“Before we get to that, please have someone explain to us how an approximate 15%-85% blend can be plausibly described as half-and-half. Tell them to make it good - we only get so many laughs down here in Truth & Compliance.”
(Honestly, from a corporate point of view their easiest option might be to up the former a bit and rename it “Quarter-Cream”. I mean, a certain degree of slop and puffery in naming is okay as long as the detailed ingredients are correct, but while 45% might have been okay, 15% is a “the fuck, man?” case.)
Thinking that we won’t be able to design machines to be subserviant to humanity and to abide by humanistic values reveals a serious lack of imagination.
Subservient, eh?
Somewhere in another universe, Black Box is deciding whether or not to let us become one of the instructive examples…
Rant inspired by the latest drama about a “smart” microwave bricking itself:
Firstly, I am uncertain of the value of a “smart” microwave in the first place. In theory you could set it on a timer from somewhere else, so it could have your food ready for you. The problem here is that you still have to put the food into the microwave, and the stuff that takes more than a few minutes is all stuff that should not be left in the microwave at room temperature for a prolonged period of time, so honestly this sounds like a recipe for food poisoning.
But okay, maybe it comes with some really nice ‘pick your food and what you want to do with it’ and an inbuilt set of scales and a fancy-but-functional UI to help you select the best settings for what you want to do. That’s useful! And maybe you want the ability to periodically update that, that’s fine, that’s an acceptable use case for a smart device.
This does not change the fact it is a microwave oven. The stupidity here isn’t as much “device can connect to the home network”, it’s “like the vast majority of smart items, we’ve made this connect to the network using standard Wi-Fi”. Microwave ovens are incompatible with standard wi-fi (and also Bluetooth, the most common alternative) because they are basically a magnetron wrapped in a very good faraday cage to keep the radiation where it is supposed to be and prevent it cooking things sitting next to the appliance. Which means the microwave is very good at blocking, shielding, or outright ignoring electromagnetic radiation in the 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz frequency.
Bluetooth and standard Wi-Fi use 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz frequencies.
Why oh why would you make a device that needs to network at the precise frequencies that it inherently shields against, where the functionality of the device will destructively interfere with its own communication signals, and then try to use those same frequencies to send it a firmware update that can brick the device when it is interrupted which is almost guaranteed to happen to a decent percentage?
(Honestly, I think the Eldrae would insist that this is a tool that must use a different communication protocol, or in early eras accept that you might have to manually plug it into the network/use their version of a thumb drive to update it occasionally. Regular maintenance may be tedious but physics is irritating that way.)
Antenna sitting outside the Faraday cage, with a fiber optic going through one of the cage’s holes into the internal boards. Seems easy enough, and cost-wise if the Eldrae had gotten to the point of wanting this badly enough to do that I’d see them not even flinching.
Honestly, what I would consider a ‘smart’ microwave is one that actually deduces the internal structure of the food when heating it up, and can create temperature profiles across the entire dish. Pulse at low power to get a reading on the structure, then give the owner options for how they want their food done.
I feel that’s the snag manufacturers keep running into. It seems easy enough. In practise, you’re juggling one hell of a shadow-shield in an environment known for signal bouncing and poor lines of sight, while sitting next to an extremely loud interference source. You’ve taken all the normal issues that cause devices to drop out and cranked them up to eleven and it’s not surprising that it so frequently fails to work at all.
As a data point, I actually have a smart microwave - and not a very expensive smart microwave, the small and simple AmazonBasics one - which I got primarily because hands-free operation is, heh, handy in the kitchen. (Side benefits are being able to put prepared side dishes in it and then command them to run while busy with the mains; and being able to put a second bag of popcorn in it at the start of the movie and run it without leaving your watching chair when the first bag runs out. Yes, I’m lazy.)
Anyway, relevant data point:
According to the logs, it’s never lost connectivity in the last year, except when I’ve had to take the back-of-house wireless access point off-line for network maintenance or when the power went out. I figured this might be because it’s using the newer WiFi band at 5GHz, but no, it’s using good old 2.4 Ghz.
All of which boils down to - well, this seems to me more like a specific design fuckup, 'cause I’ve got some empirical evidence in my kitchen that you can do this properly even at a low price point.
Also, regarding:
and with apologies for nitpicking a rant - because if the Faraday cage is working properly, the destructive interference should be confined inside the microwave chamber, where the WiFi antenna (and indeed, the rest of the electronics which you don’t want to cook) is specifically not. There should be no problem with it unless you are for some reason using very precisely directional WiFi signals.
Alright, rant rescinded. I shall assume this particular company did not give adequate thought to where to locate the aerial to avoid the whole “box is a shadow shield” bit. Maybe they put it on the back, or similar.
I think Eldrae would not argue that this could be an interesting scientific direction, but they might take personal issue with the hypothesis that extropy’s greatest triumph is a means to accelerate the arrival of entropy.
(From the people who brought you the notion that your Harmonious Proposal of Unquestionable Justice and Incontrovertible Benignity must be presented in the correct formal register, poetic form, and exquisite calligraphy should be tossed unceremoniously into the Brazier of Insufficiency to the Mandate comes the idea that Senators who do not display the proper respect for their august institution and its solemn task, including by failure to attend in full court dress, should be thrown unceremoniously off the Defenestrative Balcony and not readmitted to the chamber until they amend said fault.)
((While it’s more for the Post-Contact Hilarity thread, I take a brief moment to note the possibility of a brief post-contact reinvention of diplomatic uniforms by some countries. Being sufficiently underdressed at the Court of Courts places you several moves behind in the Game before you’ve even started.))
That was changed within days by the SHORTS (“SHow Our Respect To the Senate”) act, according to NPR. Long pants and a coat and tie are now required for men.
It looks like some train manufacturers have been caught red-handed deliberately breaking trains in some twisted form of planned obsolescence, including - once it was realised the trained were breaking due to a “bug” - “patching” the trains so they can’t be fixed.
Computer trespass, no, both because there ain’t no such crime (it’s just regular trespass/illegal entry/breaking and entering, because charges should not be multiplied beyond necessity), and also because they appear to have owned the train computers at the time/had access to provide software updates, so no trespass.
Under Imperial law, though, also possibly extortion (“We will break your trains if you don’t pay us to service them” constitutes an unlawful threat, albeit an implicit one) and definitely sabotage/destructionism (“You did not have the owner’s permission to break their train”.) That last is going to hurt. As is Interference with Imperial Services (“You fucked with the infrastructure. We have absolutely no sense of humor about people who fuck with the infrastructure.”).
…while there is a crime going by the name of “misuse of Imperial authority or resources”, that’s for things like skimming off the top of projects or requisitioning a battlecruiser for a personal space-jaunt. This sort of thing, where you’re using your authority to deprive people of their Contractual or Chartered rights, is charged there as treason.
Everyone involved gets a trip to the lethal chamber.
(Relevant to the Joining the Party thread, 'cause there is so much of this shit going on that they’d run out of morgue space real fast. Or, I suppose, hold a zero-day.
Now, chaps, you have a week to go confess all your crimes under color of authority to the nice gentlesophs from the Office of Service Security. You want to do this. Because anything we find out about during that week, sure, you’ll have to pay recompense and weregeld, and will be barred from future work in, for, or with the Service, but at least you’ll live to complain about it. Anything we find about afterwards, however - and we will - is treason, and you don’t want to know how that goes.