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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

    I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

    This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.


  • Of course that’s a possibility, but AI does not have responsibility. The question is who does?

    Do I blame a train for hitting someone who steps onto railroad tracks when there’s a train approaching? It’s a machine. It doesn’t have responsibilities or opinions or agency. It does what it has been built to do, in exactly the manner that anyone with sufficient understanding of its operating principles could tell you, because that’s what machines do. The person or persons interacting with the machine is not absolved of any responsibility by how complex or inscrutable the machine is. It’s still a machine.

    The question is, who is responsible for the person stepping onto the railroad tracks when there was a train approaching? Was the person trying to end their own life? Maybe it’s their responsibility. Or maybe the crossing signals failed and told them it was safe, and they did not realize a train was approaching. Maybe there were too many trees or signs or construction that was blocking their view. Is the train company responsible for that? Maybe. Did the brakes fail due to poor inspections or substandard work during the last maintenance? Maybe. Did the train have plenty of time to stop and the engineer was not paying attention? Maybe. These are all people, and groups of people, who may have responsibility. The only thing that’s certain is: The train doesn’t.

    We, as a society, need to decide who is responsible for the possibility of a horrific consequence arising from the use of these sort of machines. Is it the person using the machine? The people who made the machine in the first place? The people who put it in a place where this person could easily use it? By assigning responsibility, ideally in advance of any horrific consequences, that provides a clear incentive for the people we deem responsible to actually start acting responsible and take the appropriate measures to avoid such horrific consequences that they might be held responsible for.



  • I mean, it depends what you’re willing to call “research”.

    The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.

    I’m not sure I would put this on the same level as a controlled, reproducible double-blind peer-reviewed study by Harvard and MIT published in a prestigious journal, but I’m sure it’s really close. /s

    Edit: Ok, so people argue she’s at least a little legitimate, but why the fuck can’t we use actual scientific institutions anymore? We have a scientific method for a reason. Where’s the peer review? Where’s the people reproducing her results?