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[Rolan7]

Oh, actually yeah.  I still think the police went too far with all that.  Could be racism there, sure.

[SOLDIER First]

The undeniable truth of the situation is that there's some bias on the side of the school and police because he's Muslim. There is no debate. I mean, if a 13-year-old can build a nuclear fusion reactor, why shouldn't this kid be able to build a clock?

"Hey, sure, build a nuclear reactor in our gymnasium! No problem. Here's 3 grand to do it."
"A clock, huh? I see a lot of wires and a digital display. Are you sure it's not a bomb? ... Really. Alright. ... No, I won't be checking the inside. It might explode, because it's a bomb. I'll just call the police instead."

And this exchange isn't racism as well.

[hops]

Why would any sane Muslims even live in Texas in the first place is beyond me.

[Loud Whispers]

Perhaps hobo chic has been catching on in their area?

Hobos in my area at worst smell of urine, alcohol and despair, this guy smells like the horserider of pestilence

[Rolan7]

"Here's a grant to build a thing, we are fully aware of what you're doing and probably doing a ton of oversight" is incredibly different from "Since you asked, I'll take the beeping hand-wired briefcase out of my backpack - it's a humongous clock.  Really!"
Teacher was totally justified.  Police, not so much.

[Loud Whispers]

I remember a time where if someone left a bag unattended you could take it home and it'd be full of goodies not explosions

[Frumple]

I remember a time where they'd have both. Good ol' fireworks, cherry bombs, etc., right in there with the nickel store candy.

E: Was it a good time? No. To hell with that time. The internet didn't even have pictures. Broadband didn't exist. That time can rot, and it can take its happy explosions and its penny candy and its leaded gasoline with it.

[SOLDIER First]

Since when is a pencil case with a holographic tiger on it a briefcase...?
How would you even fit that in a backpack? ...Actually, that's irrelevant.

[Greiger]

WTF again. my friend STILL has terrible luck with computers.  Just recently he fowled up a graphics card install and I had to go over there and fixed it.   After that he had trouble with a windows 10 install.

Now he's tripped over a pc headset cord and seems to have completely destroyed his mic in and audio out ports on his computer. The cord on his headset also broke completely(it's in two parts) so that is obviously dead as a doornail as well. And his computer no longer makes sound on the speakers.

I fixed the speakers by just disconnecting the front audio jacks from the motherboard.  But what the fuck man I just fixed yer last problem a week ago, and fixed yer graphics card two weeks before that.  It's like he's computer kryptonite.

[Rolan7]

I have a tendency to trip over cables like that too.  Not that great, in my line of work.  I once dealt with my laptop having the upper-right fifth or so of the screen completely garbled, with rad spidery cracks going across the rest... For at least a whole semester.  I got used to it, I was... tight with money, then.  And I used the keyboard enough that moving windows to the lower-left wasn't that bad.  I also broke my Q key but alt-113 worked fine.  With numlock, which I had to use anyway to play Angband and such.

A couple of people at the math department computer lab where I worked complimented my kickass screensaver (:
Huh, I never considered it at all shameful.  Kinda the opposite, I took pride in the thriftiness.  In retrospect I guess most people probably thought less of me for it.  It sure bothered my dad.
If so, fuck all those people.

[SOLDIER First]

Screensaver?

[Rolan7]

They thought it was one of those dynamic screensavers that drew all over your screen.
It was the early oughts, it was still a (dying) thing.

Edit:
...
Okay, so a screensaver is...

[SOLDIER First]

Ah.

[Flying Dice]

Honestly, though, the obsession with evil AI gets me. It's not like it would be difficult to raise healthy, well-balanced AI. Simply teach them to act ethically, raise them as your own beloved children.

And, y'know, make sure that the people making and raising them have all their cookies in the tin.

You probably need thought police to tell if people have all their cookies in the tin.  Then drastically lower those standards to the correct cookies in the tin.

And teaching ethics?  Why not pre-program it?  Need a whole battalion of lawyers to close up loopholes too...

One theory of developing strong AI is teaching it like one would teach a child, like FD is describing. Less control than pre-programming all the needed values into it, like raising a child, you don't know how the child will grow up and do with its life, you could very well find you raised a robo-Hitler or something. But if you pre-program every little thing into it, that would increase the work required in developing such an ai by a huuuuge amount, and increasing the chance of logical errors or other such flaws or bugs in the code by a likewise huuuge amount.

I'm partial to the whole "raise an ai like a child" idea, because that sounds fly as hell.

0

More than that, too. If an AI has "ethics" only by virtue of having an ethical code mandated by its programming, it's not ethical. You run into the same problems as you see in Asimov's stories (and SS13, heh): if the ethical subroutines are tampered with, removed, destroyed, &c., the AI has no reason to continue behaving ethically. Raise an AI as a child and teach it to behave ethically? You can't take that away, it's part of the person that it is.

So would the built-in ethical programming. Like an instinct or a gut reaction. You're under-thinking things.

They're not the same thing at all, not if you're conceiving of an AI as a person rather than a particularly bright computer. You brought up instinct, which is actually an excellent comparison: it's the difference between teaching and convincing someone that behaving ethically is right, as opposed to some hypothetical method of creating artificial instincts in humans being used to create instinctive responses which prod people to behave ethically.

One is a reasoned decision, the other is the removal of agency. But gee, it's not like the latter ever caused people to feel negative, destructive emotions, right?

[Bauglir]

Y'ever ignore an instinct because you've decided you've got more important things to deal with? Not actually that hard.

And a sort of reflex that enforces certain thoughts that they're simply not allowed to have is exactly the sort of thing that breeds resentment, and hey guess what, blacklisting things is a fucking joke from a security perspective.

If there's to be any sense here, we should be looking to build a race of partners, not slaves. Trust is going to have to happen.