You do realist that “I am innocent, armed and will shoot if you try to arrest me” is possibly the worst conceivable way to avoid being unlawfully arrested, right?

There is quite literally nothing you could do to make it more certain that you will be either killed or arrested than trying to shoot your way out of being wrongly arrested.

I hope you also realise that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, and has a long and proud history of arresting and/or executing the wrong people. Literally any other system than the one you’re advocating for is provably superior when it comes to preventing the wrong people from being arrested.

I’ve done this a lot, so I’m speaking from experience. I haven’t been compromising on location (closeness to where I need to be), only on comfort. It probably depends on where you’re travelling to though.

If you’re a low-maintenance kind of person that just wants a pull-out sofa to sleep on, a shower, and possibly a kettle+microwave to make coffee+bad food for a day or two, you can find Airbnbs at ¼ the price of a hotel.

Sometimes they literally don’t have the ability to press 1.

Which is why I’m saying it should go through automatically after a short delay.

It’s easy to say “just over staff” until you’re faced with the reality that maybe once every five years, for a grand total of one hour, you’re faced with call pressure 1000 times higher than the second highest spike. It’s not viable to staff a response center to deal with thousands of people calling in the same bomb attack or shooting within minutes, when you normally see on the order of hundreds of calls per week.

What you need is the capacity to deal with 99.99… % of situations, and a safety mechanism to prevent the remaining situations from overloading your system more than necessary.

In a mass casualty event, you need to be able to filter out the people making redundant reports in order to effectively handle the important reports. You need to do that without blocking out the important reports, that’s the hard part.

You really don’t need an AI for this though. With the number of mass shootings the US sees, it’s honestly shocking that they don’t have a button the operator can press to activate an auto-reply along the lines of “We are already responding to <event>, if you still want to talk to us, press 1 or wait for a reply.”, which waits something like 10s before going through.

This would filter out a bunch of duplicate reporting with far less effort, and with less odds of something going wrong.

One thing is the 58 000 that have to re-take the exam. I’m just as interested in the 2% of exam-takers that were terminated due to “unspecified conduct issues”, and how many of those were unfairly thrown out for cheating without having done anything wrong…

So much the last bit! I can’t count the number of times our CEO has either sent a mail or created an issue (very small company) with something along the lines of “X is broken”, when what they mean is “I don’t like the design choice behind X.” Like, whatever they’re complaining about is completely functional, it just doesn’t work exactly the way they envisioned it. When explaining why it can’t (or shouldn’t) work exactly the way they envisioned, there’s maybe a 50 % chance that “X is broken” turns into “oh, I hadn’t thought about that”.

It honestly shocks me how stupid people are. There was just a case in the news about some guys that were busted while planning an attack on the White House UFC thing recently. They had initiated contact about this on tiktok (before moving to signal). One of the guys had posted photos on instagram of training with one of the others. The first guy that was busted had been reported by his parents, who he lived with, because they had overheard phone conversations that made them worried. They had anlso noticed he had begun stockpiling weapons, ammo, and other gear. All of them had quit their job to make time for the planning + attack.

Like, I’m glad these people were caught so that a bunch of innocents weren’t killed. What baffles me is how intensely stupid it’s possible to get. What would make anyone even consider communicating about this kind of stuff on a digital platform? How does anyone think it’s a good idea to suddenly start stockpiling weapons in broad daylight? In what world do you document this training online? Why in gods name would you quit your job out of the blue while doing all the above?

We’re just lucky these people are so stupid…

This makes me tremble. I cannot imagine starting every day with breaking some obscure tool, pipeline, or tool chain just for the hell of it

That’s definitely true, but the question is do the execs really care? I think that for a lot of these people, the only thing that matters is whether they can keep pulling those sweet sweet cash-outs. Just look at the absurd bonuses musk was promised from tesla recently. If he really cared about the success of the company, he wouldn’t take those, he would take a fair paycheque and allow the company to reinvest the rest of the money. Instead, he requires massive bonuses to keep working. We’re talking about the kind of money that could fund the entire educational sector in a small country for many years. He’s taking that out as a personal bonus, to the detriment of the company.

That kind of thing makes me believe that he doesn’t really care about the long-term success of the company. What he really cares about is squeezing out cash from the company for as long as possible. If the company fails, he has enough money to buy up something else that he can squeeze cash out of. The modus operandi is basically

1. Be rich
2. Buy some company
3. Wave your arms and wag your tung to get investor money into the company
4. Cash out bonuses
5. Go to step 3 until your cash-out has surpassed the investment cost
6. Either sell out of company (if it’s been run to the ground), or go to step 3 until it has been.

I honestly think a lot of the people pushing this stuff know very well that they don’t need it to succeed. They don’t really care if the general public hates it, and it flops. As long as they can convince investors, they’re pulling yearly paycheques and bonuses in the tens of millions of dollars. If it flops, some thousand employees (thralls) will be layed off. If it fails catastrophically, they might need to step down themselves, and move to a different company that “appreciates their ability to be a visionary”.

These people are only capable of failing upwards, and they know it. The name of the game for them is waving their arms and blabbering about something to draw in investor money.

I think it makes sense to be flexible: In a table, or other bureaucratic contexts, it makes sense to put the family name first. In daily speech, it’s rather common that I’m in contact with family members (even more so historically), and it makes most sense to use the distinguishing name (first name) first.

If I’m with a group that includes siblings or parents/children, I can usually distinguish everyone by first name, while many people share last names.

You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn’t happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we’re going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can’t really cause that kind of effect.

The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I’m honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this? I would think increasing truck sizes would cause a much more shallow minima, since truck sizes don’t suddenly increase from one year to the next.

This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. You can confirm the structural integrity of the wings with a rather simple visual inspection. Same goes for the windows and landing gear.

Try confirming the integrity of (tens- or hundreds of) thousands of lines of code with a similar kind of inspection…

While I see what you’re getting at, I still like this XKCD. I work as a developer, and have also worked in more “handy” fields. The thing with planes, elevators, and basically all other physical things is that they’re limited by physics. A steel beam can’t suddenly decide to spontaneously fail or disappear.

With code, that can feel pretty different. With experience, I’ve basically learned to assume that there is always some edge-case I haven’t considered, that could trigger a bug. In a building, you can have redundant bolts, and over-dimensioned supports. A small mistake somewhere, a single missing bolt, won’t cause a catastrophic failure. With code, it’s different: A tiny, hard to notice mistake, can bring the whole think crashing down. Imagine if a plane could crash because the paint had a slightly non-uniform thickness…

This is the issue you’ll never get completely around with autonomous systems. A soldier can always figure something out, whether that is simply clearing their weapon, completely disassembling it to repair it, finding a new weapon on the battlefield or getting a buddies side-arm. An autonomous system will never be as versatile and capable of adapting to stuff breaking as a human soldier.

The major advantage with autonomous systems is that you can accept that they break and become dysfunctional in the field. You can always manufacture more, and none of your guys die when one of these fails.

With all that said, I would think you could get pretty far by just adding some arm that can slide back the bolt to clear/reload the weapon when you get a jam. Like 90+ % of the jams I experienced with the MG3 and HK416 were cleared by just doing that.

I had idiocracy on my list for a while. After watching it, I can confirm that it’s easily one of the best movies ever made.

Horses are social animals that enjoy being active. I don’t know where animal cruelty was mentioned here?

This is why people like him hate/fear regulation. Regulating this is the people’s way (in a functioning democracy) to put hard barriers on what these people are permitted to do in order to squeeze out another dime.