September 2019 – Words from fallingstuff

Don’t Give Give the Kill Bot the Life Begging Routines

I started this post right about the time this story dropped, but somehow it never made it to being posted. As I was going though to clear out drafts of posts that I did not finish (for whatever reason…) I ran across this gem to be shared. As a side note, in all the time since this was posted, there has not been a follow up.

I saw an article the other day discussing an experiment about where participants worked with a robot to perform a list of tasks. Now working with the robot is not so odd, but the twist is that after the tasks were done the participants were asked to turn off the robot. The robot began to ask or beg not to be turned off, and a significant number of the participants would not turn the robot off.

Source: New study finds it’s harder to turn off a robot when it’s begging for its life – The Verge

What if there was a robot that was meant to kill instead of solve puzzles, say a “kill bot”. Now what if that code to “beg for its life” was added to the kill bot and it started a fight with a human. The human could get the advantage on the kill bot and while the human were ready to deliver the ending blow the kill bot begs for its life. If the results of this study were to scale then most humans would feel sympathy and not deliver the blow giving the bot the chance to turn the tables and kill the human instead.

The experiment reminds me a lot of the Milgram experiments in the 1960’s. Sure, bit of a stretch, but what if?

Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry – Los Angeles Times

(Note: This is a re-post of previous content – still good though!)

Eyewear is a near-monopolistic, $100-billion industry dominated by a single company. That’s why 1,000% markups for frames and lenses are commonplace.

Source: Why are glasses so expensive? The eyewear industry prefers to keep that blurry – Los Angeles Times

I have had to wear glasses for the better part of my life, and not just because I sat too close to the TV. I have often wondered why in the hell glasses were so expensive, citing that the cost of the lens to correct severe eye problems were to blame. While, yes, thick corrective lens with automatic sun blocking abilities should probably not be cheap, these lens are produced on an automated machine and should not be nearly as expensive as they are. This piece in the Los Angeles Times puts the problem under a better lens.

The Data Big Tech Companies Have On You (Or, At Least, What They Admit To)

(Note: This is a re-post of previous content – still good though!)

Have you ever asked yourself, “What does Google know about me?” The answer is uncomfortable. What Google knows about you includes everything from your clicks on ads to your birthday to the device … Read more

Source: The Data Big Tech Companies Have On You (Or, At Least, What They Admit To)

Ads for clothing on your wall while scrolling through your social media, or recommendations for laptop retailers in your Gmail after looking at a computer manufacturer are nothing new. Big companies take your information and sell it out to other companies to make money and have been for many years. With the breaches in some major companies last year I started to review just exactly how much data some companies were actually gathering, this chart from Security Baron puts a bit of surprising light on the subject.

Update Show for September 22

Between long work week, and a lack of enthusiasm this weekend (a whole lot of meh), there are not many updates to post this week. Of course the Monday and Friday posts start the site restoring project and I have a few of the previous stories scheduled to come back between this week and next week. There’s some junk that has to be cleaned up as it either no longer has anything useful anymore at least, and I have a couple projects I am working on which is going to be awesome.

Next week I will be out of town for a work exercise, so there will not be Update Show next week (.. likely).

Update Show for September 15

The time appeared for some reset and cleanup, or more like I was looking through some things and found missing links, incomplete setups, and a few other things I was not too happy with. Most of this was due to work and personal life issues. Since the majority of the content was random nonsense and there were gaps in the automations used to share between all the medias I decided to go ahead and do a clean and reset of all the social medias, posts, pages, and a few other bits. For anyone that’s been to the site before, this will look odd, since all the content suddenly disappeared, but fear not most of this will return with a little more context and background (’cause I am not about to let good music and jokes go to waste!)