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Comment Why we don't polygraph people anymore (Score 2) 116

I can think of a few things leading to Voight-Kampff-style polygraph tests being phased out in this timeline

1. Several U.S. states have banned reliance on polygraph test results by employers. "Polygraph" on Wikipedia lists Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Oregon, Delaware and Iowa. In addition, the federal Employee Polygraph Protection Act 1998 generally bans polygraphing by employers outside the rent-a-cop industry.
2. Autism advocacy organizations raised a stink about false positive results on autistic or otherwise neurodivergent human beings.
3. The LLM training set probably picked up answers from someone's cheat sheet, such as "The turtle was dragging its hind leg, and I was waiting for it to stop squirming so I could see if it needed to go to the vet."

Comment Re:I love it! (Score 1) 159

I love this idea because I know the second a company using this crap gets bitten it's going to be an extremely expensive problem the fix

That's my gut reaction too -- this will result in software with obscure bugs that are near-impossible for a human to find or fix because no human even understands how the software works.

OTOH, maybe no human will need to find or fix the bugs, because they can task an AI to find and fix them instead. I'd say that strains credibility, but last year I would have said it strains credibility that an AI can understand (or, at least, "understand") human-written code as well as a human programmer, and yet here we are.

Comment Free apps are more likely to use protocols (Score 1) 68

you have your itinerary saved in a note taking app that isn't on the appstore

If an app meets F-Droid's licensing policy then it is more likely to follow the principle that protocols are better than platforms. This means there are probably other apps, probably including apps on Google Play Store, that can reach the document repository where you saved your itinerary.

Comment Apple was beaten to Tivoization by decades (Score 1) 68

insane market (started by Apple) of personal devices that you buy that you literally don't have admin access on

That was 1985 with the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Atari 7800 ProSystem, the first popular home computing devices to use cryptography to lock out unauthorized software. Between that and the iPhone was the TiVo DVR, the first popular home computing device to use cryptography to lock out unauthorized derivatives of copylefted software.

Comment Re:Dandy (Score 1) 74

Mullahs with nuclear fusion. What could go wrong?

I think you're confusing fusion with fission. A Mullah (or any irresponsible person, for those who prefer not to sound like a bigot) who has access to grossly abuse a fusion reactor might at worse damage the reactor and sprinkle a trace amount of radiation around. They certainly wouldn't be able to make any kind of weapon out of it.

Comment Re: Not for long. (Score 1) 144

When the bombs start dropping near your back yard, are you going to be thinking of âoecostsâ at that very moment, or are you going to realize with the threat of death nearby that fighting over cobalt and lithium might just actually force you to realize the EV mineral wars, will NOT be any less deadly?

One nice thing about cobalt and lithium is that they don't get consumed when you use them. When you drive your gas-powered car, the gas you put into it goes away forever, and you have to buy another tank next week, every week, for the life of the car. The rare earths in your EV's motors and batteries, OTOH, remain present and usable for the lifetime of the car, and can and will be reclaimed for other purposes after their service life ends.

So sure, there might potentially be wars fought over those elements; but it's much less likely to come to that, partially because manufacturers are learning to get by with less or none of those elements, but mainly because every nation-state that depends on them already has a de-facto internal stockpile that it can rely on instead of having to go to war for more.

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