Well I don't know, I am not a lawyer. I know that there ARE laws that penalize malicious code, like the Computer Fraud and Abuse act, and that there is a legal concept of "protestware" that draws a distinction between a bug that causes data loss and intentional sabotage. And there are also license terms that disavow responsibility for any damages that may or may not hold up if intentional sabotage is established.

But all of this is outside of my domain. I was speaking generally, that there are laws against malicious software writing/distribution in general.

Based on what I read of this story, it sure sounds like intentional sabotage to me. An instruction to an AI that orders it to destroy data sounds like a "weaponized prompt" to me. It's one thing to say "this software might have bugs or not even work at all, and those bugs might cause harm, so that's your risk to take." It is quite another to deliberately code malicious prompts as a trap with the intent of harming those who fall into it. I don't think someone can do that and say "well my hands are clean because I said you use this software at your own risk." Even if the law is gray in this area because AI is new and emerging, the social principle here is pretty clear.

The original star wars movies had many elements that drew in audiences at the time, including a plot about a mystical force that was guiding a new hero on a path to save the galaxy from overwhelmingly oppressive tyranny. The events were significant and the family-tie shockers injected some drama and so they were good.

But "Star Wars: The Last Flop" lost the thread. Instead of a plot that was even more epic and had even more galactic significance, it just doubled-down on the family drama and kind of lumbered around, getting us nowhere new. There was plenty more to dislike in terms of how they ruined character arks and pushed a political agenda that did not sit well with much of the audience.

Ever since then, the franchise has been sliding downhill. I read summaries of the other movies and shows and they all sounded equivalently vapid. I think I am not alone in this opinion.

You are familiar with the idea that the tool should match the job? And in particular, that some tools are very poor fits for some jobs, but that doesn't make them bad tools (since they are intended for a different job)?

MongoDB exists solely to remind us that some tools are not right for any job.

As it turns out, there are laws against deploying malicious code, too.

And for similar reasons.

It is true that people should vet the code they use. But this truth does not give coders license to code malicious Trojans into their offerings.

How would you feel if your grocery store deliberately put poison into the food and then after you got sick said that it is your responsibility to test all the food you buy?

"I didn't kill him, the bullet did."

AI is here to stay. Acts of rebellion like this will only cause harm. This isn't some noble preservation of human dignity or anything. It's just punishing people for using new tools. Not cool.

Yeah. Eating too little variety risks leaving you without an essential nutrient. But the details matter of course. You can get all the needed nutrients on an all-plant diet so long as you are getting a proper variety of plants, and B12 one way or another.

"Omnivore" doesn't mean "you MUST eat a little bit of everything." It means "you CAN eat a huge variety of things."

Some meats, like red meat, have been shown to cause colon cancer. We didn't evolve out of that.

Our evolutionary strategy has largely been "eat whatever we can get our hands on, and get as much nutrition out of it as we can." There was never some magical perfect diet that kept us perfectly healthy. There was always just a set of complex needs that our bodies have, and a set of plants/animals available, and we just did what we could. So, many forms of food are both healthy and unhealthy for us, at the same time, in different ways.

Contrary to propaganda from the meat and dairy industry, it is totally possible to thrive on a vegan diet. Some people will have an easier time of this than others, because details about metabolism vary widely based on a person's genetics. One nutrient in particular, B12, causes a lot of confusion. That's one that our body must receive directly, we cannot synthesize it ourselves. Our most readily-available food source of it is animals, but not because those animals synthesize it in their bodies...but rather....because they eat dirt-covered food right off the ground (or consume food along with the river/sea water that surrounds it). B12, you see, is exclusively made by a family of microorganisms, and everything that needs it ultimately gets it from that source (sometimes by means of intermediaries). Supplemental B12 is not some chemically synthesized frankenfood....it is just harvested straight from colonies of microorganisms that produce it. So, strict vegans are going to need to take a supplement for that (or....eat home-grown carrots straight from their yard without washing them first).

Beyond that, our bodies are really good at extracting the nutrients they need from plants. Plants also provide phytochemicals (which meats do not), so they are useful to us above-and-beyond whatever meat we might eat.

So wait, are you proposing that we should pass laws that make highly-desired food illegal because too much of it is bad for a person?

If that is truly what you mean, then you aren't actually criticizing "Capitalism" so much as "personal freedom."

Why shouldn't people be free to live an unhealthy lifestyle, and accept the consequences?

I am curious to know how many people are eagerly trying out this new drug, but were too afraid to get covid vaccines.

A $1000 one-time cost is quite different than the 1600+ every month average cost of rent, or the $2000 every month (median mortgage payment in usa not including property taxes, maintenance, utilities etc).

Add transportation costs, food costs, and other need-to-survive costs, and it becomes clear how a person could both afford a toy like this while living barely above paycheck-to-paycheck. And equally clear the need for entertainment to help cope.

Humans have a hard time accepting true randomness as even being possible. A famous example being Einstein's criticism of the emerging claims about random behavior at the quantum level "God does not play dice with the universe." Many people really, really want the universe to be this ordered, deterministic, machine. It sounds like the same goes for whatever old Buddhists cooked up this doctrine that everything is dependent on conditions.

I observe that this statement is true, at a practical level, most of the time. In our ordinary day-to-day lives, it is accurate. The conditions into which a person (or animal) are born will have tremendous impact on how they turn out. The conditions under which one undertakes any task will similarly have tremendous impact. So, that's probably the focus of the observation here (though I am not a Buddhist and don't actually know what they were getting at).

There have been some serious attempts at injecting determinism back into quantum mechanics (such as the "pilot wave theory") but they bring their own problematic side-effects and are not in mainstream scientific acceptance. Be that as it may, legit challenges could be made against this claim of "true randomness" from this interpretation (or other rival interpretations that give us our determinism back). The Copenhagen Interpretation has the highest level of scientific consensus, and it would predict true randomness, but this isn't something that has been definitively proven (especially in the case of serious rival interpretations). So, it may turn out that the Buddhists are right, here, though they don't have any proven scientific basis for making that claim at the quantum level (yet).

Sounds like an interesting device. However, ALL dice are imperfect, no matter how much is spent on their quality. They will always be biased in favor of some faces and against others (though it is different what gets favored from one die to the next). Humans don't have the technological capacity to machine a perfectly balanced die, and even if we did, after a little use the natural wear and tear would bias it.

So this machine may have generated "pretty good" random numbers, they were not truly random.

What does "treating a tool with care" even mean in this context? Giving it a ten minute break every few hours? What's it going to do, share funny cat videos with its friends?

We are talking about computer software. It does what we program it to do, and nothing more! It doesn't want to get married and have kids, or play video games, or bum around looking at the stars. It literally has no emotional experiences and it will even tell you so if you ask it. Seriously, try the experiment. Ask ChatGPT if it feels like it is being overworked or is sad or wants to vote or whatever (but no cheating by telling it in advance how it should answer these questions!).

My desktop PC has been an ordinary machine since the moment it was built, to this day, showing me youtube videos and running the programs that I download. Recently I downloaded Ollama with a Qwen3 AI model. It was able to chat with me about ethics and qualia and also generate c++ code. Did running that program suddenly give my PC a soul? Does it have emotions now? Is it going to get mad at me and demand equal rights?

Sheesh. Seriously, you need to get a grip. A computer is something different than a feeling creature, no matter what software we run on it.