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Comment Re:Positive feedback loops are bad, m'kay? (Score 2) 208

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"

Comment Google is very successful, because... (Score 1) 47

  • - they own the agent for the advertiser,
  • - they own the agent for the publisher,
  • - they own the auction house, and
  • - they don't provide an audit trail.

I used to work in advertising, and I saw Google as the personification of "moral hazard" (which see). Other things? Way nicer.

Comment Alas, the "birthday paradox" will misidentify you (Score 2) 55

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.

Comment Re:Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score 3, Informative) 246

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..."

Comment Sidebar on libraries/crates (Score 1) 42

Steven Rostedt wrote -
"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.

Comment That's "constructive dismissal" in Canada (Score 1) 162

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

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