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JoBo

@ JoBo @feddit.uk

Posts
4
Comments
199
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • [BBC News] Claims that smart motorways tech leaves drivers at risk

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  • National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles - but that means one in 10 are not spotted.

    At least 79 people have been killed on smart motorways since they were introduced in 2010. In the past five years, seven coroners have called for them to be made safer.

    National Highways' latest figures suggest that if you break down on a smart motorway without a hard shoulder you are three times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than on one with a hard shoulder.

    No brainer. But then they quote this prick without directly challenging the contradiction:

    The agency's operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to "close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show".

    The 'gap' seems to be a result of drivers having a much more accurate perception than the people paid to defend them.

    National Highways says reinstating the hard shoulder would increase congestion and that there are well-rehearsed contingency plans to deal with power outages.

    Just add more lanes. That'll work. It's never worked but obviously it'll work. Fuckwits.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • I think you overestimate the amount of 'thought' going on here. (ref}

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • The way he plays with the meaning of words

    She (or, if you're not sure, they).

    any kind of bureaucratic or rule-based decision-making

    Human-written rules are often flawed, and for similar reasons (the sole human thought process that 'AI' is very good at reproducing is system justification). But human-written rules can be written down and they can be interrogated. But Apple landed itself in court because it had no clue how its credit algorithm worked and could not conceive how it could possibly be sexist if the machine didn't get any gender data to analyse.

    Perhaps that is the point.

    That is, indeed, the point.

  • Gun supervisor for 'Rust' movie to be sentenced for fatal shooting by Alec Baldwin on set

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  • She was crap at her job but she was also too inexperienced for it and employed to do it by cost-cutting producers who took so many shortcuts on set safety, half the crew walked out before this happened.

    More powerful heads need to roll.

  • Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN

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  • What high profile court case?

  • Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN

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  • Oh, please! Streisand the fuck out of it. Plenty of people have done what he did without ever being forced to acknowledge it was rape. Keep this story going for the sake of everyone, everywhere.

  • Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN

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  • This is an easy statement to make but context matters. In this case, he was not named by the media but had they not covered the story, he would never have been charged because it suited the political establishment to do nothing at all.

    Higgins alleged she was raped by a colleague in an exclusive 2021 television interview with the Network Ten’s “The Project” program, which also raised questions about the official response by ministers and political staffers in the aftermath of the alleged assault.

    After the interview aired, Lehrmann was charged with sexual intercourse without consent, but the trial was abandoned in 2022 due to juror misconduct and not revived due to fears about Higgins’ mental health.

  • Accused rapist who tried to clear his name loses blockbuster defamation trial against TV network | CNN

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  • The legal system didn't deal with it, as per fucking usual. He decided that he would use that fact to prove he was innocent, giving the court an opportunity to explain very carefully why he is quite clearly guilty.

    This was a huge political scandal. It's not reasonable to declare that the media should not have reported it.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • It's asking why don't we use it for that purpose, not suggesting that there is anything easy about doing so. I don't know how you think science works, but it's not like that.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • The data cannot be understood. These models are too large for that.

    Apple says it doesn't understand why its credit card gives lower credit limits to women that men even if they have the same (or better) credit scores, because they don't use sex as a datapoint. But it's freaking obvious why, if you have a basic grasp of the social sciences and humanities. Women were not given the legal right to their own bank accounts until the 1970s. After that, banks could be forced to grant them bank accounts but not to extend the same amount of credit. Women earn and spend in ways that are different, on average, to men. So the algorithm does not need to be told that the applicant is a woman, it just identifies them as the sort of person who earns and spends like the class of people with historically lower credit limits.

    Apple's 'sexist' credit card investigated by US regulator

    Garbage in, garbage out. Society has been garbage for marginalised groups since forever and there's no way to take that out of the data. Especially not big data. You can try but you just end up playing whackamole with new sources of bias, many of which cannot be measured well, if at all.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • It's how LLMs work.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • The systems didn’t do anything they weren’t told to do.

    You're thinking of the kinds of algorithms written by human beings. AI is a black box. No one knows how these models obtain their answers.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • Where did you get insurance carriers from?

    No idea what your post, before or after edit, is trying to say. But the subject of your quoted sentence is "proponents of AI" not "AI", and the sentence is about what is enabled by AI systems. Your attempt at pedantry makes no sense.

    If you're suggesting that it is possible to build an AI with none of the biases embedded in the world it learns from, you might want to read that article again because the (obvious) rebuttal is right there.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • Isn’t that a continuation of “why the outlier was culled”?

    Not sure I follow, but I think the answer is "no".

    If you control for all the causes of a difference, the difference will disappear. Which is fine if you're looking for causal factors which are not already known to be causal factors, but no good at all if you're trying to establish whether or not a difference exists.

    It's really quite difficult to ask a coherent question with real-world data from the messy, complicated reality of human beings.

    A simple example:

    Women are more likely to die from complications after a coronary artery bypass.

    But if you include body surface area (a measure of body size) in your model, the difference between men and women disappears.

    And if you go the whole hog and measure vein size, the importance of body size disappears too.

    And, while we can never do an RCT to prove it, it makes perfect sense that smaller veins would increase the risk for a surgery which involves operating on blood vessels.

    None of that means women do not, in fact, have a higher risk of dying after coronary artery bypass surgery. Collect all the data which has ever existed and women will still be more likely to die from the surgery. We have explained the phenomenon and found what is very likely to be the direct cause of higher mortality. Being a woman just makes you more likely to have that risk factor.

    It is rare that the answer is as neat and simple as this. It is very easy to ask a different question from the one you thought you were asking (or pretend to be answering one question when you answered another).

    You can't just throw masses of data into a pot and expect sensible answers to come out. This is the key difference between statisticians and data scientists. And, not to throw shade on data scientists, they often end up explaining to the world that oestrogen makes people more likely to die from complications of coronary artery bypass surgery.

  • On Being an Outlier

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  • That kind of analysis is done all the time. But, even if we can collect all the relevant data (big if), the methods required are difficult to interpret and easy to abuse (we can't do an RCT of being born female vs male, or black vs white, &c). A good example is the proliferation of analyses claiming that the gender pay gap does not exist (after you've 'controlled' for all the things that cause the gender pay gap).

    It's not easy to do 'right' even when done in good faith.

    The article isn't claiming that it is easy, of course. It's asking why power is so keen on one type of question and not its inverse. And that is a very good question, albeit one with a very easy answer. Power is not in the business of abolishing itself.

  • How is the hydrogen made?

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  • That is true of all colours of hydrogen other than green (and possibly natural stores of 'fossil' hydrogen if they can be extracted without leakage).

    Green hydrogen is better thought of as a battery than a fuel. It's a good way to store the excess from renewables and may be the only way to solve problems like air travel.

    How hydrogen is transforming these tiny Scottish islands

    That's not to say it's perfect. Hydrogen in the atmosphere slows down the decomposition of methane so leaks must be kept well below 5% or the climate benefits are lost. We don't have a good way to measure leaks. It's also quite inefficient because a lot of energy is needed to compress it for portable uses.

    And, of course, the biggest problem is that Big Carbon will never stop pushing for dirtier hydrogens to be included in the mix, if green hydrogen paves the way.

  • Saying What Can't Be Said: Israel Has Been Defeated – a Total Defeat

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  • Post office operator wrongly jailed while pregnant rejects executive’s apology | Post Office Horizon scandal | The Guardian

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  • It was known that the software was shitty and buggy before it was foisted on the Post Office, having been rejected by DWP (and the Post Office right up until they were given no choice). It was Blair's decision, he didn't want to upset Fujitsu or discourage investment from Japan.

    Short and long versions of a report into that on the JFSA website.

    Pressure from govt to pretend that it worked, and to make the business profitable for privatisation, caused this inhuman clusterfuck.

  • [BBC Sounds] Helen Lewis has left the chat

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  • She has used her considerable platform to make trans lives worse in many ways, not just with regard to sport.

    Because she is a transphobic piece of shit, you see.