintermediate in the privacy of your own home. Or in a secluded place among the like-minded, I suppose.


Posted by: Doug | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 6:52 AM
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I have to go to actual stores to disintermediate.


Posted by: Moby Hick | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 6:58 AM
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It's legal to disintermediate in public in Pittsburgh? I'm not quite sure what to think.


Posted by: Doug | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 7:19 AM
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IT SHOULDN'T BE


Posted by: Opinionated Antidisintermediationist | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 7:20 AM
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cry, cry, disintermediate, cry


Posted by: fake accent | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 9:09 AM
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I keep my list of books I want on Amazon, for convenience, and then I haul out my phone and refer to it when I'm in an actual bookshop. I don't buy them on Amazon. I like to think that Amazon finds this frustrating


Posted by: Ajay | Link to this comment | 05- 7-25 9:57 PM
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You could leave reviews of them on Amazon lot increase the frustration


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 05- 8-25 12:06 AM
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lot s/b to


Posted by: Barry Freed | Link to this comment | 05- 8-25 12:06 AM
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