It’s because they are usually only soft guardrails. They almost never have an actual programmatic stop gap for responses. They almost never have a prompt-isolated agent filtering results. They almost never give overwhelming priority to their guardrails over user prompts.

Their guardrails are like telling a 6 year old not to leave their socks on the floor. They’ll often remember the suggestion and comply diligently. But sometimes… well, have you ever gotten distracted and forgot a thing? Like you have so many other things on your mind that the socks on the floor rule from a while ago just slips your mind or seems way less important now? Or someone you’re supposed to listen to keeps telling you to throw your socks on the floor anyway. That’s more or less how this works, though without even the higher reasoning and moral guidance of a 6 year old.

“Ok, ok. Everyone calm the fuck down. We haven’t actually released the see-through-clothes-a-vision feature. No consumers have access to it, and it’s not yet been decided that we even will release this tech. We’re just developing and testing this personal x-ray tech to explore the possibilities, that’s all! We think it might have great applications for anatomy education, medical exams and law enforcement.”

“Ah, come on. Don’t get your panties in a wad. Yes yours. I can see them getting all wadded as I speak! Don’t you want to be like Superman, but without any of the moral restraint?”

“Besides you’re not allowed to get mad at us until after we’ve actually unleashed this mass privacy violation tech onto the world. If we do end up unilaterally deciding to irrevocably destroy every semblance of modesty, privacy, and personal descretion for sharing one’s own body, we promise, we’ll be completely transparent about it. As transparent as your dress is to these glasses right now. Wowza!”

Spoiler warning for Windows 12!

Socrates was famously called the ‘gadfly’ because he would pester elites by challenging their supposed wisdom. People that would be highly knowledgeable craftsman, financiers, politicians, etc. would then over estimate their knowledge outside of their realm of expertise and claim to be wise in all things. They would know just enough to sound knowledgeable, but really know very little about what they were talking about (related to the Dunning-Kreuger effect). The takeaway of Socrates’ gadfly work is that sometimes wisdom is acknowledging when you do not know something.

AI can have a lot of “knowledge” (it doesn’t actually know anything itself, but rather has pattern training and access to data references). But what it doesn’t have… like at all… is wisdom. It doesn’t understand, literally, anything at all. It might have some guard rails up to limit is hallucinations. It might even say, sometimes, that it doesn’t know. But it is just as happy to ramble on with pure and complete nonsense that is all just a stream of patterns training and probabilistic guesswork. If it has a nugget of data or even an entire library related to your prompt, it will present it to you. But it can 100% just fill any gaps or take the response into tangents that are nothing but guess-the-next-word, probability, looks-good-to-me word salad that can contain several “facts” that are nothing but random word associations from its training with no reference for its basis.

It is a glorified autocorrect. You cannot trust its information blindly, and using it as a tool in this way, especially while staking your fucking law career on it, is goddamned moronic.

Nothing. Is as bad. As THAC0.

It’s not impossible. It’s actually pretty simple. You just don’t give it access to credentials or resources or sensitive information of any kind. Does that make them basically useless? Yep. But then you don’t create massive security risks and legal liabilities with gross negligence either, so… gotta weigh those things against each other.

Yeah I figured that that distance was wishful thinking.

200 light years radius is for radio signals to reach someone. 100 years radius for possibly receiving a signal back.

And that is if they received our signals, are able to identify that they are artificial signals out of the background noise of the rest of the universe because the signal degrades and gets weaker as the broadcast expands, they decide to send a reply back (even though they just recieve chatter at that point, not intentional communication to them), and then actually sends us a signal back. It’s no wonder that hasn’t happened yet.

There’s around 10-15,000 stars in a 100 light years radius. The chance that any of those stars have habitable planets with intelligent life with the technology to receive and send radio signals and is listening for extraterrestial signals and can discern those broadcasts from background noise and would reply to chatter… that’s a small chance. For context, we have only been explicitly listening for and sending signals intended for extraterrestrials for 64 years ourselves, so an identical civilization 100 light years away that received and replied to us immediately would still have 36 years of transit left on their reply.

Wow. Such True. Many Funny.

So I can burn my rage off trying to peel all the damn with off while getting covered in sticky juice?

Because she makes your “hayb” itch? Sounds venereal.

There is no outcome where those deaths don’t happen. Their deaths are inevitable. Hitting the switch changes absolutely nothing about that fact. This is actually one of the least culpable you would be in the death(s) resulting from of any trolley thought problem I’ve ever seen.

The bigger question is why you are even concerned with the 100 dollars in light of the gory massacre you’re about to witness. Even if you can’t do anything, you should want to. Or at the very least, the people should be your entire focus. Ignoring it entirely to strategize about profiting less than 2 days worth of minimum wage pay out of the situation… That’s some psycho shit. You’ll be a great fit at Palantir.

That first link had Ad Herpes, and it was flaring up hard.

“Well, why do you keep calling me Katniss?”

“Your sister calls you Katniss.”

“She’s calling me ‘Cat Anus’ because she’s a little shit. My name is Tammy.”

FR.

I’ve often heard some version of the suggestion that “kids should eat a pound of dirt by the time they’re 5,” to have healthy immune systems. The suggestion, as I’ve always understood it, is that kids should spend a lot of time outside, eating dirt incidentally from constantly being in nature, having dirty hands and dirt under their nails, tripping and falling in the dirt, breathing dirt kicked up while running around and rough housing, etc. Getting micro-exposure to lots of germs early through play to built up a strong immune response. I’ve never understood it to mean literal dirt eating, but now I wonder if that might be the origin.

Probably doesn’t help that this is the first I’ve heard of it.

Boycotting a company because some stores are unionized is wild. Particularly a company that really tries not to be unionized. They’re punishing a company for not cracking down on their employees’ rights hard enough, apparently. So weird.

She and my tech lead were out of office. I probably could have got in contact with them but I was new to the team, assumed the angry manager was right, that the work was urgent, and didn’t want to rock the boat. So I just did it. Today I’m far more aware of how full of shit some of the other team leaders are.

Devs missing deadline because they fucked around, or under estimated the work required and didn’t budget themselves enough time is more there fault (assuming the reason they under estimated wasn’t lack of information from management). Devs missing deadlines because someone tells them Tuesday that they need to drop everything and pick up a 5 pointer and have it done by Thursday, is management’s fault. The “unrealistic” part of the “unrealistic deadline” was the key word there.

Here is a real life example for you. Last year we had a few tasks for migrating our logs and dashboarding from Datadog to Dynatrace. We had just gotten our logs routing to Dynatrace on Wednesday, and were going to start work on migrating our dashboards (or actually rebuilding as there was no way to directly migrate them) the following sprint.

Then on Friday, I get an angry call from a manager of some other team that had some responsibility over the Datadogs licensing asking why we still have logs routing to Datadogs. She says that the license is being hard shut down on Monday and we need to be migrated already. So I had to drop everything. I had to export everything we had in Datadogs, and start manually rebuilding in Dynatrace (which uses a poorly documented proprietary query language I’d never used before), prioritizing the most important stuff for our support team before the weekend lest they fly blind starting Monday morning.

I only found out on Monday that this manager didnt know what they hell she was talking about, that we weren’t on the license being ended, and we had another month to do the migration. I was treated like a fucking champion by my own manager, who had been out of office on Friday, for getting done as much as I had in a single day, but there was no reason for it. She was misinformed from bad communication. And even if she had been correct, her lack of observation on the matter earlier and only informing us about the issue at the last minute was inexcusable. So was her anger over the situation at our team, who doesn’t fucking work for her, btw (not even sure which team she’s over), for not falling in line with a deadline we didn’t know about, or as it turned out a deadline we didn’t even have… bad management.