If you build a tool and in the process of building it it causes harm, that should be on you. If some model under development hacks into another company, the developer should be held criminally and civilly liable.

If you build a tool and someone else uses it to cause harm, that person is 100% liable. It is not your responsibility to prevent your tool from being able to cause every possible harm.

If you build a tool and someone else uses it as intended, but it malfunctions and causes harm, the developer should be liable for that just like any other product liability situation.

Think of it like a riding mower. If I bypass the safety systems and point it toward my neighbor’s house and it runs over their dog, that’s on me not the manufacturer. But if I am riding along and suddenly it knocks me off the top and keeps going on to the neighbor’s yard and runs over their dog, that is on the manufacturer for building an unsafe mower.

Make a gun that can aim and fire itself and you have a much better analogy

Sadly yes you’re right. We’re at the point where we as a society have to wrap our head around the fact that images (and even video) are no longer proof of reality.

I’ve seen a few attempts at cameras which digitally sign the image as proof of reality. That may end up being the new normal.

Do you want to explain to a thirteen year old how it’s not a big deal if someone is passing around realistic nudes of them that were AI-generated?

No of course not. But how’s that different than when one of her classmates takes Photoshop 101? What do you tell the 13yo whose face is photochopped onto a porn star? Same thing.

I’m 100% with you that it sucks, and I’m not convinced generative AI has done much of anything useful to outweigh its societal and resource costs.
You could require all cloud AI to embed tracking data in each image, so when little Johnny nudify’s his classmate we can trace who made the image. But lots of cloud AI companies are outside the USA. And that won’t affect local models.

In this case ‘safety’ was being pushed by the group monitoring the AI companies, perhaps to push their own relevance.

This is absolutely right.

Our kitchen sink has a soap dispenser. It had this stupid tiny little bottle that you had to refill from the top while you couldn’t see how much was in it so I had to put a flashlight underneath and then lean over while I pour trying not to spill. Screw that.

I bought a kit on Amazon to fix it. You remove the bottle entirely, and then connect to the bottom of the pump a PVC tube with a check valve. On the other end of the hose there’s a bunch of different size lids for whatever brand of soap you have.

Now I buy the soap in bulk, stick the bulk pack under the sink with the hose stuck in it. This runs out about once a year and when it does I just buy another bulk pack and swap it out.

Worth every penny.

Another thing, for the bathroom. Get a large foaming soap dispenser. And then get the soap that comes as tablets. Fill the soap dispenser with hot water and then drop in one or two tablets. They fizz like Alka-Seltzer and when they dissolve the result is foaming soap liquid.

Honestly this seems like a waste.

If there was some free community edition of this I’d deploy it at our org. But I can promise you that I couldn’t get $1 approved for buying a browser, not when there’s plenty of free options.

The other thing- contact us for demo- I mean this with all respect but FUCK OFF WITH THAT SHIT. That’s what companies do so they don’t have to list their million-dollar price tag, and/or want to size up how much they can rip you off for before quoting you. You want people to buy this, make it transparent.

Honestly I think this whole conversation is stupid.

It’s always been possible to photoshop a celebrity’s face onto a pornstar’s naked body. That’s been a thing for decades.

So you talk about guardrails to prevent AI from doing this, and you use the word ‘safety’- I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

To me, AI ‘safety’ is not accidentally creating an AI that will find a bunch of 0day exploits and use them to destroy the Internet. Making AI not spit out spicy pics has nothing to do with ‘safety’.

So if an AI model can spit out a naked pic of someone, honestly, I really don’t care. It’s shitty for sure, but if the big companies block it (which they probably can’t) some little operator will spring up and fill the gap.

Agree 100%.

It’s the same thing with undocumented immigrants in the USA. They are an easily exploited underclass, they required no rights because if there’s conflict you just report them to ICE and away they go. As such they will work in awful conditions for shit pay.

Maybe the solution is to enforce the immigration regs and penalize employers who hire undocumented people. Maybe the solution is to relax the immigration regs and encourage undocumented workers to stand up for themselves. I think the former is more likely because you’re not pushing through a cultural barrier.

Not surprising.

Let me guess- ‘temporary’ gets renewed every year for decades, right?

Americans either didn’t want or didn’t qualify for these jobs, no employer goes through the visa process to stick it to Americans, it’s a giant pain in the ass.

Americans didn’t want those jobs at the salary they were offering. That’s the kicker.
The visa process may be a pain. But with a company like Tata to help you with it or do it for you, you can end up paying that H1B worker MUCH less than you would an American. And because their H1B is tied to their employment they won’t rock the boat because getting fired means having to leave the USA.

I’m surprised. This actually has teeth.

host of companies, including Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL.

Many of these companies literally have the business model of letting you replace your expensive American tech people with cheaper foreign ones, either importing them as H1B or offshore remote.

“Since 2009, just these companies alone have requested almost 3 million foreign workers. They’ve received over 230,000 H-1B visas approvals and over 100,000 permanent labor certifications…”

I promise you there weren’t 3 million jobs that NO American tech workers were qualified for. There wasn’t 230k or 100k either.

What there was, is 3 million positions that the companies didn’t want to pay American salaries for.

So they post the job like ‘experienced tech needed. Must know (laundry list of 20 different systems) intricately. 10+ years experience preferred. Starting salary $45k’ and they get no applications because that skill set requirement is a $100k-$200k position. So they claim there’s no Americans to do the job and get H1B approval.

Look at you with the heavy security. No need for that, right on the monitor should be fine. In fact to avoid confusion you should write ‘Computer PW: correcthorsebatterystaple’ so you don’t forget what the note is there for.

Yeah, sorry that all that happened to you. Sorry that your mom wasn’t a better person. Sorry that you had to lose her in that manner. Sorry that she was dumb and/or brainwashed enough to essentially sign her own death certificate. Sorry she didn’t have the mental strength to get help. And last but not least sorry that you had to clean up a house full of garbage and dog shit. I’m sorry she wasn’t a better mom. Nobody deserves that. :(

I use one-off email addresses for each company, and I use Firefox with containers so even if they get passed Firefox and high tracking they will only ever see other Amazon page hits.

I have about 50 items on mime, all based on my shopping and browsing history. No problems here

Fun fact, salt water systems require a gadget called a salt cell which converts some of the salt in the water into chlorine. The salt isn’t actually sanitizing the water, it’s not there in nearly enough concentration to do that. Rather, the salt cell is splitting the sodium chloride into sodium and chlorine, the chlorine is then sanitizing the pool.

I’m really sorry. 😥

That’s pure chlorine, much higher concentration. At the concentrations of pool chlorination there’s essentially no smell.

Everyone knows you jump in the pool in summer, smell the chlorine, and know the water is clean, right?

Fun fact- chlorine dissolved in pool water at the usual sanitation levels has almost no perceptible smell or taste.
HOWEVER, when chlorine binds with certain organic substances, especially ammonia (from the urea in sweat and urine), the result is chloramine which has a significant chlorine-y smell. Chloramine has essentially no disinfecting properties.

So when you go to the public pool and get a whiff of chlorine and think ‘man they’re using a lot of chlorine today’, no, it probably means someone peed in the pool.

You’re welcome :)

Most smartphones encrypt the majority of their storage these days.

This means there are two states the phone can be in.

BFU, or Before First Unlock, is the most secure. When you power on the phone it has just enough software in unencrypted storage to come on, initialize its hardware, start some background processes, and display an unlock screen. This is the most secure state for the phone. When you type in your password, the password itself decrypts the actual key which is used to decrypt the main storage. Without that password, the data is essentially useless as it cannot be decrypted. Also, most phones are now set up so that if you try the wrong password 10 times, it will erase the main storage encryption key which means the data is completely unrecoverable forever. In general, it doesn’t matter what you can exploit BFU because there’s very little running to exploit and the storage encryption key is usually stored in a secure enclave, that is a special part of a chip that is designed to resist tampering.

Once you type in your password the first time, the phone is AFU, or After First Unlock. The key to access main storage is held in memory, it is being actively used to read and write from that storage as software is running on the phone like email, background apps, etc. The prompt to unlock the phone looks exactly the same, but in reality the phone is in a much less secure state. There’s plenty of software, both system and apps, running for you to try to exploit.

The point here is that if you set the phone to regularly reboot, or to reboot if you haven’t logged in in a day or two, each time it reboots it switches back to BFU state.

And so if some government agency has arrested you and seized your phone, you want that reboot to happen because if the phone automatically reboots before they manage to get into it, it becomes much much harder for them to get in.