• 10 posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 15th, 2023

WTF?! You might have heard the one about being nice to chatbots in case they remember you once the machines take over. It seems Anthropic is heeding this warning, barring users from being excessively abusive or cruel toward its AI models.

Anthropic’s first changes to its usage policy in over a year include new restrictions on abusive behavior. The updated policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models.

Don’t worry if you’re a Claude user who occasionally gets annoyed at the chatbot and throws a few expletives its way. The policy update only applies in extreme cases, in which users repeatedly act cruelly toward the models for no discernible reason.

  • I worked for a Fortune 100 company that hired lots of H-1B workers. The company loved them not only because they settled for less money, but because they worked ridiculous hours and could not easily change jobs. Those H-1B workers created big problems for American employees.

    H-1B employees did not have family in the US, did not have a social life, and routinely worked 100 hours a week. Most American employees had wives, children, relatives and outside activities, and could not and would not work those kinds of hours. 60-70 hours a week was typical.

    When H-1B employees work 30%-40% 43%-67% more hours their work production will almost always exceed that of their American counterparts, and that’s exactly what happened.

    When peer-ranking and reviews were done the H1-B employees exceeded the raw metrics of their American counterparts and ranked higher. It was common for Americans to be forced out because they refused to work 100 hours a week and management did not give a damn about their quality of life.

    There may be situations where companies use the H1-B program because they cannot find employees with the right skill sets, but I saw none of those. Instead the program was used to source people one step up from indentured servants.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, the devout Catholic conservative who has long warned of animus against religion in America, says in a new book that he believes the court’s landmark decision extending marriage rights to same-sex couples was “perhaps the decisive point in our nation’s turn against religious liberty.”

Alito, who dissented sharply in the 2015 case, made the claim at Catholic University of America three years after Obergefell v Hodges in a speech that was not open to the public or widely covered at the time. The remarks were published this month in “So Ordered,” a collection of Alito speeches that he says reflect his judicial philosophy and outlook on the country.

  • We have been wanting an EV (something other than a Swasticar) for our next vehicle and think we could deal with the extended charging times required during a long drive or trip, but we ended up ruling it out.

    For us the big problem is the difficulty getting parts and service. Service for the models we looked at is only available at dealers (and only some dealers), and parts are regularly not in dealer stock.

    We really don’t want to risk taking a cross-county trip and having the car break down 200 miles from the nearest mechanic. With the additional real possibility of having to wait weeks (or months) for a part, an EV is not an appealing choice for us, at least not yet.

McDonald’s has been using artificial intelligence to dynamically price menu items in the US and some global markets, according to a report by Reuters. This involves finding the “optimal price” to match what a particular store’s patrons would be willing to pay.

This fluctuates according to location, and even stores in the same city can have different cost amounts for the same exact items, according to information reviewed by Reuters. This is basically surge pricing, like with ride-share platforms, but for hockey puck burgers that have been sitting under a hot lamp.

Reuters got a look at the interface that franchisees use to access this technology and it’s pretty creepy. Messages show stuff like “your restaurant is showing MEDIUM SENSITIVITY to price” based on “customer willingness to pay in your area.” Cost differences at nearby locations can be stark. Researchers found that a Bic Mac at a Fresno, California store cost $5.69, but the same burger cost $6.89 at another branch two miles down the road. That’s a 21 percent difference.

A Tennessee grandmother who spent six months in jail after facial recognition tech falsely linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud investigation now wants compensation for what happened. Angela Lipps is suing the City of Fargo and a Fargo Police Department detective for $10 million over the incident, which led to the loss of her home, car, and dog.

In July 2025, a team of US Marshals arrested 50-year-old Lipps in Tennessee at gunpoint while she was babysitting four young children. She was booked into the county jail in Tennessee as a fugitive from justice wanted in North Dakota.