Ah, the good 'ol "No True Communism" argument :)

"It suggests" if you ignore that their confounder control is terrible. First, sugar wasn't the only restricted food in post-war Britain - there was also rationing of eggs, butter, cheese and meats that ended during the same timeperiod. So you're not actually testing the effects of sugar consumption, now are you? Also, the early 1950s was a period of rapid change in the US, including the maturation and expansion of the NHS (founded in 1948), the introduction of new childhood vaccines, major environmental shifts (for example, the Great Smog of London in 1952 vs. the 1956 Clean Air Act). Saying "all changes = sugar" just based on birthdate seems absurd.

It's also worth mentioning that there's also survivorship bias - anyone who died before the study couldn't be enrolled, and there's also no actual linking to any maternal / childhood dietary logs. Also, the ratios of cancer differences they're describing aren't small, they're massive. Are we to attribute a lung cancer difference on the order of smoking vs. nonsmoking households as being to sugar, or due to, you know, smoking (or pollution) trends not accounted for in their cohort?

BOTH screwed up. The system shouldn't have made the match and the human should have done a better job seeing that the match was wrong. I'll go one larger and say the people who created the procedures screwed up because they didn't make allowances for the possibility of the first two screw-ups.

Way to out yourself as being American by being simultaneously loudly, assertively ignorant and racist at the same time.

** - Collective guilt is a fallacy; modern Germany is a highly democratic constitutional state with a commendable record on teaching against extremism; Marx and Engel drew heavily from French utopian socialists (e.g., Saint-Simon, Fourier), while it was the Russians who actually implemented communism; World War I began with the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb nationalist, triggering a chain reaction of ultimatums and alliances involving Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, France, Germany, and Great Britain, with any individual state bearing guilt for the war being a notion firmly rejected by modern historians; Hitler was born in Austria-Hungary and was an Austrian citizen until he renounced it in 1925, not gaining German citizenship until 1932; the East German government and the Stasi was forced on the people of Germany by the USSR, and it was not a global phenomenon "brought to the world", but rather dissolved with the GDR in 1990. TL/DR: Go fuck yourself.

The problem is, people have been over-trusting technology since technology was invented. Consider the '70s when corporate representatives were so fond on the phrase "But the computer says...". Yes, you could hear the bold italics in their voice, as if it was the infallible final word on everything.

If THE COMPUTER says you shoplifted, rest assured, some dolt in a suit will treat that like God's own word booming from the clouds.

But every person who sets foot in that store probably "kinda" looks like someone who has shoplifted. And since shoplifters look like everybody else, everyone COULD be a shoplifter.

the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate,

So one in every five thousand people who walk into your stores is going to be falsely accused of a crime? Wow, thanks for making abundantly clear that people should NOT shop there...

Many have voted with hairspray and a sawzall.

I'm not sure how well that would work on this. I don't know the specific algo they're using, but an early, primitive one was even-odd. You divide all tokens into two groups, A and B. When generating, on even tokens you somewhat boost the odds of tokens from A, while on odd tokens, you somewhat boost the odds from B. If a high-probability word is coming up it won't meaningfully alter it, but if there's different ways something can be phrased, it can cause changes in the phrasing choice to match the A/B boosts.

Now, it's easy to see how one could defeat that algo, but I'm sure that what they're using now is a lot more sophisticated than just alternating even-odd.

It's worse, they don't have to go sentient at all. The black death wasn't sentient but it wiped out whole towns anyway.

Rogue agents with no awareness have already demonstrated that they will act against any entity with a conflicting goal, including humans.

Yeah, I'm extremely dubious that the open source version will "sync" with the operational version. I expect the general codebase to be truly represented, but not the "levers" that can be pushed on an operational system.

. You can't just decide you don't like the algo and that you'll modify it and use a different one;

I mean, on any decent social media platform you should be able to? Bluesky has had this feature for years. Not just algo choice, but the ability to outright create your own algos and share them with other people.

It's IMHO a red flag when a for-profit company wants to force everyone to use the same algo.

And if someone at the bar thinks you're an asshole, they'll do the RL equivalent of "blocking" you.

Once again: nobody has an obligation to listen to you, and if you think you have a right to force other people to listen to your views, you're the asshole.

I'll take "Things I've Never Once Seen On Bluesky" for $1000, Ken.

IIRC, more than one lawyer has gotten in to hot water because of AI hallucinations in legal briefs. They sign their name to those, they are responsible.