badgermurphy

That may be the plan, but that amount of money is not significant to even the poor for more than perhaps a month or so.

A bribe is a transaction--I pay you this, and you let me get away with that. If I want to continue getting away with things, I have to continue to pay, since I am the one continually putting myself in a compromising position. The second I stop paying, the ride ends.

Also, promising payments at some point in the future may fool 3rd party onlookers into thinking you're helping them out, but I can't imagine the people who were promised the money are going to just not notice that they were welched on, even if they love the person that stiffed them.

I'm sure that's true, but it is also noteworthy that any and every consideration that goes into the initial inclusion of the data before it is fed into the model introduces intended and unintended consequences on the training.

Furthermore, the proliferation of the LLMs themselves is putting negative pressure on survival of the places where all the good data is sourced from in the first place. When traffic to a place like stackoverflow is way down because everyone's reading LLM answers (that the LLM training dataset got from stack overflow), there are less good conversations on stackoverflow to read. Some of these sources of training data may even be caused to cease to exist entirely.

Unfortunately, it was just that: good luck. All appliances from Samsung and LG are notorious in the market space for premature failure. If we had a functioning consumer protection agency, they wouldn't be able to even sell something of such poor reliability.

Hard disagree. Please, everyone, research impartial product reviews before you buy any appliance. Your appliance lifespans should be measurable in decades.

I am familiar with the "there's no such thing as bad publicity" adage, and you are definitely right that more people are having McDonald's on the mind than if this fiasco hadn't happened. That said, I don't think McDonald's can increase their brand awareness until life is discovered on other planets.

The problem that is created by a person's private data being collected against a person against their will is primarily a philosophical one similar to the "principle of least privilege", which you may be familiar with. The idea is that those collecting the data have no reasonable need for access to it in order to provide the services they're providing, so their collection of that information can only be for something other than the user's benefit, but the user gets nothing in exchange for it. The user is paying for the product/service they get, so the personal data is just a bonus freebie that the vendor is making off with. If the personal data is worthless, then there is no need to collect it, and if it does have worth, they are taking something of value without paying for it, which one might call stealing, or at least piracy. To many, this is already enough to cry foul, but we haven't even gotten into the content and use of the collected data yet.

There is a vibrant marketplace among those in the advertising business for this personal data. There are brokers and aggregators of this data with the goal of correlating every data point they have gotten from every device and app they can find with a specific person. Even if no one individual detail or set of details presents a risk or identifies who the specific person is, they use computer algorithms to analyze all the data, narrowing it down to exactly one individual, similar to the way the game "20 questions" works to guess what object the player is thinking of--they can pick literally any object or concept in the whole world, and in 20 questions or less, the other player can often guess it. If you imagine the advertisers doing this, imagine how successful they would be at guessing who a person is if they can ask unlimited questions forever until there can be no doubt; that is exactly what the algorithm reading the collected data can do.

There was an infamous example of Target (the retailer) determining a young girl was pregnant before she told anyone or even knew herself, and created a disastrous home situation for her by sending her targeted maternity marketing materials to her house, which was seen by her abusive family.

These companies build what many find to be disturbingly invasive dossiers on individuals, including their private health information, intimacy preferences, and private personal habits, among other things. The EFF did a write-up many years ago with creepy examples of basic metadata collection that I found helpful to my understanding of the problem here:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/why-metadata-matters?rss=1

Companies have little to no obligation to treat you fairly or even do business with, allowing them to potentially create a downright exile situation for you if they have decided you belong on some "naughty list" because of an indicator given to them by an algorithm that analyzed your info. They can also take advantage of widely known weaknesses in human psychology to influence you in ways that you don't even realize, but are undeniably unethical and coercive. Also, it creates loopholes for bad actors in government to exploit. For example, in my country (USA), the police are forbidden from investigating me if I am not suspected of a crime, but they can pay a data broker $30 for a breakdown of everything I like, everything I do, and everywhere I've been. If it was sound government policy to allow arbitrary investigation of anyone regardless of suspicion, then ask yourself why every non-authoritarian government forbids it.

I know that's a lot; it is a complicated topic that is hard to understand the implications of. Unfortunately, everyone that could most effectively work to educate everyone on those risks is instead exploiting their ignorance for a wide variety of purposes. Some of those purposes are innocuous, but others are ethically dubious, and many more are just objectively nefarious. To be clear, the reason for the laws against blanket investigations was to prevent the dubious and nefarious uses, because once that data is collected, it isn't feasible to ensure it will stay in the right hands. The determination was that potential net good of this kind of data collection is far outweighed by the potential net negatives.

I hope that helps!

I believe that events like these capture the public interest much more than the countless other likely lawless actions, because the legalities of those other actions and the reasons they are that way can be complex and philosophical.

In the case of firing on this shipwreck, it is a very simple event with a very straight line you can draw from "this is the law" to "this is why there's this law" to "here's an ever-increasing cavalcade of evidence indicating clear and knowing violation of that law". The situation is simple, it involves very little philosophy beyond "murdering the helpless is a dick move", and everyone pretty much gets it. A story that simplistic is also tenaciously resistant to media spin; about all they can do is try the "dick moves make you a badass" gambit, which mostly only works on those that are anti-intellectual, provincial, and insecure, so it is only getting traction with the constituencies that would already have followed their leader off a cliff anyway.

OnePlus 5 here! There is a sucking void attached internally where the battery used to be.

There are definitely examples of US military boondoggle projects that didn't result in high end military equipment getting made, but I think it is safe to say there are quite a few individual military tools and vehicles, supply chain notwithstanding, that are amazing triumphs of technology that have no equal.

You can definitely make the case that the volume and overall scale of our military production are excessive in the extreme, but I think to remain intellectually honest, we must admit that they are good at what they do, even though what they do is not always good.

They're going to have to walk a tightrope to pull that off. There is so much choice in the video game market now that its like drinking from a fire hose, so if some games start to not work due to sabotage, while many others don't, that could backfire on them.

Especially since Valve is one of the only large companies with a positive public image, while Microsoft and its countless subsidiaries are basically regarded as Voldemort, its not hard to imagine a public pissing match not going their way.

I don't think the poster meant that a Russian civil war will be nice for his online experience.

There is substantial belief in the western world that Russia is using these "troll farms" to destabilize foreign governments. If true, that would be considered by many to be an act of aggression that he and many others would welcome the end of. The fact that a period of strife in Russia is what caused would be unfortunate, but the fact remains.