Yup, same as the feedback loops in "cold readings"
Charlie Stross(@cstross@wandering.shop) wrote, in Mastadon:
The LLMentalist effect: Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms used by (fake) psychics to gull their victims: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsoftwarecrisis.dev%2Flet...
The title of the paper is "The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con"
Interests, like "I want a trailer hitch for my Subaru".
All that other stuff? Wanted for someone else.
It's just piggybacking the blame onto advertisers, because people don't like them anyway
I used to work in advertising, and I saw Google as the personification of "moral hazard" (which see). Other things? Way nicer.
Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about the first amino acids many years ago. It was included in a collection of essays (Why does ice float?, Why is the night sky black?and more...) titled, "The Left Handed Universe". So old the info may be long out of date, but an interesting read if you can find it.
If you scan a thousand British faces and compare them to a thousand criminals, you will do 1,000,000 comparisons. (that's the birthday paradox part).
If your error rate is 0.8%, you'll get roughly 8,000 false positives and negatives.
That's bad enough if they are all false positives: people get arrested, then released.
It's way worse if they are all false negatives: 8,000 criminals get ignored by the police dragnet.
That was Britain: false positives are life-threatening in countries where the police carry guns.
0.8% is a good error rate. 34% wrong is typical in matching black women. See
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aclu-mn.org%2Fen%2Fnews%2Fbiased-technology-automated-discrimination-facial-recognition%23%3A~%3Atext%3DStudies%2520show%2520that%2520facial%2520recognition%2520technology%2520is%2520biased.%2Cpublished%2520by%2520MIT%2520Media%2520Lab.
At a certain company long long ago, managers had a mainframe-based planning app that looked like a sort of spreadsheet.
The company did a study to see how much it improved the manager's team's productivity...
Oops! Use of the tools was correlated with declining productivity.
There's a book about In-N-Out called, appropriately enough, "In and Out Burger", by Stacy Perman.
" In fast-food corporate America, In-N-Out Burger stands apart. Begun in a tiny shack in the shadow of World War II, this family-owned chain has steadfastly refused to franchise or be sold. It is a testament to old-fashioned values and reminiscent of a simpler time when people, loyalty, and a freshly made, juicy hamburger meant something..."
Even a JohnnyCab has a joystick which a person can use to drive. Well, after ripping out the robot driver... but, still...
Steven Rostedt wrote
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"I played a little with [Rust] in user space, and I just absolutely hate the cargo concept... I hate having to pull down other code that I do not trust. At least with shared libraries, I can trust a third party to have done the build and all that..."
The various crate-like things are a fad. The arguably correct way of using shared libraries was reinvented independently by the Gnu libc team and by Solaris, from a first use in Multics. You remember, Unix's papa and Linux's grandpa?
Give it a few years, the hype bubble for importing static libraries will burst, and shared libraries with updaters and downdaters will be re-re-invented.
From the Canadian Government page cited below:
Constructive dismissal is sometimes called "disguised dismissal" or "quitting with cause". This is because it often occurs in situations where the employer offers the employee the alternative of:
- leaving, or
- submitting to a unilateral and substantial alteration of a fundamental term or condition of their employment.
A person given a "quit or return to the office" has been fired, and can sue the pants off the employer. The lawyer involved may well offer a good price on a suit to everyone the employer fired, thus increasing the risk to the employer.
See https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.canada.ca%2Fen%2Femplo..., or google for "lawyer constructive dismissal" if you're not in Canada
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid" -- the artificial person, from _Aliens_