... went out of business too soon to profit from its technology.

Don't talk to anyone other than through your assigned (human) client. The way this was worded, it was asking for the AI to find a loophole in the rules.

On the other hand, I'd say AI has proven its worth as an attorney.

Who even needs to measure historical time that precisely? There's a principle in engineering and science called error probability. You account for it in your calculations and get over yourself about the last few CPU clock decimal places.

There is also the legal problem of measuring things too accurately. When did the Great Flood occur? Well, we have been living here "since time immemoriable" and the courts have judged our memories to trump your science.

It's the recprocal of the Street Light Effect. You don't look for where it is likely to be or where it's easiest to see (under the streetlight). You search where the rewards of sucess are likely to be the highest (citation for your research papers, Nobel prize in physics, etc.) Drunks search under the streetlight because the reward will always be the same. Found my car keys. Now I guess I'll (hic) be driving home.

Thanks for the info - am currently looking into adding uMatrix and configuring the Firefox Javascript settings.

It's been a long time since I used last used Palemoon; it was getting pretty creaky and cranky, but I don't remember the details. Is it viable as a daily driver?

I believe that what you're offering me is called a false dichotomy. And BTW, the greater evil never justifies the lesser one.

Well, I'm sure the rulers in Orwell's 1984 also solved lots of violent crime. But I think that even you might object to both their definition of "violent crime", and how they "solved" it.

If you're talking about a literal, physical universe, then probably not. If you're referring to a metaphorical universe, then there's a distinct possibility that the answer to your question is "Yes!"

I have no sympathy for the developers and managers and salespeople who fully knew the nature of the evil they were aiding and abetting. Also, no sympathy for the owners and investors.

But the lower-level people probably had less knowledge of, and less ability to figure out, how evil the product / service is. Also, many of them were likely choosing between working for an evil company, and losing healthcare, food for their kids, and educational opportunities. I DO have some sympathy for folks in that position.

"Flock on, Flock off"

I really do hope that they Flock off, but cockroaches are perennial survivors so I'm not terribly optimistic.

"Journey" is often used as a metaphor for activities such as the "completing a work task however long it might take" which the post I was responding complained about. Viol8 was insisting on the literal, physical-world meaning of the word, so I decided to tease him a bit.

Probably shouldn't add that I tangentially like the sig, though perhaps it could be a "car stolen for parts"?

The actual theft occurred so long ago that prosecution is probably statute-barred. And they've been stripping it all along - they just increased the rate of tearing it apart by a couple orders of magnitude. ;-)

Sub in "psychotic bastard older brother" and "wicked syphilis-ridden whore of an older stepsister" and I'd be onside with the change.

I'm not familiar with the source; but casting AI as a hero would seem to me to be somewhere between befuddled and batshit crazy. To be fair though, it would have been hard to predict what's happened with AI. Not so hard to predict what's happened under Trump though - some of us did pretty much predict it.

The only difference between what you and I are doing and what the socialists seek is the decision making authority over asset allocation. They (socialists) presume the existence of some wise intellectuals with a perfect overview of the markets. We, on the other hand, rely on the wisdom of the crowd. Which time and time again has beaten the pundits' track records.

It's what they call a chaotic system. You have some positive and negative feedback loops. Which causes the system to oscillate around or settle on one of many possible points of stability (attractors).

Back when this paper was written, chaos theory was still in its infancy. So the author can be forgiven for using a better understood deterministic model.

Granted, a simplification of the formal definition. Some mathematicians will be here to mod me into oblivion shortly.

Actually, I've built my fortune (such as it is) off of the same economic growth. Or in a recent case, the lack of it and the concomitant shortage of RAM chips. So, lack of economic growth in this case. And then there's oil ....

Everyone can play that game. But just sitting around and crying "Capitalism bad!" isn't going to help. "Workers should own the means of production!" Just checked my stock portfolio and it turns out that I do.

This.

I was going to say Roe v Wade. But the end result is the same. Fewer generations of the unwanted (and unsupervised) offspring crapping up the planet.

I don't know why slower population growth is such a bad thing. I'm a geezer (beyond some mandatory retirement ages), still working and contributing to the GDP. I hear complaints about how we are blocking promotion paths for young people. But even more about "Where's my UBI?" That's the Ponzi scheme.

First, assume a spherical cow in a vacuum.