Notices by aspragg (aspragg@ohai.social)

@d2718 @pluralistic Heh, the section that struck me right between the eyes hardest was the very next paragraph:

> The techbro's overwhelming conceit is that nothing is a crime, so long as you do it with an app. Just as fintech is designed to be a bank that's exempt from banking regulations, the gig economy is meant to be a workplace that's exempt from labor law.

@cstross Maybe, but hard to say without knowing the GE universe first.

(I am right in that GE is the first in a series, yes? I tried searching for info about it, but got endless pages of bookshops wanting to sell me a copy, or review sites wanting to tell/ask me how good it is. I tried clicking on a couple to see if anything useful was on the page, but they all came with full-page pop-overs asking blah blah blah... Argh, 2020s internets is the absolute worst!)

@cstross Presumably, you'd also design it to *only* target your enemies. Or, at least make it not target your allies.

The only kind of mad science supervillain who would create and release a bioweapon that inflicts brain damage in the least-obvious-to-its-victims way possible, to everyone *including themselves*, would have to be a complete and utter bonehead, or while experimenting in their lab have suffered some kind of brain damage that they weren't really awa.... oohhhhhhh!

@evan @nasamuffin Apologies for being "that guy", but technically it's not a tree because of the merge commits :-)

@dawngreeter @aral The status quo is never "political". Change is political.

@kangaroo5383 See also "empiricism-washing"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/

> This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls "empiricism washing": take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you're just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because "math can't be racist."