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Comment Re:who will do hard time hitting a worker can be c (Score 1) 28

who will do hard time hitting a worker can be charged as a felony under the state’s “endangerment of a highway worker” or “aggravated endangerment of a highway worker”

You're treating the current law as a standard handed down from on high, incontrovertible and guaranteed-correct, which must be applied verbatim. And, indeed, laws must be applied as written... but that doesn't mean the laws are perfect forever. Laws are written within a context, and when the context changes, the laws have to change.

In a world where all cars are driven by humans, if you want to protect highway workers one way to do it is to attach serious prison time to killing one and to publicize that fact loudly so that all of the drivers know that they should be especially cautious around highway workers, even more than they would around other sorts of pedestrians (let's put aside the moral debate about whether we actually should protect highway workers more than other pedestrians).

In a world where some cars are driven by software systems, that strategy doesn't really work -- as your question correctly points out -- but the right conclusion isn't "Therefore self-driving cars shouldn't be allowed", or "Therefore we must identify some scapegoat human at the company to put in prison". The right conclusion is "Therefore we need a different kind of regulation to keep highway workers safe from self-driving cars". What should that be? I can think of lots of possibilities, both pro-active (e.g. require self-driving vehicles to demonstrate in rigorous testing that their vehicles stay far from highway workers, with whatever minimum distance you want to specify) and reactive (severe penalties, up to heavy fines and/or immediate loss of permission to operate). The point is that the law should choose an approach that works with the new context.

Comment Re:The standard pro self-driving argument (Score 2) 28

So, for example, if self-driving cars today drive 10% better than the average driver, this also means that they all drive worse than 40% of human drivers out there.

And? They still drive 10% better than the average driver. And I realize that number is just an example, not intended to be accurate, but I still feel like I should point out that, statistically, it's too low.

The fact that the self-driving cars will all concentrate their worst behaviors in the same regions of the space of all driving conditions doesn't change the fact that, on average, they're quite a bit safer than human drivers. This wouldn't be true if the roads somehow changed so that the problematic-for-self-driving scenarios predominated, but they don't.

I considers these vehicules, in their current state to be too dangerous to be on public roads.

So you consider most human drivers too dangerous to be on public roads.

But I'm sure the usual binary-thinking simpletons will simply put me in their little "against" box anyway

You're taking a binary position (too dangerous to be on public roads), so you should expect people to evaluate your position in a binary way. Your other position, trying to position Waymo safety within the wide continuum of driver safety, is more nuanced.

My position is that if they're statistically safer than average human drivers, which makes them far safer than the worst human drivers on the road, then replacing human-driven cars with self-driving cars makes the roads safer. This is straightforwardly obvious. It doesn't mean the companies shouldn't be held accountable for their failures, and certainly doesn't mean that we shouldn't expect them to to continue working on improvements.

Comment Might work on the easy problems (Score 1) 24

This might work when there is a simple, easy search that can verify a fact. But that's often not the case. In my experience most cases of hallucination are cases where the LLM needs a fact mid-response, and the fact check requires both a non-trivial query and complex evaluation of the response data, sometimes involving judgement calls. When that happens, the LLM just gets lazy and goes with its guess rather than doing the check.

I'm speaking in the context of advanced models, mind, not the kind of thing that was available in 2022, nor the kind of thing that is available in Google search's limited-capability model, or open source models. Those are far more prone to hallucination. I won't say that, say, Claude Opus never hallucinates, because it does... but the hallucinations are common only when the models is being pushed hard, operating near the limits of its capacity, which makes it prone to taking shortcuts.

Comment Re:Cool Cool (Score 2) 52

Trump could waive student debt and the republicans would stand up with tears in the eyes yelling bravo sir! Biden tried it and was immediately stopped by the courts.

Well, I think Trump would be immediately stopped by the courts, too. Probably faster than they stopped Biden, since they've very reasonably gotten intensely skeptical of almost everything this administration does.

Partisanship aside, presidents really should obey the law. If the law is bad, the solution is to change it, not to break it. Yes, that means we need a functioning Congress, something we haven't had for quite some time, but that's still no reason to break the law.

Comment Re: this sure reminds me of a time (Score 1) 64

I am late to the party and I was just going to read rather than comment, but your comment brought home the whole conversation here. Even when trashing people that have no respect for the truth or for you, it is of importance to you that the trashing is an accurate and fair comment. It so epitomises the difference we are talking about between people here. Sadly the Internet is not kind to people who enforce truth.

Indeed, truth and accuracy is important to me, and I think it should be important to everyone. It baffles me that so many people don't seem to care about whether what they believe or say is true. I recognize that those people who care are often in the minority, but that just makes it harder to understand, not easier.

Comment Re:this sure reminds me of a time (Score 1) 64

Had to look up his name to confirm this actually happened as I remembered it, but this reminds me of that time former Arizona Senator John Shadegg asked during a late 90s tour of a NOAA facility "Why do we need NOAA when I get my weather from the internet?"

Is that true? I can't find any reference to it, and it seems like the kind of thing that would be documented, if only to make fun of it.

Comment Re:And Broadcom doesn't really care. (Score 1) 65

Broadcom's strategy all along has been;

1. Buy VMWare.
2. Squeeze maximum short-term money out of it to earn back the purchase price plus a big profit.
3. Kill VMWare dead in five years because they'll have their money and they don't want to be bothered with it anymore.

And because they knew the product was going to die anyway. Open source alternatives have caught up and there's nothing to keep customers from switching.

This isn't a justification, but it's an explanation. If they thought VMWare would be a long-term cash cow, they would keep it going. They know that won't happen, so they've opted to squeeze as much cash from it as possible, as quickly as possible. They recognize that will accelerate its demise, but apparently believe it will make them more money, since they won't have to invest anything in maintaining or marketing it.

I'm surprised they aren't more worried about legal action, though. It seems like it would be safer to continue complying with the contracts, perhaps with far inferior (and far cheaper) support quality until those ended. As for the perpetual licenses, it would seem safest to just shrug and say "Yeah, you can keep using it, and we'll keep giving you every update we release", while cutting the engineering team down to nothing. The aggressive approach they're taking seems likely to net them some ugly fines after some uglier legal fees.

Comment Re:This is why "responsible disclosure" isn't (Score 1) 38

This isn't the first, or the tenth, or the hundredth time this has happened to some security researcher dealing with some company.

It's absolutely not even the thousandth time a researcher has submitted an invalid report, then whined about not getting paid for it.

Comment Re:We want to keep the backdoor a bit longer (Score 1) 38

Google Non-Specialist: Nice Catch!
Actual Engineering Team: It's not a bug. Proxied access through a Service Account is the whole point of what this product does. Maybe our docs should have more warnings or we should put in another layer like the competing tool if people are going to get confused and shoot themselves in the foot.
Google Non-Specialist: Invalid, but we'll keep a case open to idiot-proof already acceptable behavior.

This is correct. Mod parent up.

Comment Re:Seems defensible. (Score 1) 38

How would it have damaged Google to (a) give credit where it's due and (b) cut a $50,000 check?

For a report that isn't a vulnerability? Well, it would have cost them $50k, and they'd have gotten nothing for that money -- other than to encourage researchers to submit invalid reports.

Comment Re:What is socialism? (Score -1) 121

definition of "socialism", which is: worker ownership of the means of production

Bzz, false. The dictionary definition of the term is:

a way of organizing a society in which major industries are owned and controlled by the government rather than by individual people and companies

See? No "worker ownership" — government ownership. Schools don't need to be owned by the teachers for public education to be socialist, they need to be owned by the government. And they are!

Same goes for retirement financing, and medicine for retires — with millions clamoring to expand it ("Medicare for all!!") — what GP enumerated. The "single-payer healthcare" — another euphemism — would be exactly that too.

Workers can own shares of their employers — indeed, Anthrophic employees do (and anticipate to profit handsomely). That's not socialism at all — not by the dictionary definition.

I blame the libertarians for making the definitions unclear

I blame you for pulling the definition from under your tail — and the morons upvoting you.

"anything the government does that benefits the people instead of corporations."

That's spelled "KKKorporation$". Make a note of it. Benefits the people, eh? The per-pupil spending nationwide went up (inflation-adjusted) from $9083 in 1989 to $13790 last year. And what did this expense buy us — the barely literate population unable to even define such terms as "socialism" correctly...

And they've adopted the word "democratic socialism"

The term (not "word"!!!) was adopted by "former" Communists, who've proudly elected a Senator some Congresswomen and, most recently, New York mayor. Who immediately proceeded to establish a government-owned supermarket.

Comment Are unsubstantiated accusations Ok now? (Score -1) 121

some wondering if they were being picked on by President Trump

Seriously? "Some wondering" — and it is on front page... What a contrast to Trump's supporters accusations, his electoral win was stolen in 2020 — no, any time someone mentioned those, a bunch people would jump up to add: "unproven" and "without evidence".

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