I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

> The software had a built-in limit of 200 bot detection features. The enlarged file contained more than 200 entries. The software crashed when it encountered the unexpected file size.

A built in limit is:

if ( rule_count > 200 )
    log_urgent('rule count exceeded')
    break
else
    rule_count++
    process_rule

This sounds like it did not have a built-in limit but rather walked off the end of an array or something when the count went over 200.

I heard earlier today that a court has determined that since governments are using all of this data, including license plates, that a FoIA request for all of the license plate data gathered from Flock in a city area for a range of dates was valid.

They want to have a power advantage over their serfs but turning their advantage into a burden changes that dynamic. Something to look into for those so inclined.

We seem to be well past the point of being able to expect them to follow the Law or "do the right thing".

> I see no reason why the government shouldn't be allowed to buy the same data that jim-bob the farmer can purchase.

Jim-bob is likely to face some serious problems if he smashes down your door and drags you away in a pre-dawn raid.

The IRS people get a promotion.

This is why the Constitution places strict limits on the actions of government agents.

(in its original interpretation)

Here I am about to think "damn, people losing their jobs to AI" and then I realize its the "pizza in 4-easy payments" people.

They should probably go all-in on AI as soon as possible. For their investors' sake.

OK, that was pretty funny. +1.

All the noise about AI alignment and disruption is a red herring. Alignment is easy: you have lots of independent goals and do your best to trade off among them, and have some sort of constitution or test suite to keep you from veering off course. Not being bad is more important than being good. What isn't clear is that alignment will be used, even though it is easy. Right now things are roughly set up in the USA to benefit the people, but if something or someone gets enough power they can stop caring what is good or bad for the people. So the threat of AI is nothing new, it's just the threat of someone or something gathering too much power written in a slightly different venue. Government vs corporations, same story. The question is the same as always: who's in danger of getting too much power, and what if anything is going to stop them?

His surname is one transposition away from "AI Mode".

I think American schools should probably teach something. It seems fairly evident that they are not even doing that at present.

Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.

Hell has finally frozen over?

That won't be an option if MS gets is way!