111–120 of 124 posts
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I initially thought the mall Santa snitched. Last Christmas I got my partner a gift I happened to come across while searching for gift ideas - turned out it’s exactly what she wanted! I was confused - but it turned out I got shown the product (ad) because she had looked at it previously - lesson is shared Wi-Fi can snitch on you!
Or she's really good at faking it so you don't feel bad :)
When I was maybe 8-9 I found a dual plug extension for the Christmas lights. It looked like two of those cheap green plugs with a little socket on the back, wired to each other. I think some people call it a widowmaker, and to this day I can't imagine why something so dangerous would have been manufactured. Anyway, I wanted to know what would happen if I plugged both plugs into the wall at the same time. I got paraly…
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I for one wouldn't assume that "Alexa, give me a challenge to do" would be pulling from the open, uncensored internet. I would assume that Amazon had some kind of curation method that would remove the possibility of Alexa telling you to do something lethally stupid. Further, what Alexa did is actually even worse than just reading from the open internet, because it only took the "challenge" part and stripped away the…
When I ask for something really general, I assume that Alexa is just a voice controlled web browser. Since Alexa is really about advertising and selling you things, I would assume that any curation is just to drive you to Amazon products. Once you get outside of products that Amazon can sell you then Alexa breaks down to a basic web search - as evidenced here. We are calling out Alexa here but I think the same is tru…
Less magical might be a far better bargain for the platform brands, though. It's literally the face (err, voice) of your brand, and you're fighting a completely adversarial war here. At best, you've got unrelated external data sources that could make it say something stupid, but there's an entire spectrum of bad actors with incentivization to get Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant to say something offensive, scandalous, or hazardous.
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Not only did Alexa retrieve the wrong content (instead of a list of challenges to do, Alexa sourced from a list of dangerous challenges you shouldn't do), Alexa then stripped off the entire context of the warning about not doing the challenge because it was dangerous, and instead added a timer. So the issue here is less about needing to sanitize the internet for kids, and more about how AI struggles to categorize and…
You overestimate what AI means in terms of marketing. If a site owner doesn't markup their site properly, then that could also be the cause of issues like this. Do you really expect Alexa to be "smart" enough to understand human logic like an actual human, or do you not see that AI can basically mean Alexa goes to the web, does a search and parses markup from a website to the best of its ability and they call it AI?…
In the worst case, this means, oh no, they might need to find human moderators to approve content for the pool, or even custom create content. They can afford it.
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Was your answer "I expect a full scientitic report by tomorrow."? Hypothesis : Parents are fat liars" Methodology : Put teeth under pillow without telling parents. Result : Where's my money? Analysis : The results show that the tooth fairy is fake and my parents are liars." Conclusion : The current results tend to show that parents are liars, but we need more experiments to know the extent. To expend on the results,…
I never had Santa or the tooth fairy growing up, and neither do my children for the same reason. Why deceive children with something so obviously fake and not let them enjoy the story along with you? We still talk about the tooth fairy, but there’s never been a question that it’s mom or dad (which stinks when we screw up and forget).
This seems like an easy way to rob their childhood of fun memories, interest (watch how much more they care about Christmas movies when they think it’s real),curb creativity, and produce a child who’s overly skeptical.
Kid will also probably ruin Christmas for other children/parents, garnering a reputation as a know-it-all and possibly alienating themselves socially.
When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…
You literally flew across the room? I've been shocked a fair number of times -- the worst was when as an 11 year old I felt around in a bare light socket with my finger in Kenya, where they use 240 V -- and don't recall ever feeling pushed in any particular direction. Indeed, that Kenya experience was terrifying precisely because I was paralyzed. I made an involuntary "aaauugh" sound and shook until the lamp fell ove…
This is why if you ever touch a live wire (don't?) do it with the BACK of your fingers so that when your muscles contract, you don't grasp the wire (what happens next is left to imagination).
When I was maybe 8-9 I found a dual plug extension for the Christmas lights. It looked like two of those cheap green plugs with a little socket on the back, wired to each other. I think some people call it a widowmaker, and to this day I can't imagine why something so dangerous would have been manufactured. Anyway, I wanted to know what would happen if I plugged both plugs into the wall at the same time. I got paraly…
When I was around 5-6 I wanted to know what would happen if I put a hairpin into a light socket. It seemed a reasonable experiment beforehand; after I picked myself up after flying across the room I learned a valuable lesson. Around the same time I tested whether Santa existed by putting out food; when no one ate it I assumed Santa was fake. Children are not very experienced at knowledge and thinking and often do thi…
When I was maybe 8-9 I found a dual plug extension for the Christmas lights. It looked like two of those cheap green plugs with a little socket on the back, wired to each other. I think some people call it a widowmaker, and to this day I can't imagine why something so dangerous would have been manufactured. Anyway, I wanted to know what would happen if I plugged both plugs into the wall at the same time. I got paraly…
And, as you learned then, there is a great danger of accidentally touching the live end. "Proper" use of this, if there is such a thing, would dictate plugging the load in first, then the supply, but in this case there was supply on both ends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only did Alexa retrieve the wrong content (instead of a list of challenges to do, Alexa sourced from a list of dangerous challenges you shouldn't do), Alexa then stripped off the entire context of the warning about not doing the challenge because it was dangerous, and instead added a timer. So the issue here is less about needing to sanitize the internet for kids, and more about how AI struggles to categorize and…
You overestimate what AI means in terms of marketing. If a site owner doesn't markup their site properly, then that could also be the cause of issues like this. Do you really expect Alexa to be "smart" enough to understand human logic like an actual human, or do you not see that AI can basically mean Alexa goes to the web, does a search and parses markup from a website to the best of its ability and they call it AI?…
Not really, you are making huge assumptions about me here. I don't expect Alexa to be smart. I do expect that if a company is going to scrape other people's content to use in their service, it behooves them to do that scraping properly and to not use automation to do it if their automation isn't up to snuff.
