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The Machine Fired Me

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Re: The Machine Fired Me

#551

Post by baud147258 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #436
baud147258 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It wasn't until modern times that prison became a place for common criminals, in those days only political offenders would be put away I don't think it was universally true, for example, when the Bastille prison in Paris was taken at the start of the French Revolution, it held only common criminals, with the political prisoners having been moved before the start of the unrest.

Yeah, the French did a lot of things differently, the French national consciousness was matched only by its material wealth, so they could afford such frivolities.

> material wealth

You know that one of the cause of the Revolution was a Financial crisis, right?

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#552

Post by teekert »

jexah wrote: post #539
teekert wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have a suing culture so much here so I don't think that is relevant. Also, I feel that medical personnel should minimize suffering to the best of their ability, they don't take an oath swearing to fully emulate an emotionless robot.

Get a grip on reality dude. Nobody is going to risk their livelyhood to stop somebody being in relatively[0] moderate pain for an hour. The fact that you expect strangers to do this for you is really very selfish. Not sure how suing is related to the comment you replied to. If a chemist hands out drugs to people without prescriptions and they get caught, they will lose their licence, be barred for life, lose their st…

If so, these people should be replaced by robots asap.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#553

Post by rmc »

pc86 wrote: post #351
DanBC wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The racism comes from saying "We recognise human faces" and then not recognising a significant proportion of humans.

That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it. It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.

If it doesn't occur to you that there are black people, or you are too lazy to test against then, then that is racism.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#554

Post by rmc »

Proziam wrote: post #542
wpietri wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, something can be racism and something else. > Maybe they grew up in a town full of white people, and maybe all of their friends and coworkers are white. This is not an accident. All-white contexts in America are the result of personal and systemic racism. People who grow up in those contexts are, unsurprisingly, more likely to be personally biased and will regardless do things that further systemic racism. Peo…

I don't think it's likely that all the folks in Vermont are racist or that the system of governance there is supremely racist - yet Vermont has an absolutely tiny percentage of non-white folks (3.1%) Less than 15% of the U.S. is African American so it's not at all surprising that there are areas where there are very few black folks as a result. That's nobody's fault and shouldn't be described as racist because, well,…

3.1% is about 1 in 30 people. That's not that small. And this isn't 100 years ago, I'm pretty sure people in Vermont have seen a black face on TV/film.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#555

Post by pbhjpbhj »

thecatspaw wrote: post #342
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't there a problem with shadow contrast which makes features more difficult to pick out on darker skinned faces? I vaguely recall an East Asian developer giving that reason for why he developed on Western data-sets.

Wouldnt it make more sense then to develop _not_ on the easycase but the hard ones?

MVP presumably.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#556

Post by [deleted] »

terlisimo wrote: post #18

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next d…

[deleted]

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#557

Post by ashelmire »

madeofpalk wrote: post #100
krapp wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL so I might be wrong, but if they terminated his contract, I would assume they can't still legally pay him as if they hadn't. Of course, he's also well within his rights to sue over it.

He's a contractor, so can't he just submit an invoice and receive a payment? Or does 'contractor' mean something different in the US? If he missed out on pay then it's because no one cared enough/someone didn't care enough to sort it out.

"Contractor" in tech means, "we want you as an employee but we're too cheap to obey the laws involved or make a commitment, so here's a 3 year contract, hope this never goes to court!". Frankly, it's a way for companies to avoid the law, though California at least has recently made this an illegal sort of arrangement via new work rules.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#558

Post by LeftTurnSignal »

gota wrote: post #447
detaro wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't a US employer have their employees social security number, which would fulfill exactly this role if people cared to look at it?

I'm not that knowledgeable but I thought SSN aren't public information and that they are not used throughout information systems to identify people because they are 'sensitive information'

They aren't public, but so many places use it as an identifier. It's kind of dumb for something so sensitive.

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#559

Post by pure-awesome »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #463
bonyt wrote: post #161

This is literally an episode of Better Off Ted.[1] In it, the titular Ted is inadvertenly deleted from the company system when trying to correct a misspelling of his last name. Eventually, he is forced to interview for his own job as the system had already put out an ad for his replacement. I think the most striking part of it, and of the true story from the post, is the human factor - the idea that the humans involv…

Also very similar to the classic "forgotten employee" story which made the rounds in the early aughts: https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/

Oh man! I just read that, and absolutely loved it. A pretty brilliant piece of writing.

Reminds me of the Google Ultron IT guy story, from 2014 (I think? How do 4Chan/American dates work?)

https://imgur.com/a/iJD8f

Re: The Machine Fired Me

#560

Post by pc86 »

wpietri wrote: post #431
pc86 wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not racism, that's laziness. Or perhaps just being a bad engineer, if you want to be more cynical about it. It's not that hard to find both conscious and subconscious examples of systemic or individual racism. Engineers taking the easy path with webcam facial recognition is probably not a good one and serves only to give more fuel to those who claim people jump to the racism cry too quickly.

If you ship a product because it only works for white people and that's good enough, that is definitely racism. Just as it would be sexism if you shipped a voice recognition product that only worked for men. Laziness and racism aren't mutually exclusive. Historically in America, white people haven't considered black people as fully human. You can read the various declarations of secession or the 3/5ths compromise for…

This is neat, in a conversation about the technical aspects of image recognition with webcams in low lighting conditions, you're talking about secession and the 3/5th compromise. Let's try to stay on topic.

> But deciding a product was good enough to ship without caring that it worked for black people requires the effective belief that black people didn't really count as people.

Nobody ever said "oh it doesn't work with black people? Who cares LOL." I was going to make a crack about mental gymnastics but this isn't even that. You're just making shit up at this point.

> When laziness just happens to have a blatantly racist outcome in a place where there is a centuries-long history of racism, Occam's Razor suggests the explanation is racism.

No, even using your sentence here you admit the cause is laziness but then try to reframe it to racism because that fits your world view. Just like the fact that we're talking about webcams and you're talking about the 3/5th compromise and the American justice system.

Is there institutional/structural racism in the US? Absolutely. Webcams aren't a good example of it, sorry.

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