It's not going to get any easier to find definitely bot slop free software as time goes on; but we can be fairly sure about this stuff. Like hunting for low background steel.

I can't say that I'm entirely surprised, given what else they've been getting up to; but it seems downright crazy to just unleash a slop engine without even giving your volunteers a heads up; then patronizingly ask if you can perhaps arrange a meeting to understand their concerns.

If your options are 'nothing' and 'hire bilingual tech writer' you can see the attraction of having a not very good but extremely cheap option; but just tossing away the expertise you already get for nothing out of some sort of weird technophilia? Is there actually some nutjob out there who was all "Oh, but machine translation makes my CI pipeline so efficient" or something?

Arizona

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

The second sentence explains it perfectly fine to a layperson, and anyone used to interpreting plots has no real problem even without the supplied explanation. The only points of confusion for someone unfamiliar with the different models are the are the labels.

I'd be curious what the breakdown is between 'addicts', in the compulsively-does-thing-despite-knowing-it-is-contrary-to-their-interests sense, and sad but locally reasonable behavior from people with tepid options.

'Addict' is a comparatively easy call to make when people are getting fired because they no-showed to play WoW; or spending all their time scrolling tiktok despite having a school or college worth of peers to socialize with; but if you are retired, less physically able to get out and about than you used to be, and at the age where your friends and peers are starting to die off, it seems like a much more open question whether having an engaging if ultimately rather hollow hobby is an 'addiction' or just a kind of depressing local maximum.

It's obviously not some ideal of perfected human flourishing; but if you are doing it because you don't really have things to do, rather than at the expense of things you have to do, that's not really classic addict behavior; just a mediocre hobby.

Could you help me understand the 'irony' here? Is saying impolite things about a dead guy the moral equivalent to being perhaps the most pivotal figure behind a war with an estimated half-million dead and a causus belli that was transparent bullshit; not to mention the elevation of extrajudicial torture to official policy? I'm not sure I follow.

And, if you'd like to expand on the 'political leanings' thing; I'd be more than happy to call anyone whose politics involve thinking that Cheney did a great job a monster as well; especially when it's so hard to argue that any of Cheney's ugliest aspects even paid off. Flirting with more expansive theories of the ends justifying the means can be a dangerous business; but, bare minimum, you can attempt to rank means by degree of atrocity and ends by degree of effectiveness; and on that score Cheney's work was honestly pretty shit.

Remember the 'Pax Americana' that the neocons assured us could be bombed into the fractious elements of the middle east? Lol. Bin Laden? Dude was chilling in an upmarket suburb in Pakistan while we were pissing away blood and treasure on hitting a mixture of hapless civilians and 'insurgents' who had the temerity to suggest that our puppet government was not the legitimate local administration in one peripherally involved country and one uninvolved one.

So, go ahead, please, explain your other level of irony. Tell us whose political loyalties are to this grade of not-even-effective violence. What'll it be?

Luckily, reliable sources assure me that he will be greeted as a liberator in hell; so things should go fine.

I think I think therefore I think I am.

But seriously, as some have said here, there appears to be no possible scientific test of whether subjective consciousness is present or being faked.

Therefore one is led to question whether that distinction is meaningful, or matters at all.

This remains the hard problem of consciousness.

My fascination with AI is for us to develop information processing (and storing) technology which helps us answer exactly how far you can go with a created "thinking" mechanism which we cannot demonstrate has subjective consciousness. How far you can nevertheless go with creating general cognition, including introspective cognition, and cognition guided and prioritized by emotion-like symbolic tags which encode and prioritize ego-desired vs ego-undesired outcomes in experience-encoding world models and also hypothetically future-extended world models. Does any of this require subjective consciousness? I would certainly wager not. Does subjective consciousness spontaneously emerge, if enough such general, associatively-interlinked information storage and processing is occurring (a la Tononi)? Who knows. How would we tell?

This statement shows a profound misunderstanding of how computational complexity works.

Yes, computer algorithms can output things that are not (intentionally) programmed into them.

There are two or three secret magic things which result in that happening:

The first is (effectively) random input. An algorithm may be attached to an input device (e.g. a sensory device, or text inputter aimed at most of all human Internet text expressions...) which sends the algorithm an effectively random sequence of input data.

The second is loops which can be designed to feedback a functional result of one piece of random input as input to the next processing round so that the first random data helps determine the direction/extent of algorithmic processing of a subsequent different random input. I say the feedback loop "helps" determine the further processing, because a third magic element, the conditional statement, branches the processing (in the loop) this way and that depending on this or that small detail of the (effectively random, remember) input or the (even more complex and completely unpredictable) combination of past and present inputs.

No programmer could possible keep up with the complexity of how this looping, conditional execution with random input sequences will go. No programmer can, in general, know where this kind of processing will end up, and with what result, nor even, can they predict if the program will keep looping or stop with a result.

Finite, simple algorithms, particularly with random input sequences (although those is not even strictly necessary) can generate arbitrary, unpredictable results. There is actual well-known math behind what I've tried to say in lay terms here.

Perhaps those railing against high schools, colleges, and even post-graduate education, need to go back and deal with their *own* biases and self-delusions. The institutions and systems are there.

It's possible that we'll see more given the generally geriatric trend among people who actually have money in the developed world; but a lot of 'smart' stuff is almost weirdly aggressive about squandering assistive potential.

It seems like it would be an area with a fair amount of promise; if only because not being able to do it yourself does answer a lot of the "why would I need a probably-unreliable and ad-riddled computer to do that for me when I could do it myself?"; but then you see them give the product to a UI designer whose contamination OCD is triggered by readable levels of contrast who replaces all the scrollbars with invisible grey hints; or a product manager with no real sense of UI at all who just churns things randomly or decides that blind copying of UI elements from phone-sized touchscreens to high resolution PCs with mice or large but lowish resolution TVs with remote controls is totally sensible.

Even users of average or better cognitive flexibility tend to be somewhat unhappy about that; and people who are not any the better for age tend to cope with the change less well, especially if compounded by visual or fine motor issues.

What seems even more concerning is that this is how he acts when he knows he's on camera and speaking to a relatively poor railroading candidate.

Because of their enthusiasm for working at or beyond the limits of their actual authority; you normally expect even dumb cops to have a decent instinct for the informal sociology of what they can get away with and against who. Columbine Valley, CO, household median income of ~$130k, over 50% over-40, most of the young under-18s presumably attached to households, 95% white, population a bit over 1200, is not quite at "my police department can do things for me my private security can't" levels; but it's pretty far toward 'customer service' on the "are police customer service workers or occupation forces?" continuum; and it's at least an inner suburb of the ff-course-they'll-fucking-lawyer-up-dumbass metro area.

If this is the sort of attitude that this guy brings to this situation it's hard to imagine him reacting well to encounters with the public in general. Hopefully he's more of a mall cop losing his mind for want of the stimulation promised in police academy; not the sort with a suspiciously stained large flashlight and a favorite rural ditch.

I don't think that the relationship is that straightforward.

You can, absolutely, build bureaucracies to resist accountability and avoid transparency; where nothing is every anyone's fault in particular, and all the records are classified, and the department in charge of checking its own work invariably concludes that procedure was followed. It takes some doing because the amount of formalized process required to keep a large org from just disintegrating means that you can't help but leave a paper trail, meeting minutes, policy documents, etc. that all need to be sanitized or kept out of reach of discovery and meddling reporters; but is certainly doable, especially if you can apply steady pressure over a prolonged period of time.

The high-cohesion/small-size case, though, tends to degrade into the 'if the mayor, the sheriff, and the DA get along they can basically do whatever; if the sheriff is prickly enough they might not even need the DA' awfully quickly and easily. Crumbles more quickly if there's a falling out internally or something Bad happens that has FBI agents sniffing around, since there's no entrenched apparatus designed to create the impression that organizational norms are being upheld; but, if that doesn't happen, it can be very opaque since it's small enough that no formal management and only very limited recordkeeping are required; and accountability is effectively nonexistent.