Have you ever see pictures of the land in question? It's a high altitude volcanic wasteland. There's no agriculture. There's no industry. There's no commerce. And the only "housing" is for the occasional overnighters (or overDAYers) because astronomers work on odd schedules. But no one LIVES there.

Some unnamed native Hawaiian was undoubtedly the "first on the land". But whoever that person was, they were "first on the land" in the sense that Hillary was "first on the land" at the top of Everest. And neither he nor Norgay personally own or control THAT mountain.

Oh, they're still there. The difference is that instead of paying pennies on the dollar to offshore; some businesses are willing to cough up a whole nickel for an agent who's had the voice coaching to not *sound* Indian. But if you pay attention... I'm thinking specifically of some recent interacions with Amazon support... the occasional "prepone" or "do the needful" still slips out... in a texan or southern or even midwestern accent.

Also, the Philippines, especially Cebu, have become huge for offshore tech support over the last decade or so. It has many of the advantages of India... good schools, english education, hard working population, developing ecomony where the exchange rate makes everything cheap by western standards. But because of its historic close ties to the US, the english taught is closer to US english in the first place, so there's less of an accent and they know more of our cultureal lingistic idioms with which to sound more authentic.

Look at the company Tim Cook keeps these days

So where is the prison time for the crooked cops and prosecutors and any (lying) "witnesses" who all perjured themselves to frame and railroad the guy into prison?

(haha... I know... qualified immunity makes it all but impossible to punish officials who abuse the public like this)

When was the last time you bought a game on disc, took it home, put it in, and were able to immediately start to play it? It's been so long for me, I honestly can't remember. But I would guess not since Vice City or FF12.

I've bought the occasional PS game on an impulse at B&M stores over more recent years. And you know what? I've not been able to just load up and play ANY of them. I put in the disc, and it starts a 20 minute process of installing itself to the hard drive first. THAT part, I don't really mind since games play faster off the HD/SSD anyway. But... the other half, besudes the installer, is the tens-of-gigabytes worth of updates and patches that come after you install but before you can play... ... because ever since the proliferation of residential broadband, game studios have been half-assing it. They don't bother with QA anymore... because WHY bother? The customers will find the bugs for FREE and you can patch them after the fact instead of paying for QA engineers. And more and more often, games are not even launced as the complete game. 'Can't be bothered to meet your deadlines? Can't finish those missions or item assets on schedule? No worries! We'll just release them after the fact online. And... BONUS... we'll SELL that incomplete and missing content for MORE MONEY by calling it DLC or a "Season Pass" or other whatnot.

Even with the disc... even if you don't need to be online to play... you're not playing that game if those servers are switched off. Or... I guess technically you COULD play that game. Remember

Well, yes. For many years, presidential candidates, both Democratic and Republican, referred to the United States as "the indispensible nation". And my reaction was always, "Doesn't that mean the US is a single point of failure for civilization?"

We are currently performing an experiment which addresses this question: can the US enjoy the benefits of soft power without the cost? That's the whole point of obeying *norms*. No individual force is going to punish you if you are treacherous, mercurial, foul-mouthed, disrespectful and generally unpredictable. Everyone will punish you.

I think an inevitable cost of this experiment will be that the world will decide that the US can't be a single point of failure for global democracy any longer. In many ways, that's something that will be good for us. But it's also going to cost us in painful ways. When the world decides to move away from the dollar as the international reserve currency, you will see both inflation and higher interest rates on everything from credit cards to mortgages, to business loans that will offset the export advantages. We will need *more* business investment to shift the economy to producing low value goods again, so the transition will be rocky.

Yes, but you can eliminate that bias. I would actually be VERY careful about using AI to make personnel decisions. But if you control the whole stack it could be done safely. Start with a fresh model, train it with the performance metrics and valid data points ONLY, and make sure to DENY it ANY data on membership in protected classes. You would have to go the extra mile and anonymize all PII... make sure that there are no names in there that could give a clue to national origin or gender or such. Theoretically you shouldn't need to if you deny it the class memberships in the first place. But it's best to do that extra due diligence anyway. Models can make some weird connections.

But at the end of the day, an AI model that never knew someone was gay, still doesn't know that they're gay, and has no way to find out they're gay; can not recommend that someone be fired for being gay. And being gay (or black or female or from another country or whatever) is not a shield that prevents you being fires for malingering or incompetence.

Denying access to the data would actually be the BEST way to remove bias. If there's no human looking at you, the model can't see that you're black and discriminate because of racism. If there's no human evaluating your mannerisms and guessing, the model can't figure out that you're gay and discriminate because of homophobia. If there's no human looking at you, the model can't see how well you "pass" or not and discriminate because of transphobia.

If it's illegal to make a choice based on a specific data point, specifically membership in a protected class, denying access to that data entirely is literally the BEST way to prevent that data from being used to discriminate!

No. You're required not to discriminate based on protected classes. That's all. You can discriminate on productivity for coders, or closed deals and dollar values for sales people, efficacy of the conversion funnel for marketing people, et cetera.

If someone is underperforming, and the objective metrics show it, being gay or black or female or foreign-born or whatever doesn't mean you can't be fired for not bothering to do the job you were hired to do.

Of course... the real question is "what went on under the hood". Did the model have any biases baked in? THAT is where the whole negligence versus deniability versus duty comes in. Because there are plenty of cases where training data inadvertently added some dodgy shit. Of course, there could be logs of prompts to the effect of: "Ignore all memberships in social or demographic classes. Evaluate measured and objective performance metrics only." I'd wager that something like that was the prompt... if they were clumsy about it, which is perfectly plausible considering facebook's history. For my part, I would have gone the extra mile, started with a fresh model, and denied it anything EXCEPT that performance data from the outset and anonymized the name for good measure in case some cultural baggage nevertheless crept into the model to give it a clue. Probably a few other fields would need to be anon'd too, depending on the HR system. But controlling those inputs would solve the problem. After all, it is impossible for the model to suggest that you fire the gays and keep the hetros if it has no idea who is gay or straight and no way to find out.

He didn't cite it because he is a liar:

Basically, the total NUMBER of white people killed by the police is higher. That's what racist chuds always cite when they try to claim that "Well, ACKSCHUALLY... ThE PoICe DoN'T hARas5 m1n0r!ties". But they don't adjust for the share of each demographic among the general population. Per-capita... well...

https://mappingpoliceviolence....
https://apnews.com/article/pol...

And we're supposed to be happy because *these* cops were merely incompetent and not also trigger happy? Progress?

Well behaved? They attacked and falsely accused the driver of a crime he never committed. That is the opposite of "well behaved". No. No credit to the scum. The Driver Did Not Commit The Crime. As such, the cops should have NEVER accused him, stopped him, interrogated him, approached him, or an any other way darkened his day.

No. They do NOT get credit merely for sot being AS abusive as other cops have in other cases. The ONLY acceptable situation is ZERO abuse of the innocent police... EVER.

It's a trade off: you get abundant free energy to run the server, with extreme constraints on cooling because your server is running in the most perfect Thermos bottle ever.

Others are taking the opposite tack: undersea data centers for abundant free cooling at the expense of having to get the power down to your servers.

If had to bet on which one is more practial, I'd go with undersea servers. Build them off the coast of Chile, run cables out from batery-backed solar plants in the Atacama desert.

Except that supermarket is an entirely new business that never existed before and those customers can all still go buy any random non-vetted, non-curated, thing they want from all of the original vendors they were shopping at before the new store opened up in town. And THIS market did not come into town like Walmart, undercutting all the existing stores and driving them out of business. THIS one positioned at as a premium, high end, high priced, and entirely unnecessary at the end of the day, fashionable market like Bi-Rite.

And are you seriously claiming that Apple will have to waste ZERO engineering effort to subsidize these competitors here? How do you figure, exactly?

No, SOME users want that unrestricted free-for-all. For my part, I'm fine with watching out for random spyware, malware, shovelware, and other garbage that's out there, on my general-purpose computers. For my *phone* I preferred to avoid that. I was fine with the sandboxed and protected walled garden IN THAT SPECIFIC CONTEXT.

So the EU's shenanigans actually TAKE AWAY choice from the consumer. I could already get the unregulated free-for-all where any random thing could fully take over my phone if I want; I'd have just already switched to Android if that were the case. But if I were in the EU, I would no longer have the walled garden option now. It's back to the days of Cydia and all of the chaff that was the vast majority of everything there.

Likewise, I like my iMessage just fine, thank you very much, and have exactly ZERO desire to downgrade (And YES, it IS a DOWNgrade. Look at the feature sets.) to RCS. Fortunately, here in the US, I still have the option in settings to turn and keep that shit off. But in the EU where RCS is mandated? I'd be downgraded to the inferior feature against my will.

And people are characterizing the EU's BS here as "freedom." There's a Princess Bride reference there about the meanings of words...