What’s the opposite of eating the onion? When you read something and assume it must be the onion, because it sounds so dumb. Once onion biter, twice shy?

This is basically Ballmasterz 9009, if you like weird adult cartoons (made by the same guy that did Superjail).

The year is 2047. Individually tracked pricing algorithms determine prices for each customer. I am the local water man, who everyone pays a small fee to go buy clean water, because my high volume of purchases means I get a slight discount. In only 34 more years I can pay off my 8th grade education and start thinking about a down payment on a double sleeping pod.

This month, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce it’s replacing the price stickers in its aisles with electronic shelf labels. The new labels allow employees to change prices as often as every ten seconds.

“If it’s hot outside, we can raise the price of water and ice cream. If there’s something that’s close to the expiration date, we can lower the price — that’s the good news,” said Phil Lempert, a grocery industry analyst.

Jesus, I can’t imagine just coming out and saying this like it’s not fucking deranged to charge people more for WATER during a heat wave.

Also, the first time the price of something rises in the 5 minutes it takes for me to get my shopping done and get to the checkout, I’m taking a shit on the floor.

Who could have foreseen that laying off a shit ton of people and working the remaining people into the ground (often under threat of deportation due to visas) would result in costly errors??

-business genius Elon Musk, apparently

So he’s ineligible to run for president as he’s not a natural born citizen, but this made me wonder, are there any laws on who can be VP? What if they’re further down the line of succession, like Speaker of the House or president pro tem. of the Senate? What happens if, through the line of succession, someone who is ineligible to run still becomes president?

The most surprising thing here to me is that someone was buying a 737 Max 3 months ago.

Whaaat, an app created to enforce sexist norms regarding who counts as a woman did just that?? 😲

The man yells “I touched it” to the other people on the boat and then asks “Did you get that?” in an apparent reference to whether his encounter with the orca was successfully filmed. He then tries to touch the animal again. Other people aboard the vessel can be heard laughing and cheering in the background.

Fuck it, fine them too.

What % do you think was used to generate the CSAM, though? Like, if 1% of the images were cups it’s probably drawing on some of that to generate images of cups.

And yes, you could technically do this with no CSAM training material, but we don’t know if that’s what the AI is doing because the image sources used to train it were mass scraped from the internet. They’re using massive amounts of data without filtering it and are unable to say with certainty whether or not there is CSAM in the training material.

Fair but depressing, it seems like it barely registered in the news cycle.

Did we memory hole the whole ‘known CSAM in training data’ thing that happened a while back? When you’re vacuuming up the internet you’re going to wind up with the nasty stuff, too. Even if it’s not a pixel by pixel match of the photo it was trained on, there’s a non-zero chance that what it’s generating is based off actual CSAM. Which is really just laundering CSAM.

A person can control their religion, and that’s illegal to discriminate against. A person can also control whether or not they’re in a union, for example, and retaliation from an employer based on that is illegal. “Is it something that can’t be controlled” isn’t the test for whether or not something is considered illegal discrimination in employment.

Which, also, none of us know why he’s overweight and it’s frankly irrelevant. There could be any number of reasons for it that aren’t controllable or aren’t currently under control, including mental health conditions and hormonal issues. He shouldn’t need to give employers his medical records before they decide whether or not to comply with a request to exclude him and only him based on his appearance.

You have no idea what the long term effects of the rejection are going to be, and neither does the corporation doing this to human beings after killing a bunch of monkeys and still failing.

Bro, just a few more disabled people sacrificed to the machine and I swear we’ll get it right! Move fast, break things! Technology always good!

Everyone like a week and a half ago pitching a fit over me saying that this is an unethical way to treat disabled people can go fuck themselves, lol.

There is no such thing as an implant or surgery with no risk of sepsis or rejection. The risk may be low in young, healthy patients (ie, not people who are quadriplegic because that leads to many other health concerns with surgeries), but it’s never zero.

If you’re cool with risking that, okay, that’s your body. Personally I want to live.

Move mouse and click faster is a big deal when it’s the only way you can interact with the world.

I feel like I’m doing nothing but repeating this: the only way to do that is not with an implant! It’s not implant or nothing!

And it’s just a mouse right now, but what about robotic hands? A thought-controlled wheelchair? A tiny bit of agency? Technology is iterative and built on failure, and you want to tell the people trapped in non-functional bodies that it will never get any better?

Right now it is not those things, and I’m going to need you to step way the fuck back since your starting premise is that I’m not physically disabled and have no loved ones that are or could benefit from safe, effective adaptive technology. Maybe if it was your cousin or sister you’d have a little more concern about just tossing them into a meat grinder because some tech bro thinks “go fast, break things” is a policy that can and should be translated to human health.

I do not and will not accept disabled people being sacrificed in the name of progress. They can’t even do this shit in fucking monkeys, bro. Come on.

It feels ridiculous that I even need to say this, but you don’t do it because the risk:benefit ratio is lopsided as hell.

Risks: die from sepsis, have your body reject the implant, the parent company goes out of business and your implant no longer functions (this has happened with several startups), etc

Benefit: move mouse and click faster

I don’t accept that disabled people must be sacrificed at the altar of Progress, and I think the entire process for how they recruit patients and explain the capabilities and risks of the implant deserves extreme scrutiny. There’s a reason doctors have to get hours of education in ethics to be considered competent, it’s a lot more complicated than “just do whatever if it can technically work for a bit.”

Cool, when you can upload your thoughts somewhere we’ll be having a different conversation about its risks and uses. But what’s happening right now is that they did brain surgery on a man to let him move a computer mouse.