Don’t give up a stronger position for a weaker one in hopes of avoiding a conflict. You’ve only undermined yourself when the conflict happens anyway.

I’m an apartment building superintendent. I once confronted a late night trespasser: a junkie looking for a place to shoot up or snort or whatever his thing was. I demanded that he leave, but realized that I was physically blocking the only exit. He was cornered. So I moved out of the way and suddenly I was the one who was cornered. It all worked out in the end, but for a minute there I was facing a large, angry, paranoid junkie with a knife and no way to escape.

I don’t know what would have happened if I didn’t move to give him an exit, but I know that in doing so I gave up my own exit, and that was dumb.

I’ve had customers like this. Usually they just write their name in block letters. There’s no rule that says a signature has to be written in cursive so it still works.

Where is GoldenEye?

Information superhighway

E099: PROGRAMMER IS OVERLY POLITE

Obligatory:

You don’t go out looking for a job dressed like that? On a weekday?

My Yahoo email address is 27 years old.

Start saving for old age now. It might seem like a long way off, and you might not have much money right now to begin with, but being young and poor is way better than being old and poor.

I sold gmail invitations on ebay.

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Realistically, that would get annoying pretty fast and I’d soon learn to hate any song I chose. So I’d pick 4′33″, which is four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

But otherwise I’d pick “One Bad Tank”, from the video game Left4Dead2. It’s the song that plays when the boss enemy enters a particular map.

Man it sure is crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.

It’s pretty much as clean going into the pipe as it is coming out. Water pipes are kept pressurized so that any cracks or breaks push water out instead of letting contaminants in.

My mom’s early 90’s minivan. I think it was a Voyager.

“Privacy” in the modern sense is less about protecting you from personal embarrassment or financial loss, and more about protecting society from the dangers of mass data collection.

Historical examples of mass datasets that were misused:

• The Nazis used demographic records (birth, death, marriage records, etc.) to identify Jews and other undesirables in conquered countries.
• Japanese Americans were identified for internment in part through illegal use of census information.
• The Rwanda genocide was facilitated by tribal information being printed on drivers licenses.

In none of these examples were the data collected for the evil purposes it was eventually used for. In some cases, the evil purposes were completely forbidden by the rules governing the data, but they were used anyway.

Information is a form of knowledge. Knowledge is power. And power in the wrong hands is dangerous.

When in doubt, shut up.

The problem is that an AI built to maximize paperclips might conclude that converting the planet to paperclips is an acceptable cost of maximizing paperclip production. It might understand why humans think it’s bad to convert the planet, but disagree. It would need to be explicitly programmed to prioritize human life over paperclips.

otherwise we would just switch it off

If it were super-intelligent, it could probably trick us into leaving it turned on.