Well, apparently it is, if they’re complaining.

Yes, force the behaviour of closing the door while they’re away from the truck

…while relaxing the inhuman quota expectations to actually afford them that time

They’d be entering a hot car every time. That’s what they’re complaining about: The AC is supposed to keep it at a liveable temperature so they can get back, hop in and keep driving without being face fisted by the heated up cabin.

If you have an entire trolley that takes five minutes to process at a regular checkout, please don’t use the self-checkout. It’s not intended for large volumes. I put my basket that holds six, seven items on the space that holds a basket, put my bag in the other side and move it smoothly from basket over scanner to bag. Very rarely, I’ll need help or make a mistake.

Most of the time, I’m hardly slower than the cashier, except for the part where they ask me about whatever club membership and app and how I wanna pay and then activate the terminal, where I’m much faster. I just click “done”, “no, thanks” and swipe my card.

as a result they aren’t really liable or in any way responsible for what you find

One could make an argument that their ranking of results does make them partially responsible for the attention you give to particular sources, but there’s no applicable legislation on that topic.

Good luck getting the fossils in our parliament to do something about that: By the time you’ve explained what it is, why it matters and start talking about the things that could or should be done, someone tells them that it’s about maximising ad revenue and they’ll immediately go “ah, so the free market will take care of it” and move on to more profitable matters.

This explicitly exposes them to legal risk in a way that they never were before.

I think the assumption was that the AI would be producing the words and thus implicitly bear the legal risk (but can’t actually be held liable, which should tarpit the courts trying to figure out how to sue a non-person) and the “check the results” footnote should help shift the burden on the users, “caveat emptor” style.

This judge, at least, wasn’t having any of it. If that legal risk wasn’t explicit before, it is now.

Let’s hope it sticks and spreads.

In this case, it probably is “Domain Specific Language”. If you’re unfamiliar, that means it’s created for a very specific context, unlike other, more general languages. That means you can keep the set of features small and save a lot of time making complex stuff work that isn’t relevant to that context.

Loops are complex stuff. If you don’t really need them, you’re better off just keeping your language linear.

On the other hand, they’re neat. Can’t be that bad, can it?

A German publisher’s article on the case: https://www.heise.de/en/news/LG-Munich-I-Google-ordered-to-pay-for-false-statements-in-AI-summaries-11327217.html

Because while conventional search results merely present indexed third-party content with title, snippet, and link, the AI function generates a coherent, flowing text that evaluates multiple sources and summarizes them into an independent answer. From the perspective of average users, this appears as direct information from Google, not as a mere forwarding of third-party content.

The previous, rather limited liability of search engines for third-party content is therefore not transferable to this generative format, the chamber ruled. Instead, the usual standards for defamation law apply: untrue factual claims can be prohibited without Google being able to hide behind the automated AI process. The note “created with AI” does not change the attribution to Google.

I’m not sure many people were dental guinea-pigs though. Sucks that you got fucked by it though.

Got stung as a stupid kid who found a few piles of dead branches you could bounce on like a trampoline. Yeah, turns out one of them had a nest underneath, and the tenants weren’t quite happy with the upstairs neighbour partying so hard the ceiling came down.

Absolutely my fault, no question about it, and my only feeble defense is “I didn’t know”.

My issue is now, that I struggle with seizing up in panic if I know (or think) there is one mear me. Not the “shrieking trying to run away” kind of panic, just freezing in place, struggling to breathe or move. I can’t chase them away or anything, even if they were docile and harmless enough.

Ah yes, let’s let the AI qualify AI code submissions.

At that point, why not automate the whole process? Have an AI guess what kind of software you might be interested in, slop it together, evaluate and criticise it, suggest amendments, evaluate the amendment, include it, build the product, ship it, install it directly to your machine for your convenience, then proceed to operate it for you so you can automate sloppy execution of a sloppy task you never wanted to do, in a sloppy tool you never asked you for a purpose a random generator slopped together without your input.

ax+c

I’ll take the kittens. I’ll lose, but it’s a more dignified death than seizing up in panic and not even being able to defend myself.

I didn’t see any stables, just horses chilling wherever.

Stable owners hate this one trick to save 100% on your rent!

Honestly, I think they just self-selected for the ones not eating poisonous shit. I’m pretty sure the same applies on Iceland: The horses know what they can and can’t eat, because the ones who don’t know either learn or stop eating entirely.

We coddle our darlings way too much for their natural instincts. On the other hand, that makes us responsible for compensating.

Tons of vietnamese have horses in rural areas, I should ask them their secret to affording vet bills.

Well, I assume their horses will be less of a luxury pet. They probably pay less rent for the stables, treatment will be more DIY and the attachment to a working animal will be less emotional. I also don’t know how expensive their vets will be relative to the general cost of living and the utility the horse provides. I imagine they’ll have less overhead than our specialised clinics maintaining expensive equipment, dozens of specialised drugs and all the insurance and shit that goes with it in our system.

At the point we’re at, a new horse with less health issues would be cheaper than all the money we’ve blown on ours, and she doesn’t bring any utility. But we love her, and she’s not suffering so badly that it would justify putting her down. As long as I can afford it, I will sooner invest in trying to heal what can be healed, manage what can’t, provide the best life I can for her, own up to the responsibility I accepted when buying her, and enjoy our shared time.

But again: she’s a luxury, maybe a step below actual sports horses with fancy lineages and tournament quality. I suppose if horses became more ubiquitous for transport, the affordability dynamic might shift, but for now, my remark should be taken as tongue-in-cheek and definitely won’t hold up to comparison with working animals.

Who is going to stop the 1500 lb animal?

Ours is closer to 600, but voracious, headstrong and has shown a poor intuition for what’s poisonous and what isn’t. If she decides that a plant looks tasty, strength alone won’t help you save her from herself. If you react in time, you can gently pull her head to the side, enough to turn her away but not so strongly as to hurt her.

…and there goes my boner

Son of a birch

Horses are economically viable and sound

Ours sure is causing way more in vet bills than our car’s lease, insurance and gas combined, while also unable to carry either of us anywhere. She’d also not go home, but to the next patch of greenery, whether or not she can eat it…

That was ambiguous phrasing, sorry. I meant that it’ll never work for filling their pockets, because the pockets will never be full.

Stop selling our future in a vain attempt to sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers. It’s not gonna work.

They’re like the worst kind of dragon: cruel, destructive, greedy and in urgent need of a slaying.

*Edit: changed “stuff your bottomless pockets” to “sate your craving for bigger and bigger numbers” to better convey that they’ll never be happy and content.

Their pockets won’t ever fill up, their craving won’t ever be sated. “Number Go Up” may give them a brief fix, but it will never be enough.

I posted the link; you didn’t have to spend time looking for the article.

I didn’t see it in our conversation, sorry if I missed it.

The article said that women also find a hairless body more feminine and attractive.

…because they are pressured by social factors to conform to a certain image of beauty, which the article states to be a fairly new phenomenon.

“However, it has only become an important part of femininity between 1915–1945, especially in the Western world (Basow, 1991). Before this time, by looking at beauty books and catalogs, it is noticeable that most women didn’t remove armpit and leg hair (Hope, 1982).”

Also, the rise of feminism didn’t change this.

“With the second feminist wave and the spread of hippie culture, pubic hair was neither uncommon nor seen as unnatural (Cerini, 2020). Unshaved female genitalia even started to be represented in Playboy (Cerini, 2020).”

It certainly did. That change just didn’t hold up to the pressures of media that wanted to sell a certain aesthetic:

“This completely changed in the following decades, however, as full body hair removal became not only preferred, but the norm. […] [Brazilian waxing] exploded in the market as the media and celebrities began to support and advertise this completely hairless look (Webb-Liddall, 2019). Research associated exposure to certain magazines and TV shows with pubic hair removal (Bercaw-Pratt et al., 2012, as cited by Li & Braun 2017).”

This suggests that it’s innate.

“By understanding the history behind female body hair removal, it is possible to see how it started as a way to generate profit through the development of a new market. […] It is interesting to see that the association of a hairless body with femininity grew over the course of decades to become what men see as ideal when looking for a mate today.”

If it was innate, why would it not be an issue for millennia, then suddenly explode within decades?

Consequently, he attempts to reconcile a contradiction.

As an aside: Lígia is usually a girl’s name. This is most likely a woman investigating why her sex is subjected to certain pressures.

Also, if there is an evolutionary advantage for men liking body hair on women, why would a patriarchal society want women to remove body hair?

Evolution works on far greater spans of time than a century. It doesn’t have any bearing on this trend. But if you want to bring that into the discussion, the advantages of hair (cited from Bergman, J. (2004). Why mammal body hair is an evolutionary enigma. via the article) are "retention of heat, sexual dimorphism, attraction of mates, protection of skin and reflection (or absorption) of sunlight”. To reflect on their bearing on humans in order of mention:

1. Clothing has made retention of heat less critical. Most mammals don’t skin or shear other animals or harvest and prepare flax for the sake of crafting artificial heat retention covers. Most mammals also don’t intentionally start fires to warm themselves. Humans have done both for thousands of years.
2. Breasts, hips, general presentation provide plenty of dimorphism. Our ability to communicate age explicitly also removed the necessity of body hair to indicate fertility.
3. The attraction of mates is exactly the subject of this discussion, and as stated, has only become associated with hairlessness in the last century, for reasons mentioned before.
4. Again, clothing. We need less skin protection because we can compensate (and have done so for thousands of years). We also fashion various lotions to help protect the skin.
5. Do I need to repeat the role of clothing as a fur substitute? We also build covered housing, which helps reduce sun exposure. Most animals don’t build tents from hide or fabric or assemble a shelter from stones, bricks and mortar, concrete and steel.

The lone evolutionary advantage to hairlessness cited is that “Ancient Egyptians also shaved their heads to prevent lice infection”. Other primates have mutual removal of parasites as a social ritual. They also generally don’t have the technology to depilate. And again, they are more dependant on their fur than humans.

This is just one of many ways humans have removed evolutionary pressures from our lives. Hence, however important it might have been a hundred thousand years ago, body hair is just no longer a strict necessity for us. That doesn’t strictly mean that we’d evolve away from growing it, if there also is no pressure to the opposite, just that it stops being as strong of a selection criterion.

So why did we start favouring hairlessness a century ago? Per the article: Gilette wanted to open a market to sell a razor. In a word: Greed.

And why does it continue to be considered sexy? “When women shave, they are removing one of their secondary sexual characteristics, and as a result they will look younger, in a prepubescence stage. In popular culture, infantilization of women is often seen as sexy (Sullivan, 2012). […] With this in mind, it is possible to assume that women shave their body hair to look prepubescent, as men feel attracted to youth.”

I’m not sure how much more explicit you can get that it’s a social and cultural phenomenon than saying “In popular culture” (emphasis mine). If anything, we ought to explore whether an attraction to youth is innate. Again, this might not have any evolutionary advantages, but we don’t need to optimise for that. It’s not like resources “wasted” on mating without expectation of procreation is a problem.

Since I believe that humans were created,

By a moron, a sadist or both, given the cruelty our creator would have planted in us

I can simply say that humans were designed

…suboptimally so that we need to compensate?

to find women without body hair more attractive

Why not make women not grow any in the first place then?

just as humans were designed to find earrings on women attractive.

Again, not universal, but there also is an evolutionary explanation if you’d care for Hanlon’s Razor: Display of wealth signals financial stability and an abundance of resources, since it implies being able to trade some of it for ultimately useless, labour-intensive trinkets. Once that abundance becomes less exceptional, the evolutionary advantage falls away, but the cultural connotation remains.

(You’ll actually find that pattern of “was reasonable, became normal, persists even beyond necessity” in many things, by the way, like the sexist mentality that women are less suited for some jobs, just because pre-industrial societies faced pressures to separate duties by “can be done while pregnant or caring for childen”)

You dislike the Totenkopf tattoo on Platner because of its meaning but if you were an employer, how would you know what tattoos are offensive? Platner said that he didn’t know Totenkopf was a Nazi symbol.

Historical education? I’d argue that a politician with high ambitions should be aware of ideological connotations, but also, I think that people in general should be educated. I realise that this is an ideal that reality doesn’t (yet?) attain, but even if you don’t know, once someone points out that something is associated with offensive ideologies it shouldn’t be hard to confirm that against the historical record and respond accordingly.

It would be simpler for an employer to have employees cover up tattoos at least for upfront employees.

I guess we should all hide our hands too, since someone might use them to flip the bird or do the Hitler Salute. And while we’re at it, sew our mouths shut, just in case they’re used for insults. What about our eyes, that might express disgust or leer at children?

Or maybe make less of a big deal out of mistakes. If an employer hires a racist without realising, then sacks that racist once they learn of it, that should be enough to rectify the mistake.

If we’re talking about offensive ideologies, by the way, I should point out that creationism is often associated with certain religions that have historically and predently exhibited bigotry, hostility towards non-believers (variously referred to as gentiles, heathens, infidels and other such terms), even violence motivated by religious exceptionalism.

Particularly in the present, one dominant religion espousing that belief also has a well-known problem with sexual abuse of children across many different confessions. That would actually bring us back to the topic of attraction hairlessness:

“[T]he primary reason for the male preference for a hairless body is the preconceived expectation towards women regarding youth and femininity. There is a socially constructed, artificial link between shaving and attractiveness/femininity. Biologically, sexually mature females have body hair, but society has made femininity more connected to youth and pre-pubescence than to a woman’s ability to reproduce. […] As a result, their expectation is transformed into societal pressure, as women start feeling abnormal for having body hair and decide to remove it in order to be seen as attractive.”

Are you really going to defend “I don’t like tattoos on women” with the justification “We were designed to sexualise children”?