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173079664
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
uary 16, 2024 @09:14AM
(#64244454)
Attached to: Air Canada Found Liable For Chatbot's Bad Advice On Plane Tickets
Whatever legal precedent is attached to a small claims court ruling is so slight as to effectively be non-existent for all practical purposes.
Companies uniformly fight all small claims cases without so much as glancing as the specifics beforehand, because the individual cases aren't worth the corporate time it'd take to come to individual go/no-go decisions on fighting each one, and not fighting small claims at all is more expensive (both in the form of the default judgements and in the form of reputation for not showing up to small claims, which attracts more people trying to make a quick couple hundred) than sending some chair-warmer middle-manager to small claims court for a day at their regular salary.
173077062
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
uary 16, 2024 @12:42AM
(#64243808)
Attached to: Air Canada Found Liable For Chatbot's Bad Advice On Plane Tickets
Correct, as alluded to by "while not being so all-encompassing as to become tl;dr for the small claims judges".
173076770
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 15, 2024 @11:47PM
(#64243760)
Attached to: Air Canada Found Liable For Chatbot's Bad Advice On Plane Tickets
Wonder how much Air Canada paid in attorney fees to avoid an $812 refund?
From TFCourt-Document:
5. Mr. Moffat is self-represented. Air Canada is represented by an employee.
This was a small claims court, and reading through the finding, it looks like they just sent some middle manager armed with a boilerplate response, which most large companies have on hand for dealing with small claims cases. Boilerplate responses are mostly intended to be an auto-fire response that will suffice for 80% of the complete bullshit "you put ketchup on my Big Mac when I asked for no ketchup, I demand $1,000 restitution for emotional trauma" claims that come up, while not being so all-encompassing as to become tl;dr for the small claims judges. The middle manager is mostly there as a warm body and to answer any questions the judge might ask - being that this is small claims, the judge's questions are plain English sort of stuff, basically Judge Judy without the sass.
Unfortunately for Air Canada, their boilerplate response is evidently somewhat out of date, and geared more towards situations where a customer gets crappy/unclear advice from a live agent:
27. Air Canada argues it cannot be held liable for information provided by one of its agents, servants, or representatives – including a chatbot. It does not explain why it believes that is the case. In effect, Air Canada suggests the chatbot is a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.
So, their thoughtless boilerplate creates an incongruity in this particular situation, which the judge had a bit of fun with. It's abundantly clear that Air Canada wasn't really consciously making the argument, it was just a byproduct of their lazy approach to small claims cases.
173076102
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 15, 2024 @09:30PM
(#64243640)
Attached to: NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancellor Says
You don't need to know how to use a computer to type up a quarterly report with two fingers and then join a Zoom meeting with your microphone turned up too loud.
Interesting that that's the only part you chose to respond to, btw. You're clearly not committed enough to your devil's advocate trolling here.
173058356
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
ruary 13, 2024 @08:19PM
(#64237786)
Attached to: NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancellor Says
Remote work is not encumbered with terrible edu-software. Nerds have been putting together the pieces for remote work for decades, and those pieces are designed to allow work. Maybe you have to deal with Teams or Slack and the occasional Zoom call, but for the most part, you can do work at home.
Contrast this with edu-software, which is always a goddamn UI nightmare right from the bat, and hobbled by the fact that most parents don't know how to operate computers, most teachers barely know how to operate computers, and (unfortunately, these days) most kids are only semi-literate with computers. So you have a hodgepodge of poorly-funded fly-by-night startups and poorly-motivated Big Firm departments, neither of whom truly give a shit, trying to gear products at an audience that can barely operate the tools they run on.
And this isn't even getting into the fact that learning is different from working, and requires not only a different skillset, but a different immediacy. If a server shits itself, a 911 text is simple and straightforward. But it's basically impossible to quickly and intuitively tell if a kid's focus is wandering or if a kid seems confused over fucking Zoom-for-Educators, and equally impossible to design the equivalent of a teacher doing a quiet shoulder-surf while the kids do independent work to check on all the various intangibles that help an educator gauge whether a kid might need a quick couple-minute individual instruction or what to focus on during the next class-wide instruction.
173058292
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
ruary 13, 2024 @08:08PM
(#64237764)
Attached to: NYC Fails Controversial Remote Learning Snow Day 'Test,' Public Schools Chancellor Says
Because we can't let children play anymore. Every snow day is a day not spent wasted at a desk being condescended to by midwits. The children must learn to behave, consume, and develop an affinity for the licensed corporate mascots that are deployed as "teaching aids".
173035474
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
uary 11, 2024 @12:26PM
(#64232120)
Attached to: Wearable AI-Powered Neurotech Startup Promises 'Electric Medicine' and Wellness Benefits
On rough days I can just drink some extra alkaline water and pop a gluten-free Goop vagina sticker enema.
173035340
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
uary 11, 2024 @11:58AM
(#64232068)
Attached to: Shell Is Immediately Closing All Of Its California Hydrogen Fueling Stations
I'm at Red Lobster, eating the free cheddar biscuits. You keep bringing plates of shit to the table and each time I tell you those plates are shitty and I'll stick with the cheddar biscuits.
It doesn't mean I think the cheddar biscuits will continue forever or are a complete balanced diet. It just means everything else you've offered is shit.
173033504
submission
Submitted
by
AmiMoJo
ebruary 11, 2024 @05:53AM
AmiMoJo writes: Mutant wolves roaming the deserted streets of Chernobyl appear to have developed resistance to cancer — raising hopes the findings can help scientists fight the disease in humans. Dr Cara Love, an evolutionary biologist and ecotoxicologist at Princeton University in the US, has been studying how the Chernobyl wolves survive despite generations of exposure to radioactive particles. The researchers discovered that Chernobyl wolves are exposed to upwards of 11.28 millirem of radiation every day for their entire lives — which is more than six times the legal safety limit for a human. Dr Love found the wolves have altered immune systems similar to cancer patients undergoing radiation treatment, but more significantly she also identified specific parts of the animals' genetic information that seemed resilient to increased cancer risk.
173031898
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 10, 2024 @10:37PM
(#64231264)
Attached to: EFF Challenges 'Legal Bullying' of Sites Reporting on Alleged Appin 'Hacking-for-Hire'
It's not "whataboutism", for fuck's sake. It's "man, I remember when the EFF could do no wrong. Then, they did some wrong. It's tangentially-related to the article in question, but I still can't really read it without getting a weird taste in my mouth".
Try to think in something other than tired Twitter politics catchphrases, because based on your response there it's seriously affecting your comprehension of the world.
173030654
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 10, 2024 @05:44PM
(#64230886)
Attached to: New Hutter Prize Awarded for Even Smaller Data Compression Milestone
Where do I claim my share of the prize?
173030592
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 10, 2024 @05:27PM
(#64230862)
Attached to: Will FTX Customers Fully Recoup Their Money?
Like, seriously, come on...
173029544
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 10, 2024 @01:59PM
(#64230452)
Attached to: EFF Challenges 'Legal Bullying' of Sites Reporting on Alleged Appin 'Hacking-for-Hire'
The EFF seemed in favor of bullying and censorship when they went after the FSF for re-electing Stallman to their board. I mean, the first bulletpoint in the Medium blog that the EFF's statement links to as an explanation for why Stallman is a bad person and the FSF should not have him on their board is, word for word, "1. Richard Stallman has problematic opinions" - you can't make this stuff up. The only other point the Medium blog raises is "he's awkward around women". Just real bottom-of-the-barrel desperate intolerance from mediocre minds.
I know it's (to some degree) -1, Offtopic, but I just can't see anything about the EFF without being reminded of that whole incident, and of how, for lack of a better general descriptor, gross it felt seeing them go full-idiot like that, having grown up in a time when EFF could always be trusted to be on the right side of the issue. If you told me back then that I'd be making a snarky crack about them on /., I genuinely don't know how I would have reacted, but I wouldn't have assumed you'd ever be correct. And yet here we are.
Anyway, sucks that Appin is hassling bloggers. I wish they'd stop, and I wish I could read the article without being reminded of my conflicted feelings for the EFF throughout. Good luck to whoever's suffering from this.
173027906
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 10, 2024 @09:11AM
(#64229738)
Attached to: Instagram and Threads Will Stop Recommending Political Content
Nobody's banning politics. They're just not going to insert it into people's feeds unless it's a post by someone they already follow.
Any political speech that is self-suppressed because there's no (or greatly-reduced) possibility for it to go viral is political speech we're all better off without in the first place.
173027776
comment
byCrappySnackPlane
bruary 10, 2024 @08:51AM
(#64229694)
Attached to: Nine US States Are Teaming Up To Accelerate the Adoption of Heat Pumps
What do kerosene heaters and wood stoves have to do with anything? The low-income renters are better off with the actual natural gas and electric furnaces which heat pumps are slated to replace, not the imaginary kerosene heaters nobody in TFA, TFS, or TFComments was talking about.
People using a wood stove to heat their shotgun shack aren't installing $5,000 heat pump systems, and slumlords who force their tenants to rely on kerosene heaters aren't going to suddenly spring for a heat pump either.
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