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.

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...

You mean the cards that only exist because of the chips in them, that are made in Taiwan with the EUV lithography equipment that for which the EU is the world's sole supplier? THOSE graphics cards? THAT is the trade war you want to start? Brilliant idea, CHUD.

Evernote was, for the first many years of its life, the AMG Mercades of note taking apps. It was fast, robust, reliable, feature-rich, and pleasant to use. Then, about five years ago or so, for some reason they decided to... well... to start sucking ass. They released a disasterous new version that is slow, bloated, and buggy; while stripping out quite a lot of the features it used to have. If it were a car now, Evernote would now be an old Fiat Panda with rusted out floorboards and an engine won't get going unless you push-start the car. So the new ownership actually tracks.

Nope. The republicans control the courts there; to the point of discarding and disregarding the will and votes of the people entirely. So while neither party technically has that "trifecta" in Virginia, maga controls the state and agenda in Virginia.

Pot, meet kettle. And, by the way, you people do it more often. As per usual, an accusation, coming from a maga, is in reality a confession.

There are 39 U.S. states where a single political party holds "trifecta" control, meaning one party holds the governorship as well as majorities in both chambers of the state legislature. (Ballotpedia)

23 States have Republican trifectas.
16 States have Democratic trifectas.

Here is the breakdown by political party:

Republican Trifectas (23)
South: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, West Virginia

Midwest & Plains: Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming

West: Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nebraska, Ohio, Utah

Democratic Trifectas (16)
Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont

West: California, New Mexico, Oregon, Washington

Midwest: Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota
(Ballotpedia)

WTF??? Did the entire world collectively forget at some point that robots.txt is a thing? So far as I know, google respects it. If they don't, then THAT is definitely a problem. But otherwise, this entire hullabaloo is solved problem and much ado about nothing.

Yeah, Pages and Numbers were nice. But, similarly to this move by the gatesians, Apple pulled the "free with the purchase of a device" iWork suite from the App Store earlier this year and put their replacements behind a Zynga-style micro-transaction paywall.

I think you can still download the old free versions if you already have them attached to your account. But they won't be getting updates anymore. Pages and Numbers are both (I just checked the App Store.) $12.99/month now. I dunno about Keynote... I've never used that one.

Airpods, Magic Trackpads, and other Apple kit do. And my car lets me set its name for bluetooth/CarPlay. I've not seen that functionality elsewhere though; certianly not on any el-cheapo portable bluetooth speaker; nor on any pair of emergency headphones I've bought when I've forgotten to bring or charge my airpods. And a quick google turns up several speakers with some variation of "bomb" or "boom" in their names. So if the bluetooth name is similar to the product name, and it can't be changed, it is not at all unlikely for this to have been entirely unintentional. How many of us even look at our list of bluetooth devices after we pair them? Most of us just turn them on, and if the music plays, that's that. A little common sense would have gone a long way here.

Of course, the REAL question/problem here is what TF whas that little asswipe doing using a goddamned speaker on an airplane instead of headphones like a civilized human being.