There's been a lot of discussion about regulating AI in the news recently, including Sam Altman going before a Senate committee begging for regulation.

So far I've seen only calls for regulation, but not suggestions on what those regulations should be. Since Slashdot is largely populated with experts in various fields (software, medicine, law, &c), maybe we should begin this discussion. And note that if we don't create the reasonable rules, congress (mostly 80-year old white men with conflicts of interest) will do it for us.

What are some good AI regulation suggestions?

I'll start:

A human (and specifically, not an AI system) must be responsible for any medical treatment or diagnosis. If an AI suggests a diagnosis or medical treatment, there must be buy-in from a human who believes the decision is correct, and who would be held responsible in the same manner as a doctor not using AI. The AI must be a tool used by, and not a substitute for, human decisions.

This would avoid problems with humans ignoring their responsibility, relying on the software, and causing harm through negligence. Doctors can use AI to (for example) diagnose cancer, but it will be the doctor's diagnosis, and not the AI's.

What other suggestions do people have?

The recent article Job Interviews are a Nightmare provoked a few commonsense tactics that people should use while interviewing.

It occurred to me that there's no corresponding common sense for the interviewer, so I thought I'd put some notes down about that.

How to interview someone: Scan through their resume, find something they did that you know something about, and ask them a pointed question about that topic. Make the question challenging or controversial if possible: ask about an uncommon feature that only an insider would know the answer to, or ask them to explain something complicated about it or something that you don't know the answer to, or something that's not exactly black-and-white.

People like talking about themselves, it puts them at ease, and by watching them you can tell whether they present themselves as arrogant, friendly, knowledgeable, have a sense of humor, and so on. Just sit back and let their responses flow over you and get a feeling about the person. Could you work with him? Does he know how things work? Can he explain complicated things? Would he give a solid presentation? Did he get along with others? (That's a big one.)

On purpose, ask a question he doesn't know the answer to (a technical question related to your own product, for example). Can he say "I don't know"? Follow it up with "if you worked here and I asked that question, what would be your next step?" See if he knows to look on the net, if he would ask co-workers, of go to the library, or E-mail an old professor, or generally if he has skills to find out what he doesn't know. If he's lost and doesn't know how to proceed, that's a datapoint (may not be a problem for an intern, but a big problem for senior software engineer).

I had one applicant who worked on the electronics for GFI systems so I asked if I installed a GFI in my home, would it protect the other outlets on the circuit (the answer is yes, it would protect outlets further out from the breaker box). Applicant didn't know, but thought that it probably wouldn't - doesn't know the fundamental theory of the thing he claims to have worked on, probably not a good fit at my company.

Another applicant had worked on emacs, asked whether a line-based buffer or a char-based buffer would be a better software solution for an editor (in the sense of adding text in the middle of a block of characters), and got a complete list of plusses and minuses of both styles with references of other software packages that used both types... yup, an actual expert in his field. And he comes across as a little bit Aspergers, which is not a problem and his personality would fit well with the others here.

Stay away from any interview questions you find on the internet, and in particular don't google interview questions that are listed as good to ask. These are worthless, won't tell you anything, and note that the applicant *himself* can google these and their best answers. You could just as well E-mail these, they could look up the answers and E-mail them back.

Put the applicant at ease by asking him to explain something he did in the past, try to challenge him a little with your question, and use your own feeling of his behaviour to see if he's someone you'd like to work with.

The recent article Job Interviews are a Nightmare provoked a few commonsense tactics that people should use while interviewing.

It occurred to me that there's no corresponding common sense for the interviewer, so I thought I'd put some notes down about that.

How to interview someone: Scan through their resume, find something they did that you know something about, and ask them a pointed question about that topic. Make the question challenging or controversial if possible: ask about an uncommon feature that only an insider would know the answer to, or ask them to explain something complicated about it or something that you don't know the answer to, or something that's not exactly black-and-white.

People like talking about themselves, it puts them at ease, and by watching them you can tell whether they present themselves as arrogant, friendly, knowledgeable, have a sense of humor, and so on. Just sit back and let their responses flow over you and get a feeling about the person. Could you work with him? Does he know how things work? Can he explain complicated things? Would he give a solid presentation? Did he get along with others? (That's a big one.)

On purpose, ask a question he doesn't know the answer to (a technical question related to your own product, for example). Can he say "I don't know"? Follow it up with "if you worked here and I asked that question, what would be your next step?" See if he knows to look on the net, if he would ask co-workers, of go to the library, or E-mail an old professor, or generally if he has skills to find out what he doesn't know. If he's lost and doesn't know how to proceed, that's a datapoint (may not be a problem for an intern, but a big problem for senior software engineer).

I had one applicant who worked on the electronics for GFI systems so I asked if I installed a GFI in my home, would it protect the other outlets on the circuit (the answer is yes, it would protect outlets further out from the breaker box). Applicant didn't know, but thought that it probably wouldn't - doesn't know the fundamental theory of the thing he claims to have worked on, probably not a good fit at my company.

Another applicant had worked on emacs, asked whether a line-based buffer or a char-based buffer would be a better software solution for an editor (in the sense of adding text in the middle of a block of characters), and got a complete list of plusses and minuses of both styles with references of other software packages that used both types... yup, an actual expert in his field. And he comes across as a little bit Aspergers, which is not a problem and his personality would fit well with the others here.

Stay away from any interview questions you find on the internet, and in particular don't google interview questions that are listed as good to ask. These are worthless, won't tell you anything, and note that the applicant *himself* can google these and their best answers. You could just as well E-mail these, they could look up the answers and E-mail them back.

Put the applicant at ease by asking him to explain something he did in the past, try to challenge him a little with your question, and use your own feeling of his behaviour to see if he's someone you'd like to work with.

I've been watching the Arizona vote audit with interest of late. I have *not* researched the process, on purpose, and have just been looking at the audit itself and some of the high-level news titles that say what's going on. I have some observations about security and the process in general.

I'm impressed with the process. I describe what I saw are below, but note that *everything* is recorded in a transparent way. The audit was livestreamed, so that anyone on the internet could view the process, ballots were read and verified by at least 3 human readers (under camera), the votes were photographed (both sides) and scanned, and lots of paperwork was recorded and kept.

The process gives us a scientific tool for sorting out election claims.

For example, one claim is that votes were (illegally) printed in China, shipped in, and added to the count. This is an hypothesis, it might be true and it might be false, but it's not completely crazy and we can test for it: paper from China contains bamboo, this should show up on a UV scan, and all votes were UV scanned. Done and done.

Another claim is that the tallies of the audit are not accurate due to partisan involvement. This is Russel's Teapot, and it's not even wrong: it makes no claims of *what* happened, or *where* in the process this could have happened, or *how*. It's not testable in any way. To make Russel's teapot claim, you also need to explain how the teapot got there in the first place.

We have video evidence for moving boxes of votes from secure storage, for the people reading votes, for scans of the votes read, and we have the physical votes themselves: where in this process did the adjustments happen? There is abundant traceability in the process: if you claim particular defect, you have to explain how it got through the redundancy checks, why it's not visible on the video feed, and how several people didn't notice it (but you did).

And note that if there *is* any discrepancy between vote tallies and people believe it's partisan, we still have the original votes and can turn the entire kit over to the other side and let *them* go through the physical votes looking for problems. Hopefully with the same level of transparency and recording.

It's really quite satisfying to know that there is this level of election integrity, and I hope other states use this process - or even improve on it.

There's a crisis of confidence in our elections right now, and a strongly secure and open audit will go a long way towards calming any unrest.

Notes on the actual process:

The audit focuses on Ballots, registration, and counting machines.

Machines:

Counting machines are being forensically audited, and I don't know much about this. There's been some leaks, but I can't tell if they come from official auditors or anyone else, so I'm going to wait until the results are published. Other forensic analyses (of vote counting machines) resulted in a report containing an abstract, a multi-page list of conclusions, and a many pages of "this is what we did, this is what we found". I expect something like that to come from the Audit.

If they're doing things right, they took an image of a counting machine disk and analyzed that; which means: they left the original machine unmodified, they have numerous *other* machines completely untouched, and any claims can be verified by examining an untouched machine.

Regardless of the conclusions, I'm confident the machine audit will be verifiable by skeptics from both sides.

Registration:

Registration is being checked in a computer/db kind of way, and I didn't get much info on this. Arizona claims to be going through the database looking for "obvious" problems (their word) such as 80 people registered from the same address, people registered at blank lots, voters who also have a death certificate, and so on.

Of note, there is no attempt to determine whether the mail-in ballots were signed (on the back, required by law), and there is no attempt to match the signatures with known signatures on file such as driver's license. (NB: I may have this wrong, or this could change later, or something similar.)

I like that and I think it's a good move: the purpose of the audit *isn't* to disenfranchise voters, and if people forget to sign the back of the form it's a system error and not a user error. Also, my own signature changes day-to-day, so signature matching isn't a valid check.

Ballots:

Ballots are read by a 5-person team sitting at a round table with a lazy-suzan in the middle (think Chinese restaurant table with lazy-susan). One person places a ballot on the carousel and slowly spins it to face 3 people to read and make marks on a count sheet, then the last person takes the ballot off and places it in a pile. This takes a couple of seconds per ballot, but sometimes you can see the carousel pause before a reader, she leans forward and adjusts her glasses, then nods to the dealer and the ballot proceeds (probably from verbal commands). One dealer, 3 readers, one taker.

The dealers I saw wore gloves, and I think this is a good idea. No blotches or ink-stains from dirty fingers, and if false ballots are detected we might be able to get fingerprints. The readers never touch the ballots: I saw some of the duplicate ballots slide off (longer ballots with a fold at one end) and the readers pushed back from the table and and allowed the dealer to make adjustments. (Duplicate ballots come from special votes: braille, large-text, E-mailed votes from overseas are transferred to a "duplicate ballot" for machine entry. Also, damaged ballots are sometimes duplicated.)

Ballots were read in groups (I counted 50 ballots for one run), then tallies were made, the tally sheets handed in, everything was dated and signed, and the tallies are kept in envelopes glued to the sides of the ballot boxes. If there's any question, we can match specific ballots with the individual dealers/readers and the time-stamped video stream to check what happened.

In a separate section, ballots are also photographed front-and-back, and the images are saved. Anyone could see the photographing stations and watch ballots placed and processed on the live stream.

Ballots are also scanned somehow, but I couldn't quite tell what this was from the video. I read that they are high-res scanned, and by UV looking for broken fibers from the fold and from the marks. If the marks were made by a pen-like instrument there should be broken fibers, but a photocopied mark won't have these. If there is no fold, then the mail-in ballot wasn't actually mailed.

Also, apparently the checkbox marks are checked for randomness: marks with exactly the same shape indicate a machine process.

The ballot scans will not be released except by court permission. I think this is because the mail-in ballots contain the voter information (name, address) and there were a lot of these this election. The database with the signatures obscured (or removed) would make a good database for AI research, so I hope this eventually happens.

Slashdot has many Coronavirus stories and lots of comments... but very little insight. Mostly it's all insults - one side to the other.

Can we have some rational discussion about the pandemic in terms of the shutdown? We used to do that here. I know there are medical experts, economists, lawyers, researchers, and other smart people here - and I don't think those are the ones being jerks.

I'll start (I identify as a math/physics guy):

Take a look at the coronavirus statistics and scroll down below the wall of numbers to the first graph, and note that the function has become linear for the last 5 weeks or so.

If you take 30,000 as the daily coronavirus cases (slope of the linear portion, rough estimate from "Daily New Cases" further into the link) and note that there have been 1.3 million cases so far, this means that at the current rate it will take approximately 10,000 days for coronavirus to infect the US population.

Social Distancing and the shutdown turned the exponential rise into a linear one.

The original two reasons for the shutdown were that A) we weren't prepared, and B) the pandemic threatened to overwhelm our hospital capacity. Well, we're now prepared, and more accurate/recent predictions show that hospitals won't be overloaded. NY and California seem to be the only places at risk, we have two mobile Navy hospitals on standby, and have built overflow hospitals in places where needed. Among many other preparations.

Given the enormous impact of the shutdown, doesn't it make sense to reopen?

Specifically, since social distancing seems to work so well, it makes sense to ease off on some restrictions until the pandemic resumes exponential rise, then moderate the speed of that rise ("flatten the curve") so that hospitals aren't overwhelmed.

The theory being that everyone will be getting the virus anyway, the shutdown is wildly destructive, and the best way to navigate between those two evils is to allow the pandemic to run its course in a way that minimizes the economic damage, but doesn't result in unnecessary deaths due to hospital overflow.

This assumes vaccinations won't be available in time to help.

What insights can you bring to the discussion?

Any economists, medical experts, lawyers, or other smart people want to chip in?

Today I submitted a story suggestion noting that it's now November 2019 - the timeframe of the events of Blade Runner - linking an article comparing how the predictions of the story and movie line up with current technology...

...which was quickly downmodded as spam.

Slashdot has a problem, which is that people are targeting and methodically downmodding specific slashdot users based on their views. I suspect that some people own hundreds of accounts, and scrape the site looking for particular users, and probably phrases as well. When something comes up, they access whichever account has mod points and shut down that user or viewpoint.

I wonder if there are organizations dedicated to methodically doing this across the internet. In 2016 a group (now disbanded) "correct the record" was formed to confront social media users who posted unflattering comments about Hillary Clinton. I'm sure there was a similar group stumping for Trump that I couldn't find in a quick search.

I haven't seen an invite to meta-moderate in ages, and I think this is the problem that meta-moderation addressed. If someone unjustifiably down-votes a comment, it would eventually get reviewed by other users, and after repeated abuse that user wouldn't get moderation points.

Was meta-moderation removed?

Flagging a submission as spam is particularly insidious because your account can be locked for submitting spam articles! There's no warning - after a number of flagged submissions, you're banned. I don't want my account locked, so I will stop submitting stories to Slashdot.

Is scaring people away like this good for slashdot?

This is also a reflection of the larger issue about abuse on the internet, with ties to fake news and political lies. Someone responding to an insightful post with abusive language and insults will tend to drive that user away, and could be legitimately criticized as wrong, unfair, against the TOS or decorum of the forum, and should be discouraged. But what happens when someone unjustifiably downvotes a comment? That's not seen as abusive or insulting, but it can be disspiriting. The arguments against abuse apply to unfair moderation as well.

Right now society is discussing the effects of foreign influence on elections. Could some foreign hacker group promote a candidate in the upcoming elections to gain unfair advantage? There's more at stake here than just scaring away quality posts on slashdot - a lot more.

As one of the premier tech sites on the internet, maybe slashdot should be on the forefront of coming up with solutions to some of these problems. Meta-moderation would be a good first step, and at the very least it would experimentally test the idea.

If slashdot implements a policy that works, it could serve as a model for other sites. Slashdot could contribute to fixing what is perhaps the biggest problem facing the internet right now.

Was meta-moderation removed from slashdot?

It looks like I no longer get notifications when someone replies to my posts. :p

I was banned from Slashdot for about a day.

If too many of a user's submissions get modded "spam", the Slashdot system automatically bans the account. I've been posting a lot of political stories, and someone(s) went and marked them all as "spam", and I got banned.

You can check my submissions yourself to see if you think they are spam.

If you think they *are* spam or otherwise inappropriate, I'd like to hear about it. I don't want to get banned again, and in any event I'm happy to behave more in keeping with what people want.

Kudos to Slashdot mod Logan who actually received and addressed my feedback about this!

Imagine - a corporate mod actually received and read a complaint, looked over the account, and unbanned it!

Totally blew my expectations.

Slashdot rocks.

Just now I couldn't load Slashdot at all, not even the main page!!

What happened??

Slashdot used to be superfast

No matter where I happened to be - be it in America, in Asia, in Europe, in Africa or in Australia, - Slashdot loads up fast

No matter if the device is a smartphone or a desktop PC, you could almost always count on Slashdot to load fast

But no more

Now Slashdot takes something like 10+ seconds to load, and sometimes it took more than half a minute to load

What happened?

Has Dice shrunk the pipe to the Slashdot server?

Furthermore, Slashdot has been giving a lot of troubles, lately

Just now I was reading back stories on Slashdot, and when it hit " http://slashdot.org/?page=2 " the Slashdot server gave me this:

What gives???

You like to tinker with stuffs? You like to create new things? You are interested in IoT (Internet of Things)?

Then you are in luck. There's a site (no, not related to me in any way) that has been set up for people just like you

It's been funded by Foxconn (and no, I ain't related in any way with Foxconn either) and what the site is doing is to provide tinkerers a venue to propose their idea and if their idea has merit, Foxconn will build it (prototype and all) and if the idea is really interesting, Foxconn might even make your product for you (of course, Foxconn gonna take a big cut, but then, they provide the funding)

Site's name? http://kick2real.com/

One last thing ... a minor inconvenience. This site is in Chinese

I am posting this site on /. because Slashdot supposed to be a place for geeks who like to get their hands dirty inventing stuffs

I have no more tolerance for the bigoted fucks on slashdot.
I lived through dice and beta.
I didn't mind the things I saw as advertisements.
I had my fair share of debates I learned something from.

But the level of tolerance of racism and sexism on the part of slashdot users has gotten to be just too much. There's a level of shitty user base I just can't stand. At this point, with all the neo-misogynists and racial realists, and the widespread tolerance and endorsement of their positions by moderators, I can't see this being a community with meaningful insight anymore.

I'm sure none of those shitty people will be sorry to see me leave.

Since its inception the Net has taken over much of human civilization's attention and it has become the main viaduct for much of the communication and information flow, so much so that the act of letter-writing has become an ancient (and almost extinct) art

In other words, an over-reliance on the Internet has developed, and the problem is getting more and more serious

Internet will not last forever, and if that happen, what will human societies become?

History is filled with stories of collapsed of civilization, one of which we can learn lesson from is the Late Broze Age Collapse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Before the arrival of late bronze age collapse, nation states around the Mediterranean Sea and the Anatolia region had trading ties with each others. Along with the trade ties, cultural exchanges ensured that new ideas, new stories, new designs continually replendish and revive the otherwise isolated cultural groupings dotting along the coast line of the Mediterranean

However, with the collapses of the Hittite empire and the New Kingdom of Egypt, trade between the nation states dwindled and cultural centers all around the Mediterranean Sea suffered a domino-effect cultural crash

While people might argue that the Internet will not fail, that it will go on forever, but what if it fails and ceases to exist ? What will happen next ?

Our over-reliance on the Net is a worrying trend, and we should ponder the possible consequence before it happen

The thread http://developers.slashdot.org/story/14/08/10/2250205/new-nsa-funded-code-rolls-all-programming-languages-into-one has been seriously spammed, and that troll that does the spamming always spam threads that are related to "NSA"

So what are you going to do with the spam problem, Slashdot ?

If you can not stop that bot from spamming you, at the very least offer us an 'un-friend' feature so that we can make a tick on the box next to that fucker, and forever and ever we won't need to see any more of his spam

Will you do that, Slashdot ?

Dice holdings gets most of its money through its main website, and the employees they can provide. Would it help convince them we're serious if we boycott this site next time we need a job?