zimmie

randominternetperson said:

OutdoorAppDeveloper said:

Dear Apple, disable iMessage until you can make it bullet proof. In its current state, it will likely get people killed. Journalists, government critics and politically connected people are all at risk. Even US soldiers and embassy workers could be at risk. Also, sending out a list of replies to journalists and telling them that they cannot quote you in their stories in this life and death subject is not a good look. Please get ahead of this story and do the right thing. Speak plainly. Act swiftly. Your credibility is on the line.

Absurd and hyperbolic.  "Bulletproof" is an impossible standard.  Also, how do you conclude that lives are at risk?  If governments want to silence critics or journalists, they don't need these hacks taking advantage of (temporary) software vulnerabilities.  

It's not an impossible standard. Non-trivial software like a network messenger application can be made in such a way as to have no bugs. It's not easy, and it requires a lot of discipline, but the process for creating bug-free software is relatively well-understood.

That said, yes, rubber-hose-cryptanalysis will always win. Repressive governments have many ways to silence opposition.

rob53 said:

I would hope this would benefit chip production in the US but why Arizona? Cheap land and taxes? TSMC is not an American company and all profits (after taxes) will not stay in the US. Will the citizens of Arizona accept a Taiwanese company or will they boycott them as being non-American? I guess money talks more than anything else but how much is Phoenix paying them to build there? Are they selling out the citizens like Wisconsin did with the failed Foxconn major installation?

As I mentioned last time this was discussed, they're building in Arizona because that's where the skilled workers are. Intel has a bunch of fabs in Chandler, AZ. It's only beaten by Hillsboro, OR.

If you have existing fabs in a region, you can ask a bunch of people who are already employees to move to a new facility, and train new people as you backfill. If you don't already have fabs, you need to go where the workers already are and attract them from a competitor, or spend potentially years training people in your industry before the site can start producing.

Without spoilers, it's entirely unsurprising Lovecraft Country isn't getting a second season. I don't really see how it could have one.

I look forward to seeing the result of this deal. Should be interesting!

rcfa said:

What the PC “wokes” forget, there are many reason for stammering and stuttering, and they include getting caught in a lie, being embarrassed etc. non of which have to do with a speech impediment.
And in many of those cases, that emoji is totally fitting.

As much as nobody should be ridiculed for a speech impediment or some other form of handicap, the world doesn’t revolve around the weak people who think everything is about them.

What’s next? Can’t wear dark sunglasses because blind people might feel mocked by it? 

It’s going to be fun in the future, when AI working on large datasets discovers scientific facts that happen to be not to the liking of “the woke”; will science be forced to bury the truth, lest some group identity gets offended?

If you think AI will be capable of making unbiased decisions within our lifespans, I have a bridge to sell you. AI working on large datasets doesn't discover facts about the world, it discovers facts about the dataset. And if the data was entered by humans, or if humans decided what data to collect, the data isn't really objective anymore.

Some things correlate to race or other legally-protected characteristics more strongly than you might expect. The correlation between ZIP code and race is so strong banks in the US are prohibited from using an applicant's ZIP code in lending decisions. We don't even know all of the correlations which can be used as proxies for race, let alone have a way to correct for them.

Black people got longer prison sentences in the past? An algorithm trained on that data will continue making racist recommendations. For example, criminal sentencing AI was found to overestimate recidivism likelihood for black inmates and to underestimate it for white inmates.

crowley said:

Does stammer mean something else in the US?  I don’t even understand why anyone would think that emoji might be relevant to stammering.

In the US, stammering isn't strictly related to stuttering. It can be the "Uh, well, wait, but what if, no, um, never mind, hmm, although ..." speech pattern some people do while thinking. Or the similar "Uh, um, uh" with word fragments which people do when they're trying to talk and something derailed their train of thought before their mouth got the message to stop. Or the half-formed "What are you ...? Where is ...?" questions someone might ask when surrounded by a whirlwind of activity they know nothing about.

In areas I'm familiar with in the US, it's considered more of a nervous habit, like bouncing your leg or chewing your nails, rather than a problem actually communicating.