Sweet! I only learned about real-world Sabacc after how much enjoyment I got out of the Kessel Sabacc minigame in Outlaws. Looks like there are a few cantina tables in my area, might check them out.

This is a good analogy, and is one big reason I won’t trust any AI until the ‘answers’ are guaranteed and verifiable. I’ve worked with people who needed to have every single thing they worked on double-checked for accuracy/quality, and my takeaway is that it’s usually faster to just do it myself. Doing a properly thorough review of someone else’s work, knowing that they historically produce crap, takes just about as long as doing the work myself from scratch. This has been true in every field I’ve worked in, from academia to tech.

I will not be using any of Apple’s impending AI features, they all seem like a dangerous joke to me.

Exactly. I wish more people had this view of interns. Unpaid ones, at the very least. I worked with a few, and my colleagues would often throw spreadsheets at them and have them do meaningless cleanup work that no one would ever look at. Whenever it was my turn to ‘find work’ for the interns, I would just have them fully shadow me, and do the work I was doing, as I was doing it. Essentially duplicating the work, but with my products being the ones held to final submissions standards. They had some great ideas, which I incorporated into the final versions, and they could see what the role was actually like by doing the work without worrying about messing anything up or bearing any actual responsibility. Interns are supposed to benefit from having the internship. The employer, by accepting the responsibility of having interns, shouldn’t expect to get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of helping someone gain experience. Maybe a future employee, if you treat them well.

Yeah totally, that’s an important distinction. Paid interns are definitely different than unpaid interns, and can legally do essentially the same work as a paid employee.

The way the distinction was explained to me is that an unpaid intern is essentially a student of the company, they are there to learn. They often get university credit for the internship. A paid internship is essentially an entry-level job with the expectation that you might get more on-the-job training than a ‘normal’ employee.

This article doesn’t say if the intern was paid, but it does say the company reported the behavior to the intern’s university, so I’d guess it was unpaid.

I work at a small tech company, by no means big tech. I know it’s common for interns to be treated as employees, but it’s usually in violation of labor law. It’s one of those things that is extremely common, but no less illegal.

The US Department of Labor has a 7 part test to help determine if an intern is classified properly. #6 is particularly relevant to this.

There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.

Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.

Think about it this way: remember those upside-down answer keys in the back of your grade school math textbook? Now imagine if those answer keys included just as many incorrect answers as correct ones. How would you know if you were right or wrong without asking your teacher? Until a LLM can guarantee a right answer, and back it up with real citations, it will continue to do more harm than good.

For sure, it’s not an easy problem to address. But I’m not willing to give up on it just yet. Bad actors will always find a way to break the rules and go under the radar, but we should be making new rules and working to improve these platforms in good faith, with the assumption that most people want healthy communities that follow the rules.

I think by default bots should not be allowed anywhere. But if that’s a bridge too far, then their use should have to be regularly justified and explained to communities. Maybe it should even be a rule that their full code has to be released on a regular basis, so users can review it themselves and be sure nothing fishy is going on. I’m specifically thinking of the Media Bias Fact Checker Bot (I know, I harp on it too much). It’s basically a spammer bot at this point, cluttering up our feeds even when it can’t figure out the source, and providing bad and inaccurate information when it can. And mods refuse to answer for it.

This is awesome, we need more rules like this, and Khan is absolutely nailing it. But I’m worried it won’t stick. I think companies have taken our absentmindedness and laziness for granted, and have made tons of money because of it. I don’t think they’ll give that up without a fight, but hopefully they lose. Unless the Supreme Court gets involved, and then we can all but guarantee they’d rule against these consumer protections.

“Too often, businesses make people jump through endless hoops just to cancel a subscription,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will end these tricks and traps, saving Americans time and money. Nobody should be stuck paying for a service they no longer want.”

It’s such a basic and obvious consumer protection.

As of October 2024 Microsoft has a market cap of $3.109 Trillion. (Source). So uh, fuck that.