nyan

Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.

That just means you have no intuitive sense of how large a litre is. If they'd written it as "2000 quarts" (which is close enough to being the same volume at that level of rounding) would it have painted a clearer picture in your head?

Yes, you can have your own robot attack dog for about the same price as a high-end gaming PC. Some assembly possibly required, and you'll have to write your own attack software based on a manual poorly translated from Chinese (if you're lucky), but what do you expect at that price point? 🤨

They're making their own and selling them for about 2% of the cost of the Boston Dynamics version: This LiDAR-equipped 30-pound robot dog can be yours for $1,600 . How much of the technology was actually developed independently, I have no idea.

I actually have a bit of hope for this one, since they seem to have figured out a way to avoid one of the known problems with these systems. At very least, it's an angle worth exploring.

Part of the issue with raising retirement age, though, is that you can only go so far before the majority of people are unfit to work. Things like osteoarthritis have a much larger effect on your ability to work than they do on your life expectancy. Plus, the burden of continuing to work disproportionately falls on poor people whose work is more physical—well-educated people with desk jobs usually earn more money, have somewhat better savings, and can thus afford to retire a few years before their government pension kicks in.

Exactly. I live in terror of anyone ever seeing the back of my work. 😅

Technically, there's a tendency for them to be trained on datasets that don't include nearly enough dark-skinned people. As a result, they don't learn to make the necessary distinctions. I'd like to think that the selection of datasets for training facial recognition AI has improved since the most egregious cases of that. I'm not willing to bet on it, though.

stores use it and it alone to ban people despite it having a low but well known error rate.

And it is absolutely predictable that some stores would do that, because humans. At very least, companies deploying this technology need to make certain that all the store staff are properly trained on what it does and doesn't mean, including new hires who arrive after the system is put in. Forcing that is going to require that a law be passed.

The real issue is that we seem to be purging all the wrong things.

Useful answer to technical question? Gone five years later.

Unfounded and fraudulent accusation that some teenager in Albuquerque committed a hideous crime? Preserved for the ages. Revenge porn photos? Also preserved, although possibly without the attributions.

Although, really, all of that is human nature too: we conserve what draws the attention of the average mook, not what specialists find useful.

Pleased, but surprised.

eat as much glue as you can

Likely won't make a difference to the gene pool. I looked up a couple of MSDS, and it seems that PVA glue ("white glue"), is safe to ingest. The Elmer's glue "recommended" in the original Reddit post is a form of white glue.

That can bite both ways, though—I mean, not with publicly funded universities so much, but what if you find out the small religious sect you supported is a front for a murderous cult? (Yeah, I know, silly example, but . . .) Is there a point at which you should be able to exert control or claw back the money?