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Comment Buried the lead? (Score 5, Interesting) 27

Last paragraph in the article:

Amazon has broadly locked down its shopping sites from AI agents, blocking dozens of agents, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, while investing in its homegrown tools like Rufus, a shopping assistant featured on its website and app.

Way to bury the lead. Company with a history of anti-competitive practices sues competitor. News at 11.

PS. For what it's worth, Amazon's point that Perplexity inadvertently messes up Amazon's contracts with advertisers "who pay only for legitimate human impressions" does seem interesting. I guess they're inadvertently over-billing their advertisers. I'll be curious to see how this develops.

Comment "AI democratized the feeling of knowing [...] (Score 2) 46

[...] without the burden of understanding. Reality will provide feedback shortly." This phrase is on a sticker in my office. (Look it up, there's a cute sloth on the sticker too.)

I'm currently teaching proof-based math to college freshmen. In the honors track. My syllabus does not disallow the use of AI because I haven't been able to wrap my head around how to best do that yet. Students end up with homework scores with averages in the very high 90s. Standard deviations in the low single digits. This is, of course, way more impressive than past semesters.

Then came the first midterm, a month into the term. In class, closed book, closed notes. It covers basic things, simpler than homework, and is preceded by a practice midterm they can do at home with questions of a similar nature to the real thing. The result: an average of 70 and a big standard deviation. It looks like the usual distribution, just way to the left compared to the past.

A few students have come into my office to discuss their performance. I see them see the sticker. I think they then start to feel the burden of understanding. I'll know more after the next midterm.

We're all still learning how to deal with this new reality.

Comment Re:Designing an AI system to do homework is evil (Score 2) 153

The evil part is that in many cases this appears intentional on the part of of the company running the LLM. i.e. they have intentionally made it a better tool for fraud and adapted to that use case instead of a more productive use case.

This reminds me of Cluely, whose manifesto concludes with this (emphasis theirs):

So, start cheating.
Because when everyone does, no one is.

I know they're trying hard to be slick and catchy with their wording, but boy does this framing make me uncomfortable.

PS. Here's a wayback link, in case the manifesto goes kaput soon.

Comment Re:What about a driving licence? (Score 2) 75

Not sure that the question of ongoing operation on US roads by someone who remains subject to a different state's licensing requirements has been addressed; since historically it would have been purely hypothetical.

The situation you describe here is actually quite common. From the Texas Department of Public Safety:

Driving privilege reciprocity allows a person to use a valid, unexpired foreign license to operate a motor vehicle in Texas for up to one year or until a person becomes a Texas resident, whichever date is sooner.

I've encountered similar wording in every US state I've been in.

But in any case, I think they're precisely trying to maneuver themselves out of this situation altogether. Quoting from the article:

“They provide guidance. They do not remotely drive the vehicles,” Peña told the Senate committee.

"Providing guidance" ... Slick. Let's see how that goes.

Comment Re:Is the AI going to go to jail for you? (Score 1) 40

"Is the AI going to go to jail for you?"

Fun fact: we don't even seem to be able to give "the AI" traffic tickets yet in CA.

On a more serious note, the likelier scenario is: an AI company roll out an AI tax prep tool that waives all liability and is, say, 50% cheaper than all the (non-free) alternatives. I can see people going for that. Some will say, well, I'll do it if the expected value of my refund minus my cost and penalty dollar value is > 0. I'm not one of those people. But they're out there.

Comment Re:4 day work week, two month pto, ubi, blah blah (Score 1) 94

Automation didn't shorten the work week. Automation didn't shorten the work week.

Yes it did. It shortened the work week from six days to five, and shortened the work day to eight hours.

This part needs clarification. Automation shortened the work week in the sense that it exacerbated a problem whose resolution was the 40 hour workweek. What I mean to clarify is, employers didn't just say, great, now with automation we only need our employees to work 40 hours per week. They said the opposite. Industrial machines could run long hours tirelessly, so employers (factory owners, etc.) had employees work longer and longer hours, etc. This then led to social unrest and, slowly but eventually, a legally mandated 40 hour workweek.

Fast forward to today.

Let's agree, for the sake of argument, that AI makes people more productive. In the gradient of:
(a) company aims for approx. fixed total productivity, and thus a shorter workweek, or
(b) company aims for approx. fixed schedule, and thus more productivity,
I'd expect (a) to be the more likely general outcome. On this part, I agree with the GP.

I'm not sure what to make of Dimon (et al) talking about shorter work weeks. Maybe we can revisit this when JP Morgan (et al) shortens theirs.

Comment What possible solutions are being pursued? (Score 2) 66

On one hand, yes, I appreciate the comments pointing out that photos have always been ... malleable, critical thinking has always been necessary, etc. On the other hand, the problem has exploded in scale. The barrier to entry for producing realistic AI fakes (photos, videos, audio, you-name-it) is very, very low. And getting lower by the day. Surely, we can't pretend that we should be passive about this and go about our business as usual.

Can people enlighten me/us about the solutions you're aware of that are being pursued? Maybe some sort of visible, QR-like crypto signature watermark on pictures or videos for authenticity, tying the file to its creator? Something else for audio? I am really quite curious.

Thanks in advance!

Comment Average vs median (Score 1) 25

There's a comment under the WSJ article I find worth repeating. WSJ user @LouisLin574 wrote: "They never talk about the fact that the vast majority of the stock grants go to the top executives. See how they say average not median. This is purely a recruiting tool and free PR hype. And all that stock can be worthless. It is just theoretical value at current arbitrary valuation."

Submission + - 22 Million Affected by Aflac Data Breach (securityweek.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Insurance giant Aflac is notifying roughly 22.65 million people that their personal information was stolen from its systems in June 2025. The company disclosed the intrusion on June 20, saying it had identified suspicious activity on its network in the US on June 12 and blaming it on a sophisticated cybercrime group. The company said it immediately contained the attack and engaged with third-party cybersecurity experts to help with incident response. Aflac’s operations were not affected, as file-encrypting ransomware was not deployed.

[...] The compromised information, the insurance giant says, includes names, addresses, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, driver’s license numbers, government ID numbers, medical and health insurance information, and other data. “The review of the potentially impacted files determined personal information associated with customers, beneficiaries, employees, agents, and other individuals related to Aflac was involved,” Aflac said in a notification (PDF) on its website. The company is providing the affected individuals with 24 months of free credit monitoring, identity theft protection, and medical fraud protection services.

Submission + - Tough Job Market Has People Using Dating Apps to Get Interviews (bloomberg.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Most people use dating apps to find love. Tiffany Chau used one to hunt for a summer internship. This fall, the 20-year-old junior at California College of the Arts tailored her Hinge profile to connect with people who could offer job referrals or interviews. One match brought her to a Halloween party, where she networked in hopes of landing a product-design internship for the summer. While there, she got some tips from someone who had recently interviewed at Accenture. As for the connection with her date? Not so much. “I feel like my approach to the dating apps is it being another networking platform like everything else, like Instagram or LinkedIn,” Chau said.

Chau is among a cadre of workers who are using dating apps to boost their job searches. They’re recognizing that the online job hunt is broken as unemployed workers flood the system, AI screens out resumes and many job matching programs are overwhelmed. Automation has squeezed human contact out of hiring, which has pushed applicants to seek any path to a live hiring manager, no matter the means.

The overall US unemployment rate continued to climb throughout 2025, reaching 4.6%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And while the number of unemployed high school graduates held steady at about 4.4% in November, the rate for workers with a bachelor's degree rose to 2.9% from 2.5% a year ago. About a third of dating app users said they had sought matches for job hook-ups, according to a ResumeBuilder.com survey of about 2,200 US dating site customers in October. Two-thirds targeted potential paramours who worked at a desirable employer. Three-quarters said they matched with people working in roles they wanted.

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