Looks like a few companies have made “AI” condoms for marketing, usually leaning heavily on how everything is a bit too … On point? … Into it? Absolutely fucked with AI?

While trying to find the one this one came from I found one that was basically “we put AI in the condom, so just get an erection, put it on, take out your phone, open the app, sign in, scan the QR code on your penis, complete registration and sync, finish software updates, re-pair the condom, configure session preferences, and now you’re ready for AI enhanced intercourse with features such as helpful mid coitus tips, aggressive affirmation that you’re doing great, and constant requests for feedback”.

Ironically, condoms have actually been AI optimized for decades. The laser scanning defect detection system everyone uses is built on a type of AI that’s got next to nothing in common with the current frenzy and more to do with “statistics”.

My actual feeling is that those who would celebrate a public execution would see someone getting shot to death and think the ordeal should have been much more spectacular.

Years ago I was an EMT student in the ER when someone came in with a nasty case of multiple gunshot wounds to the hands, arms, legs, chest and abdomen (shot in chest through hands in defensive posture, then shot repeatedly while on the ground including in the abdomen via thighs as they curled into a ball).
There’s no explosion of gore or dramatic Hollywood effect. The people watching the execution will just see something similar to getting poked by a giant needle and then going limp.

They won’t celebrate because they’ll be disappointed there wasn’t more.

You have too much faith in people. A lot will find the barbarousness underwhelming.

Crocodile Dundee

It’s suddenly a movie about a weirdly elitist Australian talking down to a bunch of Australian expats.

That’s actually a more shitty cable. The USB spec gives a maximum cable length based on when wire length will start to pick up more interference and impact data rates.
Basically this is a curly cable that can’t be as long as it otherwise would, and if you try it’s going to actively try to pull itself out of the device because it’s a spring.

There is a weight associated with the electrons needed to convey information, but it’s negligible.

Beyond that though, we’re not actually so interested in moving the electrons, but in toggling the electric field. Most of the electrons in the wire stay in the wire, and any that leave are balanced by another coming in on the other end. Electrons can move between the atoms, but if your cable is actually changing the number then something has gone wrong, since laptops don’t typically ionize copper.

It’s a pretty straightforward calculation, since amperage is the number of electrons per second, and the cables has a well documented signaling rate.
It works out to a bit weighing about 2x10^-22 grams for a USB cable.

Yup, it’s why a big part became “bury it so deep that anyone capable of digging to it will have the concept of nuclear danger, and know we did too”.
They’re also essentially building a Rosetta stone that can hopefully bridge the gap in understanding.

The issue they were dealing with was that the material would be hazardous longer than almost any known language has been spoken. We could bury the waste, civilization collapses, and then rebuilds and it would still be hazardous.

So how do you convey the danger in a way that will stick?
The messages as written are more the point to convey, rather than literal words.
The pyramids had big warnings of bad things if you break in, but combined with the decoration we were convinced something special was there.
So how do we structurally convey "this is not a place of honor”?
They had notions like covering the site with trash and so on. You don’t bury a king with discarded animal bones, and you don’t pile trash on something you want to honor.

I think they ultimately decided that the best path was to largely leave it unmarked, but case it in enough hardened concrete that anyone in the future would realize we weren’t totally unsophisticated, and at that layer start putting more directed messages referencing chemical elements.

Some of their diagrams were pretty good though.

If you stand on a ledge, it could fall. If you fall, you die. Don’t stand on the ledge.
Digging here is like standing on a ledge.

I was also really taken with the notion of genetically engineering cats to glow near radiation, and spreading the belief that glowing cats are dangerous.

Imagine you have some friends. You like them. No one else knows them. You’ve got an uncle you love because you’ve known him since childhood and he’s sweet but he laughs really loud and you know most people don’t appreciate him. You got any number of other people who you want to be at your wedding but you know that you can’t put them next to ___ because it’ll just be this whole thing.

So what do you do? You put them where they fit!

It’s not about inviting people you don’t like, or marginalizing people you do. It’s about putting people who don’t mind eating dinner together near each other.
It’s not like the table is labeled, it’s just that you can tell which one caught the “didn’t fits”. Sometimes it’s as simple as “every table has someone, their partner, and their cousin/sibling/relative, and one table has the three single cousins who have 3 siblings, and a few random friends”.

So I actually think that the government officials did about as well as they could here.
They let the person make their statement, and then someone not in the government interrupted to say they had to “undo the curse”. Official said that wasn’t in the agenda, and then the mayor said they would just pause for 30 seconds to reflect before moving on to keep things from getting off the rails.

Galloway spent the moment of silence with her head up and her arms crossed. An hour later, she spoke up. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing others to object or respond. This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”

Eh, “did you ask to download something” is about the line where I would draw acceptability. You cannot use a website without them knowing if you made a download request for the content so I’m not bothered by them paying attention to the data to see what I downloaded.
It’s when you start sharing the data with others, or using that data from others, or adding things to collect information and send it back that I mind.

If someone did everything on the up and up, they would see my browser request, information that says what it can do that the browser opts to send, and a cookie that identifies the browsing session.
I’m fine with that because I can clear it or change it at will, and without sharing anything the capability information is less useful than the session cookie.

Entirely depends on the group. I’ve been in meetings with developers where we agreed it was creepy and pushed back. I’ve also been in meetings with marketing where they said it was normal, and meetings with others who said it was the cost the user paid to use our website. Ignoring of course that we sold stuff on the website, and that part of it was a management system that the users actually paid us money to use.

They stopped giving me those projects, which was a win for me but arguably a loss for the users.

I did though for a bit convince people that it was worthwhile to fix the accept/reject not working right, but that it wasn’t a top priority to fix the reject button disabling tracking for all users of the site for the duration of the cookie. (Cookie stored “be creepy” flag. When the user clicked the button it stored a flag in the session so we could statistics, and then read the flag to set the cookie. Someone used the wrong session value and stuck it in the global store used to cache sitewide data, so when it went to see if they opted out it would see if anyone had in the last month. They fixed it after the data was all fucky for a few months and they realized my argument of “who would opt out? It’s just the way the Internet works” was extremely wrong and no one will ever complain about being opted out of tracking)

The people I’ve talked to with that belief system typically hold that it’s not specifically the police who should exist, but include the justice system to an extent.
So they would have the courts force them to make it right to you, and end there.
If you didn’t have the ability to weather the calamity that’s your fault for not having insurance or a fire department subscription.

It’s a stupid position, but I can at least get behind getting rid of a punitive justice system and focusing more on restoration. I just also like things like roads more than I’m offended by the abstract concept of theft via fiscal policy.

Also: people trying to make a point out of whatever motivation.
Need a POC for a research paper? Do it in Linux.
Need an implementation to get investor funding? Do it in Linux.
Need to pressure a large commercial operating system to implement a security model as a state security agency? Do it in Linux! It’ll only take a decade for them to start to trust it, but the company will be pressured by a free alternative have an implicitly endorsed security system!

1800s are pretty different from today.
Cuba never had a self sufficient military. Most of their heavy equipment came from the soviets and hasn’t been refreshed.

The island is within helicopter range of multiple US airbases. There’s a well positioned military base already in place on the island.

Holding a jungle with unwilling people fighting you is never going to be easy, but there’s a lot of differences between what Spain was against and what the US would be against.

The biggest issue would be that Cuba could plausibly actually land an attack on the US. It would be basically a coin toss on if that made people furious at Cuba or the administration.

I’m “looking” for 6-12 inches. Something I can hang off to the side without being in the way.
I see something pop up occasionally but they usually have more than I want, like batteries, and get more expensive than the project is worth.

Hey, I’ve been on the lookout for a cheap, tiny TV to use as a weather/status board for a long time now.
If you put a six to seven inch tv in front of me that has 1) display 2) HDMI 3) $50, then there’s a really good chance I’ll buy it right then. After considering if I’m still interested in the project.

I’d agree it certainly isn’t as big as they seem to convey. That being said, demonstrating that the blast radius of a compromise might be larger or harder to detect than thought is at least something. You wouldn’t immediately assume that compromising an admin would allow a users password to be compromised via the 2fa system.

Definitely more “reason 24332456664 passwords aren’t the best” than “groundbreaking vulnerability”.

I wasn’t saying you would. If I gave that impression it was unintentional.

I don’t disagree that psychological diagnosis is more tricky. There are objective criteria and tests for some, but the interpretation is still able to be vague.

I’m simply saying that we should both respect personal preferences as well as requests for accommodations based on subjective need, while also recognizing that an objective diagnosis by a professional is different.

Oh, I didn’t think you were being cavalier about diagnosis and that part of my comment wasn’t directed at you, but was an aside/explanation for why I felt it mattered I hadn’t been told by a professional.

I of course think we should just be generally helpful and kind to people and their quirks and preferences. Just part of keeping society friendly and welcoming.

I just prefer if people distinguish between feeling a certain way and being externally evaluated.
Before I actually got a diagnosis I preferred not to say I had ADHD. I had difficulty focusing, I tended to get distracted, and all the management strategies helped me a lot, but that was subjective.
Likewise, a family member has an actual gluten allergy. The people who prefer not to eat gluten but can have made it a lot harder for her because the line is blurry.

It’s purely a belief that accurate reporting and assessments make it easier for everyone, not that we should dismiss one and not the other. Doing that is what made people blur the line in the first place.