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Comment How to guess age without demanding ID (Score 1) 34

It's a hard, if not impossible problem to solve for 100% of people 100% of the time.

On the other hand, if society is willing to live with "you will probably have to show ID if you seem anywhere close to the age limit" then the problem becomes a lot easier.

If the age limit is 12 and you have a 4-digit Slashdot ID, it's pretty safe to say either you are over 12 or the ID wasn't yours when it was created.

Likewise, if your overall "user behavior" is has been consistent with that of someone well over 25 for several years, the odds of you being under 18 are pretty slim.

As a real-world analog, most stores where I live demand ID to buy age-18-restricted products if you LOOK under 30.

Comment Science fiction missed the misadaptation threat (Score 2) 104

Thanks for the insightful post. And to build on your survival instinct misadaptation point, consider that our preferences were tuned through evolution or a scarcity of certain things (salt, sweet, fat, excitement, novelty, startling, etc) and work against us when there is abundance of those things made possible by modern technology (e.g. ultraprocessed foods, algorithmic feeds, several scene changes a second in Videos, etc). See:

https://www.healthpromoting.co...
"Dr. Douglas Lisle, who has spent the last two decades researching and studying this evolutionary syndrome, explains that all of us inherit innate incentives from our ancient ancestors that he terms The Motivational Triad: the pursuit of pleasure, the avoidance of pain, and the conservation of energy. Unfortunately, in present day America's convenience-centric, excess-oriented culture, where fast food, recreational drugs, and sedentary shopping have become the norm, these basic instincts that once successfully insured the survival and reproduction of man many millennia ago, no longer serve us well. In fact, it's our unknowing enslavement to this internal, biological force embedded in the collective memory of our species that is undermining our health and happiness today."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose is a book by Deirdre Barrett published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2010. Barrett is a psychologist on the faculty of Harvard Medical School. The book argues that human instincts for food, sex, and territorial protection evolved for life on the savannah 10,000 years ago, not for today's densely populated technological world. Our instincts have not had time to adapt to the rapid changes of modern life. The book takes its title from Nikolaas Tinbergen's concept in ethology of the supernormal stimulus, the phenomena by which insects, birds, and fish in his experiments could be lured by a dummy object which exaggerated one or more characteristic of the natural stimulus object such as giant brilliant blue plaster eggs which birds preferred to sit on in preference to their own. Barrett extends the concept to humans and outlines how supernormal stimuli are a driving force behind today's most pressing problems, including modern warfare, obesity and other fitness problems, while also explaining the appeal of television, video games, and pornography as social outlets."

https://tlc.ku.edu/
" "We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, sleep-deprived, socially-isolated, fast-food-laden, frenetic pace of modern life." - TLC Principal Investigator Stephen Ilardi, PhD"

And to take that even one step further, see my sig: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Comment How much energy use per hour? (Score 1) 4

"An hour of HD video streaming generates about 42 grams of [carbon dioxide], while a chatbot prompt is around 0.1 grams."

Basically, what this is saying is an hour of HD video is equivalent to 420 chatbot prompts, or 42 chatbot image-generation prompts.

How many chatbot prompts does a typical person give per hour in a typical session with a chatbot? 5 text prompts in 5 minutes? Yeah, it's less energy-hungry than watching an HD video. 5 image prompts in 5 minutes? The opposite. If it's a robot doing the prompting at full throttle, it will likely outpace video-watching by far.

Comment Re:The problem with SAS (Score 1) 27

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.

Comment Camera in kid's playroom Re:Holy cow! (Score 1) 86

>So I'm flipping through cameras, and there were cameras in pretty weird places. Like the playroom for the children in pediatrics. Really, I don't want to know.
Either because parents wanted to be able to watch their kids, because of liability insurance reasons/fear of lawsuit, or because something you don't want to know about happened in the past/fear of lawsuit if it happens again.

I'm hoping it's the first one. It's not something I would encourage today due to hacking potential, but 10-20 years ago it was the "new shiny thing" for day-care centers to have cameras the parents could log into so they could watch their kids. Sadly, too many of these used easy-to-guess passwords or they had other ways to let just anyone peek in on the kids.

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