fiat_lux @ fiat_lux @kbin.social

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2 yr. ago

I wasn't suggesting stopping the development of automated vehicles because it's impossible to have 0 damage. I was advocating having high standards for software/hardware development and real consequences for decision-makers trying to find shortcuts.

Progress and standards are not mutually exclusive.

'Less shit than the average human at it' is a really low bar to set for modern computers, even if Tesla fails at that poor standard and Cruise is currently top of the game. We still need much higher bars when we're talking about entirely automated systems which are controlling speedy large chunks of metal, or even other smaller-scale-impact-and-damage systems. Systems which can't just hop out, ask if the victims are OK, render appropriate first aid, accurately inform emergency services, etc.

The more automation, the higher the standards should be, which means we need to set legal requirements that at least try to scale with he development of technology.

One of the big problems with how organisations often work, especially private businesses, is the extremely casual attitude to product testing and risk assessment. It's only after they spend shitloads on lawyers and public relations that they are suddenly able to prioritise creating jobs dedicated explicitly to preventing the damage they cause with that attitude.

But because law-making is slow, weighed down by flawed human power structures combined with legitimately necessary procedures, the only thing businesses need to do is to outpace the speed of law change to avoid being punished. Outpacing the law has been easy enough to do at the best of times, but with half-assed exploitative software development in a rapidly progressing robotics and 'AI Boom' environment, it will only get easier and hurt more people.

And then the executives who allowed their shoddy products to hurt people will just change employers, likely for a pay raise or just selling the business outright. The only consequences for their reckless management personally are a few late nights in a bad mood. All because limited liability meant they might as well have just been an innocent bystander.

Meanwhile the victims - if they survive, are left in lifelong pain and misery, because courts ruled that the law doesn't cover their novel situation. Not to mention the damage to their families and communities.

Globally, we need to start holding individual organisation decision-makers to personal account for the damage their decisions cause. Both financial and prison-time, for both environmental and human damage. I mean like "Board of Directors and all Chief Officers of Cruise on trial for negligent homicide" levels of responsibility. It's the only way to prevent this kind of unnecessary suffering.

tl;dr
1. Risk of personal loss is the only way people in power will prioritise building safer products.
2. We need the law to catch up faster to a world where humans can offload more life-changing decisions to computers.
3. Law-makers should start assuming we live on the Star Trek holodeck in a Q episode instead of the Unix epoch, if they are going to catch up on their huge backlog.
4. People need to start assuming their code is imprecise and dangerous and build in graceful failures. Yes, it will be expensive in a time-sensitive environment, important things often are.

Totally normal. Sometimes you just want to curl up but still stretch out your legs!

Oof for that edge-case, in every sense. I hope the victim recovers with no long-term consequences. Truly horrific.

House arrest in a purportedly US$700k warehouse complex he spent US$30m renovating

It didn't buy him a single gram of taste, but that part is not exactly surprising.

In jail

House arrest, unfortunately.

The Thai have already mastered that art.

Image description: intricately cut carrots, cucumbers and apples in the shapes of leaves surround a melon carved to resemble a blooming flower. The carved fruits sit on a bed of lettuce on a white plate.

Easy way to be identified, I wouldn't recommend that at this early a stage, especially in company code.

OP I suggest looking at other existing unions near your discipline and other countries that have unions for tech workers. If you look at how they have operated and achieved success, it may help you to navigate that in your world.

These are all long-fought battles with lots of lessons already learnt, find the people who have already fought them and you have a good starting point.

I was thinking more about the new bloom as a creation/rebirth metaphor, not that the plant itself is some new genetic mutation. I apologise, I likely wasn't entirely clear with my navel-gazing.

Just a little dash of creation in your destruction to remind you of Saṃsāra and our completely inconsequential existence in the Universe.

I both love and hate this photo. Cute little bright yellow blooms telling me that things are very bad.

Yeah I posted that. There was no conviction for the unit despite eyewitness testimony that they were there and doing it. There was only conviction of the entire Waffen-SS.

Ukraine has had annual parades "celebrating" his unit since 2010, incidentally. Their courts went as far as to say the unit's logo wasn't "Nazi owned" despite being created by Nazis for it. Here's some photos from the 2021 parade, the first one in Kyev.

Edited to add: to be clear, Hunka was not in the above parade photos, and I have no idea if he has ever been in the parade during its history. It's just there as demonstration that there is a parade to the division he was a member of, and that there is a known and tolerated Nazi presence and association at these parades.

After the war, thousands of SS Galichina veterans were allowed to resettle in the West, around 2,000 of them in Canada. By then, the unit was universally known as the First Ukrainian Division.

A blog by an association of its veterans, called “Combatant News” in Ukrainian, includes an autobiographical entry by a Yaroslav Hunka that says he volunteered to join the division in 1943 and several photographs of him during the war. The captions say the pictures show Hunka during SS artillery training in Munich in December 1943 and in Neuhammer (now Świętoszów), Poland, the site of Himmler’s visit.

In posts to the blog dated 2011 and 2010, Hunka describes 1941 to 1943 as the happiest years of his life and compares the veterans of his unit, who were scattered across the world, to Jews.
Forward.com

I apologise for butting into yet another country instance I am not part of, but no, I'm not letting nazi apologism stand.

He served in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, a voluntary unit made up mostly of ethnic Ukrainians under Nazi command.

The division was formed in 1943. Not even all Ukrainians were allowed in it because only the Galicians were 'Aryan-like' enough.

It was formed after all the ghettos inside Lviv, Galicia's main city, and Ternipol, in this old man's home oblast, were built and had been running for years. It was formed after Jews, who were 44% of Ternipol's population, were dragged from their homes to be publicly shamed, beaten and evicted in the pogroms. It was formed after the Final Solution began. It was formed after mass deportations, slave labour, after the ill, elderly or orphaned were shot in the streets of the place he lived. It was formed after the mass graves of all those victims and more were exhumed and their bodies burned in open-air pits.

This man had functional eyes and ears at the very least, because the Nazis did not like people with disabilities, and he knew what he was signing up for because he was living in the middle of it. Every major town surrounding his birthplace had ghettos and were already sending people by train to the death camps. He didn't choose a charitable hypothetical peaceful Ukrainian autonomy, he and 53,000 other people volunteered to fight for the new unit of an army who were very publicly killing and torturing the majority of the people around him.

And, this wasn't about a Ukrainian group allied to the Nazis to achieve long-term independence for Ukrainians. They were voluntary Nazis under direct Nazi control fighting for greater Nazi control in countries outside of Ukraine. This man could have changed allegiance at any point if he had been naive and somehow swindled into committing atrocities for Nazis instead of Ukrainian Independence. Atrocities like the Huta Pieniacka massacre where his division committed 500 murders of civilians by grenading the town. Where, assuming he was with his unit at the time and not in hospital, he murdered civilians too.

He joined at 18, by choice.

According to Hunka, his reason for enlisting was following the call of the Ukrainian Central Committee to fight for the idea of "Unified Ukraine". - his wiki page

If it was about Ukrainian independence, why were they fighting the Yugoslav Partisans and Slovak Partisans in their countries? People who were actually fighting for independence instead of doing it via Nazis.

Do not give Nazis the benefit of the doubt or the ability to hide behind hypothetical post-rationalised stories. This is how Naziism becomes permitted.

Some of us hand-drew maps and wrote all that stuff down because the official hint books and magazines were all from another continent! And we liked it like that...

Or, at least, it was the norm and we had no other choice but to accept games were hard 😅

Games were much harder when they only had a few kilobytes of space, the processing power of a cash register and you couldn't just casually search for a video walkthrough to tell you why you were terrible.

This isn't Tom the small business accountant from rural Ohio commenting on Germany's immigration policy on a facebook post. It's someone who controls more money than the GDP of multiple entire countries, and who has already shown an interest in using his companies to influence geo-politics based on his opinions in the moment.

If anything, you should be concerned that a single individual can make choices about global politics without discussion or legal safety guards - which has historically caused some issues in the place that the AfD comes from.

I hope that if he steps foot in any country that experienced the horrors of Nazism, that the locals take to the streets to forcefully eject him from the country. He should be denied entry by the EU entirely.

Edit: I also hopes Germany does something about the AfD, who don't appear to be congruous with Nazi anti-glorification laws.

PET is also probably the most already-recycled and recyclable plastic we use. While it is objectively a good thing we now have a new way to recycle something, it's not going to have the huge impact that the phrase "change the world" implies.

News headlines over-representing scientific advancement as a way of boosting morale sets people up for disappointment and complacency.

There are very different types of plastics in this world that each have their own formulas, dangers, benefits and recyclability. One things you can do for both the world and your health is to learn some of the high-level differences.

This is the most globally-accurate guide i have found for plastic identification and recyclability info

Tl;dr image summary of above content. We only really recycle plastics marked 1 PET, 2 HDPE, 4 LDPE and 5 PP at the moment

If you can find a way to reduce use of 3 PVC, 6 PS and 7 Other / unmarked plastics in your lives, please do so.

Tangent: only 2 and 5 should be used for food/medical if you are also heating it, especially acidic things. If you are in a situation where you can't avoid that, low heat, less time and you will minimise or likely entirely avoid problems.