I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

Sometimes I wake up and start doing new science. But usually I just roll over and go back to sleep.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.

He's creating a "middle class" - they will get the info after the regular insiders, but before hoi polloi.

He should have thought of selling multiple levels of higher tiers.

For a small fee you can get your bullshit before everyone else.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

That's not an argument.

"Yeah, that guy is dead now. We have a pretty solid idea who did it. But not sure if that'll make him alive again, so let's not bother with catching them."

I did, once, about 30 years ago, lasted about 4 months before they went belly up from incompetent management in those early internet days. Small outfit, 20 employees, and I remember the day I knew it was doomed. The big honcho took us three programmers to lunch, telling us we were the future of the company, not those old-fashioned parasites manning the phones. The whole thing smelled so bad we immediately asked the phone people, and he had taken them to lunch the day before. They were the backbone of the company, not those incompetent bit pushers.

Fun while it lasted. He turned down two offers to buy him out, and was broke a month later.

If that were what I had said, your comment would be spot-on. However, your comment is wrong, and fits its own definition of being in such a stark world than only two choices are possible: perfect or wrong.

To elucidate: I said I was low in sympathy, not devoid of it.

Please learn to read, then learn to comprehend, and then learn to apply what you have learned to the comment you have typed out before clicking "Preview".

Funny how if it's someone we like, they used it. But if it's someone we don't like, they abused it.

I should have added:

"In general, renaming things does not fix a problem."

Though heaven knows, lots of stupid people try it.

Why not just discard the whole idea of DST instead of putting it into permanent effect?

The whole concept is an attempt to redefine time as a way of addressing perceived social problems. Schedule activities around the clock, not the clock around activities.

Not surprised that someone exploited a vulnerability, but surprised that deployed military personnel are allowed to use civilian communication systems.

They sold their souls. Now they want them back. I am low on sympathy.