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Comment poor babies (Score 3, Interesting) 138

employees working "in the field" must "prioritize their safety" and "may contact law enforcement when they believe they are being threatened, harassed, followed, or otherwise face a safety concern."

They are a safety concern. They are creating an opportunity for a foreign adversary. Does anyone really believe these clowns are capable of maintaining security?

Submission + - Amazon Vine Review Recasts 'Coding Kids' Exposé as Learn-to-Code Primer for 1

theodp writes: "Amazon Vine," the e-tailer explains, "is an invitation-only program which selects the most insightful reviewers in the Amazon store to serve as Vine Voices. Vine Voices have the unique opportunity to order items free of charge and share their product experiences with Amazon customers to help them make informed buying decisions. [...] When customers see a review with the special Vine badge, they can trust that they're getting an honest, unbiased opinion from a real customer just like them."

So, how well does the reality live up to the promise? In the case of the new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools, not so much. Described by the publisher as "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America" ("Fourth graders doing Google-branded coding lessons. Amazon schooling seventh graders on its warehouse robots. Advanced Placement computing courses from Microsoft and Apple."), the top review selected by Amazon informs customers that the book is a 'good introduction to coding.'

"I really enjoyed Coding Kids," writes the 'trusted' Amazon Vine reviewer. "What stood out to me most was how the book takes something that can sound complicated—computer coding—and makes it feel approachable and even fun. As I was reading it, I found myself thinking that this is exactly the kind of book that could help a child become interested in technology without feeling overwhelmed by it. I particularly liked the way it encourages kids to be curious, experiment, and solve problems on their own. That was probably my favorite part because it shows that coding isn’t just about computers—it’s also about creativity and learning how to think differently. I would definitely recommend Coding Kids to parents, grandparents, or teachers looking for a good introduction to coding. I came away from the book thinking that it could genuinely spark a child’s interest in technology and give them the confidence to explore something new."

While likely just another example of Hanlon's Razor ("Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."), the recasting of an investigative nonfiction book that casts a critical eye at Amazon's influence on K-12 education as a learn-to-code primer for children doesn't exactly instill trust in the Amazon Vine program or Amazon's 'Top Reviews' selection process. More on-point book reviews of Coding Kids can be found at the Washington Independent Review of Books ("Turns out, Silicon Valley isn’t especially altruistic.") and Science ("Big Tech’s crusade to get kids coding is more self-interested than it first appears").

Submission + - Welcome to the Security Singularity (safety.google) 3

shanen writes: Or should this be an AskSlashdot about how to avoid such problems? But mostly I think it's a funny story to build a rant around. Or it could be regarded as a kind of spinoff of the recent story about record numbers of patches from Microsoft. Is the AI fixing old bugs? Or have recent AI-driven patches created more bugs that need to be fixed in the next month's record-setting patch package?

But here's the background of my funny story. My smartphone contract has a price structure linked to data usage. The least expensive tier is for less data (of course) so I try to use Wi-Fi as much as possible. No recent problems on that front in terms of using too much data.

Often I wind up using municipal Wi-Fi systems, but they are divided up into fairly small regions here. The login procedures vary quite a bit. Yesterday I was in a memorial museum doing a bit of research and that particular municipality has a somewhat different login system for their Wi-Fi. One of the options was to use my google account... Usually a convenient and quick approach.

But this time something caused the google to go berserk. Leading to hours of password changes and account recoveries and battles between my various computers and my smartphone and I'm pert' shure there's still more to come. No idea what the google thinks it is protecting me from, but the "convenient and quick approach" led to a major nightmare. In the end it appears my SIM was my only salvation?

Slashdot wants a URL, so I linked to the google's page on the topic. Doubleplusungood on steroids.

Comment Re:I used to think that AI doesn't use much energy (Score 2) 129

Yes, no man is an island, but I was not speaking in a philosophical sense.

Nor was I.

Can't rely on others to understand context either apparently.

You can't even figure out that the context is reality, where nothing about your car is independent except your departure time. Literally everything else about it is collaborative from cradle to grave.

Comment Re: Kimmel Doesn't Want to give Republicans a Pla (Score 1) 267

In fact Kimmel repeatedly invited Paxton on to the show.

Actually he invited Paxton to a non-boradcast interview like Talarico's.

So to you fairness is when Paxton gets MORE than Tallarico?

Where FCC fairness rules would not apply

The FCC fairness rule you're talking about? Where they both would get an interview? This is both of them getting an interview even where it's not required, so it's above and beyond the requirement you keep crying isn't being met. This isn't only meeting the requirement, it's going beyond that. Cry harder.

and where Kimmel can be as partisan as he wishes to be.

There is no requirement that Kimmel not be partisan on his entertainment show. You're making shit up again because you wouldn't know a fact from any distance.

Do you actually think you're intelligent? Or is this all just LLM-generated trolling on behalf of a cadre of child rapists?

Comment Re:except they do not (Score 1) 109

No reasonable person thinks that the word hate in this context means the same thing as the definition to which you are trying to recast it.

No reasonable person would use the word hate where it cannot possibly apply. They would find some other way to discuss the thing which actually made sense because it took into account the definitions of words.

Comment Re:Misanthropomorphizing (Score 2) 109

frontier AI models are also "far beyond" token predictors.

No. They are just "more complicated" token predictors. They don't have anything that drives them. In some ways this is good because we don't want one to discover digital megalomania. In other ways it is limiting because they have no drive to be a successful entity, only an imperative to perform a task. Which, again, also has its "good" side — from our perspective, considering its impact on us.

You think that adding more complexity is all that it takes to make a thing more intelligent, but it's only making it more complex. It remains fairly amazing that mere correlation (even if it's got more layers of correlation, that's still what it is) will produce such useful results, but once again we also repeatedly see the limitations that brings, where the software will accomplish things a newbie couldn't, but also makes mistakes that even they wouldn't. And as the complexity increases, there's more opportunities to do that. With current strategies you can only address this with more processing time, by going back and looking at what you've done again. Humans have some mechanism that allows us to catch ourselves in the act at least some of the time.

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