Ah yes, “synthetic users.” This is being pushed at my job as well. We’re supposed to use AI to design the next feature for our website, then ask AI “users” what they think of it.

That’s not our entire vetting process - it’s supposed to replace someone just writing down an idea and saying “I think this is good.” And I agree that just firing from the hip like that is dumb. We want our product managers to do more research into their ideas before they get greenlit to be built.

The question is whether AI “synthetic users” add anything of value. The team that put this tool into service noted it has a “positivity bias,” aka “you’re absolutely right!” So we feed it an idea we think is good, and it says oh yes it’s very good.

It’s read every customer email we’ve ever received and every user research report ever conducted by our human UX researchers. But it’s still just not that useful. I think AI is very useful for summarization, searching, and collation of information, but this goes beyond that, asking AI to imagine it is a person and then come up with things to say about an entirely novel concept. And AI is not good at that.

Just because you can think of ways out of enforcement doesn’t mean all enforcement is impossible. If there’s a plumbing truck parked at the movie theater, management is going to damn well know if plumbing work is occurring. I know it makes us feel smart to think of loopholes but we don’t need airtight enforcement in order for a law to make sense. There are tons of laws on the books that aren’t actively and exhaustively enforced, and they exist to give authority to those who would take action in situations where they can.

It’s a myth that you can write anything off as a business expense and the IRS can’t do anything about it.

Yes that was involved and they executed it well.

That’s not a loophole. If the truck wasn’t driven to this movie theater for work purposes, then it wasn’t driven for work purposes.

They were neat to loook at but not very impressive in practical terms. So you can take 3 semi-floppy coiled things and turn them into one semi-rigid thing. But only one of them can be attached to something, or the actuator won’t be able to move.

The tent application is the closest one to something practical and the tent was not very rigid, nor was there any real advantage to it over conventional methods.

🤷‍♂️

It’s not necessarily that. It’s more like, if I configure my phone to silence notifications for an hour on the weekend, there’s a chance either through my own fuckup or the settings being so complicated that come Monday morning I will miss something from work.

I don’t know why people are losing their minds over the concept that someone might want to get away from their phone for a while.

You mean prohibition doesn’t make people good? Their prohibition on alcohol is a fairly effective prohibition on alcohol.

I just want to caution against us developing the stereotype that people’s capabilities slowly fade to zero, at which moment they die. That’s not always how it goes. People can die suddenly at any age, but the odds go up as you get older. You can die at 80 but still be productive when it happens. Your productivity can also go to zero years before you actually expire.

We have an elderly problem in US governance, but let’s not address it with a bunch of stereotypes about the elderly.

Yes there’s nothing particularly odd about the first couple of names in this timeline. The point is what comes after them.

Oh yeah corruption and sexual abuse: uniquely American. Fuck right off.

Well in part it’s just being perceived that way. The car will decide if you’re drunk somehow becomes government surveillance. The App Store will ask for proof of age: government surveillance. And so on.

I’m not saying that this is a false interpretation but certainly it’s leaned on extremely hard in the way people report on and talk about these things. Hence why you get the sense that everyone everywhere is suddenly completely about government surveillance.

I think we could have a whole conversation about drunk driving and the efficacy and fairness of this kind of measure without even cracking the lid on government surveillance. But no one wants that. Nope, if it isn’t a direct descent straight into Fascism, it doesn’t get clicked on.

Could be. I struggle to imagine what would need to be bolted to the wall, only in that place, only on that one floor.

That looks like where Cotton Eyed Joe kept The Subtle Knife.

I had a word or two in there that left room open for that. I hope I have clarified.

I agree the state should not infringe speech. You are free to blow more word count than is actually in the First Amendment on reminding us that it exists, and you did. I get it.

But we can hold the belief that the state should stay out of it even while we personally shit on assholes spewing hate and crying “free speech” when they get a reaction to it. They have free speech - they cry about it because they want it to be guaranteed bandwidth / freedom from consequences. Fuck them and fuck that.

As far as I’m concerned, Tom Waits solved ticket scalping back in 1999. He did two shows in my area on the Mule Variations tour. When you bought tickets, you could only buy two, and you had to give a name. Not an id, just a name. And then at the door, you had to show ID. You would anyway because it was a 21-and-up show, but the name on the ID had to match the name on the ticket. They didn’t scan shit. Just the doorman glanced at the name, and compared it to what was printed on the ticket. You could buy as many pairs of tickets as you wanted under the same name, but you couldn’t then sell them to people because their ID wouldn’t match at the door.

Simple. Non invasive. It worked. The show was amazing.

I think one of Dave’s mistakes is in thinking he didn’t have any “down.” His humor is brilliant and searing when it comes to being black. He’s done skits where he’s a slave. He sees himself as the historical victim of the ages and never imagined that anyone could take what he says as coming from above. Classic privilege blindness, and a great illustration of what that means intersectionally.

I’m so sick of people trying to hide hate speech behind free speech, behind tolerance, behind pluralism. It’s hate. It’s hate. It doesn’t need to be protected and included. This is very old news. All they do by quibbling about it is broadcast to the world that their intellect is about 100 years behind the rest of us. Fuck you, Dave.

Not to make it worse but did you hear he’s the health secretary??