Looks like a few companies have made “AI” condoms for marketing, usually leaning heavily on how everything is a bit too … On point? … Into it? Absolutely fucked with AI?

While trying to find the one this one came from I found one that was basically “we put AI in the condom, so just get an erection, put it on, take out your phone, open the app, sign in, scan the QR code on your penis, complete registration and sync, finish software updates, re-pair the condom, configure session preferences, and now you’re ready for AI enhanced intercourse with features such as helpful mid coitus tips, aggressive affirmation that you’re doing great, and constant requests for feedback”.

Ironically, condoms have actually been AI optimized for decades. The laser scanning defect detection system everyone uses is built on a type of AI that’s got next to nothing in common with the current frenzy and more to do with “statistics”.

My actual feeling is that those who would celebrate a public execution would see someone getting shot to death and think the ordeal should have been much more spectacular.

Years ago I was an EMT student in the ER when someone came in with a nasty case of multiple gunshot wounds to the hands, arms, legs, chest and abdomen (shot in chest through hands in defensive posture, then shot repeatedly while on the ground including in the abdomen via thighs as they curled into a ball).
There’s no explosion of gore or dramatic Hollywood effect. The people watching the execution will just see something similar to getting poked by a giant needle and then going limp.

They won’t celebrate because they’ll be disappointed there wasn’t more.

You have too much faith in people. A lot will find the barbarousness underwhelming.

It’s the frustrating thing with adding safety features to almost anything.

You add a thing to make something safer under normal conditions by catching the edge cases and mistakes.
People treat a safety feature as a quality of life feature and stop paying as much attention.
Nothing changes unless your change is non-obvious (my car will increase how much brake a certain depression of the pedal implies based on how imminent it thinks an impact is. If it thinks you need to brake, and you confirm that by hitting the brakes, it’ll say “cool, lemme just adjust the force per the radar then”), or the lazy approach is just legitimately safer (backing up a car while staring at a backup camera is still safer than only looking at the rearview mirror. Both are wrong, but the easier wrong is still safer).

Ultimately, people will use as much effort as they feel is justified for a safety budget. If you make it harder and safer people won’t use it, and if the easier outpaces the safety they won’t keep doing both since it’s not safety driving the choice.

With power tools adding safety features makes people a little more cavalier, but it’s their safety vs their convenience.
With a car, it’s my convenience versus your “bone integrity”, which is why it so often results in people acting extra shitty.

Crocodile Dundee

It’s suddenly a movie about a weirdly elitist Australian talking down to a bunch of Australian expats.

That’s actually a more shitty cable. The USB spec gives a maximum cable length based on when wire length will start to pick up more interference and impact data rates.
Basically this is a curly cable that can’t be as long as it otherwise would, and if you try it’s going to actively try to pull itself out of the device because it’s a spring.

There is a weight associated with the electrons needed to convey information, but it’s negligible.

Beyond that though, we’re not actually so interested in moving the electrons, but in toggling the electric field. Most of the electrons in the wire stay in the wire, and any that leave are balanced by another coming in on the other end. Electrons can move between the atoms, but if your cable is actually changing the number then something has gone wrong, since laptops don’t typically ionize copper.

It’s a pretty straightforward calculation, since amperage is the number of electrons per second, and the cables has a well documented signaling rate.
It works out to a bit weighing about 2x10^-22 grams for a USB cable.

Yup, it’s why a big part became “bury it so deep that anyone capable of digging to it will have the concept of nuclear danger, and know we did too”.
They’re also essentially building a Rosetta stone that can hopefully bridge the gap in understanding.

It once happened with an entire building. And not the way that it sounds.

Turns out if you make a building a giant parabolic reflector, it’ll reflect sunlight and gently melt a few cars.

The issue they were dealing with was that the material would be hazardous longer than almost any known language has been spoken. We could bury the waste, civilization collapses, and then rebuilds and it would still be hazardous.

So how do you convey the danger in a way that will stick?
The messages as written are more the point to convey, rather than literal words.
The pyramids had big warnings of bad things if you break in, but combined with the decoration we were convinced something special was there.
So how do we structurally convey "this is not a place of honor”?
They had notions like covering the site with trash and so on. You don’t bury a king with discarded animal bones, and you don’t pile trash on something you want to honor.

I think they ultimately decided that the best path was to largely leave it unmarked, but case it in enough hardened concrete that anyone in the future would realize we weren’t totally unsophisticated, and at that layer start putting more directed messages referencing chemical elements.

Some of their diagrams were pretty good though.

If you stand on a ledge, it could fall. If you fall, you die. Don’t stand on the ledge.
Digging here is like standing on a ledge.

I was also really taken with the notion of genetically engineering cats to glow near radiation, and spreading the belief that glowing cats are dangerous.

Imagine you have some friends. You like them. No one else knows them. You’ve got an uncle you love because you’ve known him since childhood and he’s sweet but he laughs really loud and you know most people don’t appreciate him. You got any number of other people who you want to be at your wedding but you know that you can’t put them next to ___ because it’ll just be this whole thing.

So what do you do? You put them where they fit!

It’s not about inviting people you don’t like, or marginalizing people you do. It’s about putting people who don’t mind eating dinner together near each other.
It’s not like the table is labeled, it’s just that you can tell which one caught the “didn’t fits”. Sometimes it’s as simple as “every table has someone, their partner, and their cousin/sibling/relative, and one table has the three single cousins who have 3 siblings, and a few random friends”.

So I actually think that the government officials did about as well as they could here.
They let the person make their statement, and then someone not in the government interrupted to say they had to “undo the curse”. Official said that wasn’t in the agenda, and then the mayor said they would just pause for 30 seconds to reflect before moving on to keep things from getting off the rails.

Galloway spent the moment of silence with her head up and her arms crossed. An hour later, she spoke up. “Opening with an invocation means allowing viewpoints that may not reflect our own and responding to someone’s invocation is a slippery slope to putting a financial liability on the taxpayers and allowing others to object or respond. This is exactly why I had concerns about having an invocation when we first talked about it.”

Oh, you’re totally correct. Just, as the other commenter immediately demonstrated: people love to latch on to any discrepancy or possible inconsistency.

You’re not wrong. It’s further than that though, because there are accidental head-hammerings (if we want to get all OSHA I suppose we’d say there are head hammerings from systemic negligence, but thats the same on an individual level), but you just don’t have an accidental rape.

The point continues to be missed: why is it unsafe?

No one disputes that that situation is unsafe. People are saying that it’s unsafe because of rapists. Pointing out that you shouldn’t do unsafe things is asinine when the point being made is that people shouldn’t act in a fashion that makes them a danger to others.

Ignoring that the hazard is due to the choices of live humans with agency and entirely placing the agency on the victim is the crux of the problem.

Flip it around: you shouldn’t be inebriated in a situation where there are hundreds of people you can hurt.

The victim has no control over where the hazard goes. The rapist chooses where it’s dangerous for the victim to be. Big party? Dangerous if there’s a rapist there. Intimate gathering of friends? Dangerous if one of them is a rapist.

Rapists are not lightning. They don’t randomly strike in hazardous situations beyond anyone’s control where the best advice is “don’t stand under a big tree or you might get raped by lightning”.
They’re humans committing a crime against another person.

Alright, but I didn’t say not to uncritically follow rules. I said I follow rules unless I have a reason not to.
From what you said it sounds like you have a reason.

I was also pretty clearly talking about rules of greater consequence than table manners or conversational etiquette. I don’t typically put things like traffic law in the same category of table etiquette.

It’s a pretty big stretch to go from “I don’t put my feet on the table at dinner” to “the rules required me to do bad things and I did it because those are the rules”.

Finally, there’s a reason for most rules of etiquette and manners, you just don’t know what they are or care. That’s fine in the end, I don’t typically follow all rules of etiquette either because I’m lazy. If someone invites me to their fancy dinner though then I’ll put a napkin on my lap, keep my elbows off the table and eat with the right fork at the right time. Not because it’s the rules but because I want the persons fancy dinner to be as nice as they hoped. I’ll follow a rule of etiquette because I care about someone else.

But I never said or implied that anyone should follow rules without thinking.

It’s hammered into a lot of people’s heads that the word is very mean, and not just “insult” but “remember, people like you used to be considered animals and treated like property, subject to difficult to fathom attrocities”.
It doesn’t need to be directed to be a reminder. While reference is likewise a reminder, it’s at least couched in terms that convey the speaker understands it has weight beyond “insult”.
Couple that with saying it as a white person can carry significant reputation damage.

Since these lessons are usually imparted in childhood implicitly, and it doesn’t come up often enough to drive introspection for most people, it just lingers as “don’t say words that hurt people and make everyone dislike you”.

I generally follow the rules unless I have a reason not to. The rationale is that just because I don’t see the reason for the rule doesn’t mean there isn’t one. If everyone ignored every rule they didn’t understand the need for the world would be even more of a shit show.
So I stop at the stop sign when no one is around. I know I would only do it when it was safe, but so does everyone who got hit by a car running a stop sign at a blind corner in the middle of the night.

I’m definitely asking about it if it’s the least bit inconvenient though.

Eh, “did you ask to download something” is about the line where I would draw acceptability. You cannot use a website without them knowing if you made a download request for the content so I’m not bothered by them paying attention to the data to see what I downloaded.
It’s when you start sharing the data with others, or using that data from others, or adding things to collect information and send it back that I mind.

If someone did everything on the up and up, they would see my browser request, information that says what it can do that the browser opts to send, and a cookie that identifies the browsing session.
I’m fine with that because I can clear it or change it at will, and without sharing anything the capability information is less useful than the session cookie.

Entirely depends on the group. I’ve been in meetings with developers where we agreed it was creepy and pushed back. I’ve also been in meetings with marketing where they said it was normal, and meetings with others who said it was the cost the user paid to use our website. Ignoring of course that we sold stuff on the website, and that part of it was a management system that the users actually paid us money to use.

They stopped giving me those projects, which was a win for me but arguably a loss for the users.

I did though for a bit convince people that it was worthwhile to fix the accept/reject not working right, but that it wasn’t a top priority to fix the reject button disabling tracking for all users of the site for the duration of the cookie. (Cookie stored “be creepy” flag. When the user clicked the button it stored a flag in the session so we could statistics, and then read the flag to set the cookie. Someone used the wrong session value and stuck it in the global store used to cache sitewide data, so when it went to see if they opted out it would see if anyone had in the last month. They fixed it after the data was all fucky for a few months and they realized my argument of “who would opt out? It’s just the way the Internet works” was extremely wrong and no one will ever complain about being opted out of tracking)