That has to be some kind of special exception in IE6 that they were doing for debugging, and they failed to remove it. Crazy.

Twitter was useful for getting updates about sports during games - for example, an update on whether a player who was injured might return to the game, or sometimes, more detail on something weird that happened (you’d be shocked at how poorly informed people in the arena are, compared to those watching on TV). A lot of this depends on who is feeding the info, though, and the more recent beat reporters for our favorite hockey team haven’t been as active on Twitter, so I closed my account after Musk bought it. Haven’t really missed it.

But even today, every article about something that happened in a game will embed a Twitter link for video. Like there’s no other possibility - just Twitter.

I’m not defending this, just saying that sports use it extremely heavily.

Yeah. Maybe I’ll see if I can get the gdt bot working again…

Yeah. I help mod the Washington Capitals hockey team sub, and recently I looked through every other NHL team’s sub, and we’re the ONLY ones that post game day threads. And even with us, it’s basically only one or two of us commenting on the games. Compare that to dozens or even hundreds of people commenting on every game in every team’s reddit sub.

When I worked for the federal government, it meant outreach to minority communities, trying to get more to apply. Once they applied, they were on the same playing field as everyone else.

On a related note: Every time I see a video on Facebook of a crash caused by a tractor trailer, I see racist comments, guessing who the driver was, as though no white guy has ever wrecked a truck. It’s insane. It’s so deep in their heads that rational thought is gone.

Here’s my problem with all of the automation the manufacturers are adding to cars. Not even Autopilot level stuff is potentially a problem - things like adaptive cruise come to mind.

If there’s some kind of bug in that adaptive cruise that puts my car into the bumper of the car in front of me before I can stop it, the very first thing the manufacturer is going to say is:

But the responsibility for safe driving, is on the driver…

And how do we know there isn’t some stupid bug? Our car has plenty of other software bugs in the infotainment system; hopefully they were a little more careful with the safety-critical systems…ha ha, I know. Even the bugs in the infotainment are distracting. But what would the manufacturer say if there was a crash resulting from my moment of distraction, caused by the 18th fucking weather alert in 10 minutes for a county 100 miles away, a feature that I can’t fucking disable?

But the responsibility for safe driving, is on the driver…

In other words, “We bear no responsibility!” So, I have to pay for these “features” and the manufacturer will deny any responsibility if one of them fails and causes a crash. It’s always your fault as the driver, no matter what. The company rolls this shit out to us; we have no choice to buy a new car without it any more, and they don’t even trust it enough to stand behind it.

Maybe you’ll get lucky and enough issues will happen that gov’t regulators will look into it (not in the US any more, of course)…but probably not. You’ll be blamed, and you’ll pay higher insurance, and that will be that.

So now I have to worry not only about other drivers and my own driving, but I also have to be alert that the car will do something unexpected as well. Which has happened, when all this “smart” technology has misunderstood a situation, like slamming on the brakes for a car in another lane. I’ve found I hate having to fight my own car.

Obviously, I very much dislike driving our newer car. It’s primarily my wife’s car, and I only drive it once or twice a week, fortunately.

Yeah, exactly. So great to be able to say, oh, she’s about 15 minutes away, so I’ll start making dinner. Much easier and safer than texting while driving, too.

We originally set it up so she could make sure I wasn’t laying in a ditch somewhere from a cycling crash.

Yep. I’m retired now, but before retirement a month or so ago, I was working on a project that relied on several hundred people back in 2020. “Why can’t AI do it?”

The people I worked with are continuing the research and putting it up against the human coders, but…there was definitely an element of “AI can do that, we won’t need people” next time. I sincerely hope management listens to reason. Our decisions would lead to potentially firing people, so I think we were able to push back on the “AI can make all of these decisions”…for now.

The AI people were all in, they were ready to build an interface that told the human what the AI would recommend for each item. Errrm, no, that’s not how an independent test works. We had to reel them back in.