This pleases me

Mayor of New York isn’t the end goal

No.

But…

The adage that “the dose makes the poison” is working in your favor here. A large city supply delivers millions of liters of water per day; by the time you dilute your poison into millions of liters of water you’ll either be adding absurd amounts of poison (someone is going to notice massive line of tanker trucks queued up outside the treatment plant), or you are dealing with large - but not unweildly - volumes of something so horrendously toxic that it’s still deadly when diluted that much. There are very few substances that toxic, and someone is going to notice if you start procuring hundreds of liters of botulism toxin or Vx because at that point you are dealing with outlawed chemical warfare agents

Initially I thought “burner kids” ment actual children who were failing school and OP was a teacher

You can’t use logic to talk someone out of a position they didn’t use logic to get into in the first place

https://youtu.be/qw8sTxK6j2I

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by the internet being held together by chewing gum, string, and an informal agreement that the few thousand people who keep the whole mess running won’t all go to the pub at the same time

This only works with rational actors

Maybe don’t engage in a war of escalation with unstable people

Your presence on an illegal, sedicious, and - worst of all - unsanctioned messaging server has been noted, citizen; have a treason star. In addition, it has been noted that you failed to file form TA-616/17B (Official Notice of Intent to Engage in Sedicious Activity) with your local IntSec office before engaging in the aforementioned activity - you are fined 50 XP Points.

Moxy and chutzpah are stats in Paranoia

People keep imagining AGI like its going to be benevolent skynet, when it’s probably going to be more like the Tyrell corporation from Blade Runner

If ECan are looking at shorter term fixes, perhaps dumping some of the billions of dollars this would cost into having a commuter bus service from Rolleston that runs more than once a day

The license change literally just prevents you from stripping their branding if you have more than 50 users a month - this is more permissive than the MPL that Firefox is licensed under

Cuddle puddle!

It does, but it’s super dangerous to do unless you have it wired up properly. Proper installations will use a special connector so you can’t plug anything else into that receptical, and will have it interlocked against the main breaker - you can’t plug anything in without disconnecting from the grid. The dangers of doing it amateur-hour are:

• You now have a cable that you can unplug and have live ends exposed - which if you don’t realize is connected to an active generator is super dangerous, and even if you do one slip and you are now the ground conductor
• If you connect the generator while still connected to the grid, your generator is almost certainly going to be out of phase. This will probably cause damage to your generator and anything else plugged in at the time
• If you don’t have an interlock and run the generator while connected to the grid (say during a power outage) you will be back-feeding power into the grid. This is super dangerous for anyone coming to fix the outage, as things that they’ve isolated to fix can still end up being live

Note that this interlock is also required if you have solar - although it’s usually in the form of an automatic breaker that will disconnect and put the circuit into “island mode” if it detects a loss of grid supply

Not quite an idiom, but one of the senior managers at work keeps talking about Moore’s Law in the context of AI stuff like it’s some kind of fundamental law of the universe that any given technology will double in capability every 2 years

1. Moore observed that transistor density in microprocessors had historically been doubling every 18 months, and this trend more or less continued for a decade or so after he noted it
2. Density has nothing to do with the capability of technology that uses those microprocessors. The performance of the chips roughly doubled every couple of years, but there was a lot more going on with that than just transistor density
3. Moore’s law hasn’t held for at least the last decade

I don’t know about strictly racist, but it’s definitely got colonial overtones. Europe has used “they are uncivilized” as an excuse for the way they brutalized their colonies, erased cultures and enslaved people for centuries

Totally - “scary” as in “this is going to cause so many issues and get people into real trouble” more than “man people are stupid”

My company paid for some people to go to one of these “accelerate your company with AI” seminars - the recommendation that the “AI Expert” gave was to ask the LLM to include a percentage of how confident it was in its answers. I’m technical enough to understand that that isn’t how LLMs work, but it was pretty scary how people thought that was a reasonable, sensible idea.