They didnt just leave a gun lying around, and they’re not suing the gun company. To get a gun you have to go to a store that sells deadly weapons and give your money to someone who will tell you that it’s a deadly weapon that will kill people. A gun that kills someone is doing exactly what you bought it for.

The parents in this case left an electronic stuffed animal lying around, which they had been given by someone who almost certainly didn’t say “be careful, this toy may convince your child to kill themselves.”. So they are suing the manufacturer, the same way they would sue a drug maker whose medicine made their kid suicidal or they would sue a therapist who told their kid to commit suicide.

“Oh, you’re just a bad parent” may be an accusation of contributory negligence, but it’s not an assertion that should keep a third party from having to answer for their actions.

Graceful degredation is a choice, made in the negative by survivors of the dot-com bubbles that fiercely want to extract a level of customer loyalty that mere “actual companies” could never dream of.

Business software is a weird world. Made weirder than there absolutely are people paid by Intuit (not OP) whose job is to convince people who don’t currently pay for QuickBooks that paying for QuickBooks will solve whatever quickbooks-esque problem they have.

It’s worse in the IT side. I’m modestly sure that COBOL and Java are only still around because of IBM and Oracle sales staff.

(Maybe less so for Java than COBOL. Or maybe Oracle’s sales team is just better.)

Starts reading.

“Hmm, I wonder where the presumption that pre-colonial values were entirely different than colonial ones comes from.”

Get to the part about all the speakers at the conference being white

“Oh, there it is.”

Racists and regressives do come in every color, but looking like the khlam or a meeting or the “my great grandpappy helped conquer Africa for Europe” club is something else altogether.

Honestly, at this point I’d settle for just “AI cannot be bundled with anything else.”

Neither my cell phone nor TV nor thermostat should ever have a built-in LLM “feature” that sends data to an unknown black box on somebody else’s server.

(I’m all down for killing with fire and debt any model built on stolen inputs,.too. OpenAI should be put in a hole so deep that they’re neighbors with Napster.)

Clear reporting should include not just the incremental environmental cost of each query, but also a statement of the invested cost in the underlying training.

I think this is the case that found “profound agreement” over the actual issue that was appealed – if the courts should let some appellate divisions require an additional burden when a white/cis/het/xian/guy says they were the victim of discrimination.

The civil rights laws are supposed to protect them, too.