I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

Probably when Chinese fabs really start churning out DDR5 and high end flash memory. That's the truth of it, it's a gift to them.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

They probably need to keep the data around for a while, for legal reasons. They might get sued, and if it was deleted it will be worse for them. They might get a law enforcement request for the data, and it would look bad if they deleted it.

The bigger issue is that unless you get lucky and go viral, there is no way to get this kind of thing resolved and all you can do is sue to get your costs covered.

And also diver's watches, so there is no excuse for smart watches not having a replaceable battery either. People understand perfectly well that they need to have the gasket properly replaced if they want to maintain water resistance. Not that anyone would warranty a smart watch by the time the battery needs replacing.

It's almost impossible to anonymize search data. Google can do it internally and simply avoid processing it in a way that could reveal identities, to comply with GDPR, but other companies will not be so limited. In theory GDPR applies to them too, but the danger is that we end up in a Facebook like situation with shadow profiles on people who have never used their services.

I don't think Google should be required to provide anonymized search data to rivals. Firstly, that's effectively their intellectual property.

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that. I'm sure the others will do something transformative with the data.

Ours doesn't like being picked up either, although he is slowly coming around to it. Something traumatic happened to him, and I wonder if it involved being picked up.

We think ours did formerly belong to someone, but was in a poor state when he came to us. No microchip and nobody recognized him on the local noticeboards. He's very shy around people, but was definitely house trained before we got him. Over time he is getting a little better with people, but it's a very slow process.

You clearly haven't met my cat. We rescued him and he's not very cuddly. I suppose he is kinda cute sometimes.

That's the problem, in my experience those chatbots can't resist telling you how great you are. I had to ask Google Gemini to tone it down a bit.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

Hilarious that this was modded "troll". I just didn't get around to doing one clock one year, and noticed that it was no real effort to add 1 to it, and that I need not bother with the other ones.

Because I do a lot of GNSS and time related stuff anyway, I tend to be working with UTC a lot of the time. During summer time I have to remember to add one to all the timestamps anyway.

Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.