Thankfully the US is now focused on a meritocratic system, with everything run by famously qualified people like Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., Linda McMahon, Steve Witkoff, the DOGE teenagers, and on and on and on, who certainly reached their positions due to their qualifications and nothing else and are eminently qualified for their positions, as are all of the minders who have been appointed to replace the mass numbers of purged career civil servants.

It's really a breath of fresh air to see the switch to a focus purely on competency and not things like appearance or loyalty!

Famous free speech advocate Donald Trump. *eyeroll*

You're literally responding to an article where the administration is putting speech constraints onto governmental grants as standard operating procedure. Which is utterly minor compared to what they're doing to free speech in other fields such as collages, or to law firms that take up cases they don't like, or FTC pushing broadcasters to cancel programs that criticize them, or arrests and deportations of legal immigrants who express views they don't like.

And to top it off you have the gall to compare actual literal government censorship to individuals "shouting people down", e.g. people expressing opinions contrary to your own, aka their own free speech rights. Guess what? I have a f'ing right to think you're a moron for your hot take and to express that opinion all I want.

(As an unrelated side note: when I read the headline "Society Will Accept a Death Caused By a Robotaxi, Waymo Co-CEO Says", I expected the quote to continue with something like, "This is why we have ordered our robotic fleet to begin hunting humans. Let the blood sport commence!")

Agreed. Forget about escalators, think about a much closer analogy - aircraft. *Every single crash* gets an investigation and recommendations on how to avoid that type of crash from happening again. Recommendations that are, for the most part, acted on.

But we just accept car crashes as, "Meh, it happens". It's not that we don't have safety regulations for road design and car design. It's just that we've heavily normalized a high rate of crashes and don't treat preventing them with any sense of urgency, even though they're a top killer of young people.

They'll build them right next to the 13000-job Foxconn plant in Wisconsin and fund them with the proceeds of China buying billions of dollars of US agricultural products.

** letter. SIGH.

If only there were a noun form of the adjective "female" used when applied to a human. Maybe something beginning with the word "w", I dunno.

Did you actually expect the house to come with furniture, without an explicit statement that it's furnished?

What if the previous owner hadn't left yet, and the pictures were of the previous owner's furniture - would you have just presumed that you get their furniture?

I don't see any issue with this. Real estate agents used to virtually insert furniture via non-AI means. Here you're just going to be having an AI model that generates a depth map from the existing space and is then allowed to imagine in whatever furniture is described to fit into that depth map - it just makes the process easier / faster (letting the agent iterate through possibilities faster) and better looking.

Weapons detections systems send automated alerts. The specific form depends on the system. But no system is dialing up unanticipating randos on the phone and going, "Hello, police? I've got an emergency here!"

And unless the system had facial ID, and the police knew the "suspect", what they had to go on was the picture from the security camera, so they were already looking at the supposed "gun" in the picture and still saw fit to act like this.

I was not talking about frame tweening. I was talking about tools to create game assets, as was the article in question.

The job is only dangerous in the big cities.

You have some weird conceptions about big cities. Homicide rates aren't an urban vs. rural thing, they're a north vs. south thing . It's the south that has the high per-capita murder rate. Which is in turn because said areas are the poorest places in the US. The trend holds true even in areas that are relatively culturally homogenous - for example, there's not much of a difference in culture between northwest Texas rural counties and northeast Texas rural counties, but northwest Texas is much wealthier per-capita, and also has a much lower homicide rate.

The TL/DR: crime correlates with despair, and places like the Mississippi Delta are characterized by chronic high unemployment, low wages, and limited access to quality education and resources. This combines with a legacy of racial violence/mistrust and lax firearm laws, and the result is exactly what one would expect.

One could make the argument that, well, okay, it may be the rural south that has a high murder rate per capita, okay, but there's lots of people in big cities, so it's a multiplier. Yes, that's true, but there's also lots of cops in big cities, so it doesn't change their odds of being the one responding to a situation where shots are fired, to the degree that police departments are equally well staffed per-capita.

It's also worth mentioning that the rural crime rate trends in the US are much worse than the urban crime rate trends. I hate to risk derailing this by the meremention of Trump, but he tapped into a very legitimate wellspring of anger; the economic growth in the US over the past several decades has been very uneven, and a lot of people, esp. in rural areas, the rust belt, and the south have felt left behind, with insufficient care from politicians as to their plight. While the ragebait media landscape has tended to try to focus their anger on cities and minorities, as "evil outsiders catered to by elites", US cities are, frankly, doing quite well on average, and have thrived in the US's growing service economy. But people in the rural south, the Mississippi Delta, the rust belt, etc (outside of the "energy belts", like in west Texas, that produce oil, gas, wind power, etc)... their lived experiences of a lack of opportunity and declining communities are very much real. They're just projecting them (wrongly) onto big cities outside of their region.

Bad pay, no college education required, but granted the ability to exert power over others... exactly what sort of person do you think you're going to attract with that sort of job description?

Nobody called anybody. It's a weapons detection system. They're deliberately running it. The article makes it sound like ChatGPT got bored, started watching webcams, and decided to narc on the Doritos Guy. That's not even close to what happened.

From TFS, there's no indication either way of whether they had seen the picture before, and if I had to argue either way from the wording, I'd go with "yes, they had".

Also, when did we switch from calling weapons detections systems "weapons detections systems" to "artificial intelligence systems"? It's still true, but a much less useful choice of wording, and is probably going to make some readers think they were shoving video feeds through ChatGPT or something.

Also, in the picture, it was clearly their cell phone and how they were holding it that triggered the alert, not the Doritos bag.

"And your etymology is a fantasy. "

You've confused c.f. with e.g..