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Cake day: September 6th, 2024

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  • Full self driving should only be implemented when the system is good enough to completely take over all driving functions. It should only be available in vehicles without steering wheels. The Tesla solution of having “self driving” but relying on the copout of requiring constant user attention and feedback is ridiculous. Only when a system is truly capable of self-driving 100% autonomously, at a level statistically far better than a human, should any kind of self-driving be allowed on the road. Systems like Tesla’s FSD officially require you to always be ready to intervene at a moment’s notice. They know their system isn’t ready for independent use yet, so they require that manual input. But of course this encourages disengaged driving; no one actually pays attention to the road like they should, able to intervene at a moment’s notice. Tesla’s FSD imitates true self-driving, but it pawns off the liability do drivers by requiring them to pay attention at all times. This should be illegal. Beyond merely lane-assistance technology, no self-driving tech should be allowed except in vehicles without steering wheels. If your AI can’t truly perform better than a human, it’s better for humans to be the only ones actively driving the vehicle.

    This also solves the civil liability problem. Tesla’s current system has a dubious liability structure designed to pawn liability off to the driver. But if there isn’t even a steering wheel in the car, then the liability must fall entirely on the vehicle manufacturer. They are after all 100% responsible for the algorithm that controls the vehicle, and you should ultimately have legal liability for the algorithms you create. Is your company not confident enough in its self-driving tech to assume full legal liability for the actions of your vehicles? No? Then your tech isn’t good enough yet. There can be a process for car companies to subcontract out the payment of legal claims against the company. They can hire State Farm or whoever to handle insurance claims against them. But ultimately, legal liability will fall on the company.

    This also avoids criminal liability. If you only allow full self-driving in vehicles without steering wheels, there is zero doubt about who is control of the car. There isn’t a driver anymore, only passengers. Even if you’re a person sitting in the seat that would normally be a driver’s seat, it doesn’t matter. You are just a passenger legally. You can be as tired, distracted, drunk, or high as you like, you’re not getting any criminal liability for driving the vehicle. There is such a clear bright line - there is literally no steering wheel - that it is absolutely undeniable that you have zero control over the vehicle.

    This actually would work under the same theory of existing drunk-driving law. People can get ticketed for drunk driving for sleeping in their cars. Even if the cops never see you driving, you can get charged for drunk driving if they find you in a position where you could drunk drive. So if you have your keys on you while sleeping drunk in a parked car, you can get charged with DD. But not having a steering wheel at all would be the equivalent of not having the keys to a vehicle - you are literally incapable of operating it. And if you are not capable of operating it, you cannot be criminally liable for any crime relating to its operation.









  • I think we should indict Sam Altman on two sets of charges:

    1. A set of securities fraud charges.

    2. 8 billion counts of criminal reckless endangerment.

    He’s out on podcasts constantly saying the OpenAI is near superintelligent AGI and that there’s a good chance that they won’t be able to control it, and that human survival is at risk. How is gambling with human extinction not a massive act of planetary-scale criminal reckless endangerment?

    So either he is putting the entire planet at risk, or he is lying through his teeth about how far along OpenAI is. If he’s telling the truth, he’s endangering us all. If he’s lying, then he’s committing securities fraud in an attempt to defraud shareholders. Either way, he should be in prison. I say we indict him for both simultaneously and let the courts sort it out.


  • To me, it’s not even just about what it looks like. It’s what it represents. One cyber truck, if were unique, could be a legitimately cool work of art. But as a mass-market vehicle it’s just ridiculous.

    Like, if there was only one cyber truck, and it was something a local gearhead had welded up in his garage, I would legitimately respect it as a cool and unique work of artistic expression. It would show that they have creativity and are willing to make a bold statement to the world.

    But if you just buy one of thousands of cyber trucks that exist in the world? That no longer represents your original creative expression. That just represents having bad taste and having poor personal finance skills.

    Building your own art car is cool. If Ford decides to start making them by the millions, then that would just be sad.






  • It’s about rich donors. There are a small number of influential and wealthy Jewish donors that give a lot of money to universities. There are a far larger number of wealthy religious conservative donors who are more interested in the advancement of Israel for their apocalypse beliefs. Some are just old wealthy donors who grew up in an era when Israel was much more of an underdog than a brutal colonial occupier (or at least could more easily be portrayed as such.)

    High-level admins like university presidents spend most of their time hobnobbing with wealthy donors and potential donors. Their primary job IS to secure donations. That’s what they spend the vast majority of their time thinking about and prioritizing. And those donors are perfectly willing to cut off those dollars if they see things happening on a campus they don’t like.

    Universities have let private donors gain way too much power over them. Academic freedom has been severely degraded by their over-reliance on wealthy benefactors. That is unfortunately just the sad state of modern academia.


  • This should serve as a lesson to women everywhere that to conservatives, the definition of “trans” is flexible, and that someone is a “woman” only as far as it is politically useful to conservatives.

    Look at the attack on the two Olympic athletes this summer. They were cisgender women, but they didn’t meet western white beauty standards, and the right needed to find some “trans” athletes to attack, so they labeled cis women trans and demonized them. They still reference them in speeches.

    Or these girls in this ad. Just some random cis girl athletes, but it was politically useful to label them trans, so they did.

    As the culture war moves ever-more extreme, the definition of “trans” can always be expanded. Remember, 90% of cisgender women are crossdressers according to the traditional definition of the word. 90% of cisgender women regularly wear clothes that would literally have gotten them arrested in many parts of the US only half a century or so ago. It was literally illegal for women to wear pants in many areas. And as the push to confine women to ever-stricter gender roles marches on, any woman that doesn’t meet this ever-narrowing standard of beauty can be labeled “trans” and have their rights stripped away.

    Are you a woman athlete who looks a bit ‘masculine’ from years of participating in a contact sport like boxing? You’re “trans” and deserve to have your civil rights taken away.

    Are you a woman who works in a traditionally male career field? You’re “trans” and deserve to have your rights taken away.

    Do you wear anything other than dresses, skirts, and other traditionally female clothing? You’re “trans” and deserve to have your rights taken away.

    Do you want to have any independence at all, have your own bank account, and have any role in life other than daughter, wife, and mother? You’re “trans” and deserve to have your rights taken away.

    The attack on trans people is a perfect wedge for the right. There is no hard definition for the word “trans,” and it can conveniently be defined ever-wider to confine women to ever-narrower ranges of acceptable behavior. When you hear hard right reactionaries talking about declaring being trans illegal or waxing about putting trans people in mental institutions, remember that it wasn’t that long ago that cis women that showed any degree of independence were also institutionalized and lobotomized.

    In the minds of many hard-right conservatives, 90% of women today are acting in ways that are fundamentally in contradiction to the role of their sex. In their eyes, most women are transgender. And while the narrow edge of the wedge is targeting people who actively seek out overt gender transition, that isn’t the real end game.


  • The current Republican party is just a party that has been taken over by the monster they curated for decades. The party of Reagan and the Bushes was mostly run by business interests. But to have a chance of winning, they pandered heavily to the religious zealots and the conspiracy nuts. For decades, the businessmen told the crazies that various nebulous evil forces were out to take everything they loved away from them. They used racial resentment, anti-LGBT bigotry, hatred of immigrants, etc. to pander to the crazies. The businessmen promised the crazies that they would punish the evildoers and keep the crazies safe. Well, eventually, the crazies came to realize that the businessmen never really seemed to live up to their promises. They never engaged in the mass brutal expulsion of those filthy immigrants. They never criminalized the queers and locked them in jail. They never actually banned abortion. The businessmen cultured, encouraged, and fed the insanity of the crazies, but they only ever wanted to just string them along. Doing all of the things the crazies wanted was bad for business after all.

    Well, eventually the crazies got tired of waiting, and they took over the party. That is what Trumpism is. It’s the monster the Republican leaders have been feeding for decades finally breaking loose and taking over the whole party. For decades, Republican leaders have been running on the same kind of hatred that fascist parties use, but without any intention of actually going full fascist themselves. But if you stoke up enough fascist hatred, if you make that kind of bile acceptable in the body politic…Eventually an actual fascist will come along to give the crazies what they want.

    Like it or not, the Republican party of today IS the party of the past few decades. It is simply the party actually embracing its core message and carrying it to its logical conclusions.