Whether computers count as ruthless depends on fine details of your definition of ruthless.
If you mean the mental/emotional state necessary for a human to act without regard for consequences of their actions to other people, then computers are not ruthless.
If you just mean acting without consideration of how their their actions will affect people then computers fit this definition of ruthless perfectly by virtue of not being able to consider the consequences of their actions on other people, because we don’t know how to program them to consider how their actions will affect other people.
> because we don’t know how to program them to consider how their actions will affect other people.
We don't have to. For example, a ruthless train door could be made less ruthless, by having sensors that respond to someone who is nanoseconds late, to open the door, just that once, just like it's elevator door brethren, but only once.
The problem is that "inherently opportunistic people" will take advantage of the machine kindness and take an entire train full of people hostage.
The oppressive train door is a dictator everyone loves, maybe if they were also razor sharp, people would give them the respect they deserve. phwump. guillotrains. on time, every time.
But doing so isn’t the default state for computers. Someone needs to think about that, and put effort into building that. Making it so that some concerned citizen that wants to make the system less ruthless, also demands the instrumentation of the system to allow for that, cooperation between all parties to facilitate such changes - it doesn’t happen by default. So while it’s possible to make a system not behave ruthlessly with enough effort, it is default ruthless, for better or worse.
> If you mean the mental/emotional state necessary for a human to act without regard for consequences of their actions to other people, then computers are not ruthless.
I don't understand, what am I missing?
I've never seen a computer have any regard for the consequences of its decisions. Computers are thus completely ruthless.
I think the GP points to the fact that given the inability of computers to evaluate the consequences of its programming, ruthlessness is a concept that cannot apply to them because by definition involves disregard about those consequences, not ignorance.
I think there is a conflation of malicious and ruthlessness in this thread, showing no pity or compassion (def of ruthless) does apply to a computer because they can do neither. However, being actively malicious and disregarding consequences probably only applies to humans controlling them because the computer is ignorant of those consequences as you say.
I assume that's mostly complaints about the cable insulation rather than the connector.
Lightning connectors do have the advantage you can safely stick a toothpick in them to remove lint, I don't know if lint building up inside the socket is a problem specific to lightning though.
I believe some analytics frameworks used to send a silent push notification every day that made the app hit some endpoint, and becaues silent notifications can't be disabled that allowed them to measure uninstals. Apple may have fixed the security hole that allowed this, or told people to cut it out or they can't update their app anymore since I lasted looked into this though.
https://www.givedirectly.org/ is I think a fairly effective charity, admittedly I assume they mostly send money to people in non-war torn countries, but I think the point still holds, and just doing the moral equivalent of sending evelopes full of cash is a decent baseline for charities.
Solarpunk only really got started in the last years of Iain Banks' life, and is generally set closer to the near future. I can't really think of much in the way of ecological themes in the Culture novels, and all the special effects in them are powered by antimatter and the "energy grid" between different unverses rather than solar power.
Based on your comments here and what I’ve seen of polyamorous people’s online dating profiles I think I am more likely to respect a man in such a relationship style than I am to respect you.
Do you think this comment is helpful? If not do you think your own comments have been helpful? If your answers to those two questions are different do you know why they are different?
I only have an undergraduate degree in physics, but I think the point you may be missing is that information requires some physical medium to store it.
So entropy is very roughly speaking the property of the system that determines how big a hard drive you need to store a description of that system.
Why do you request push notification permission? I can think of no useful use cases for push notifications in your app.
Also you should open links in an external browser on iOS rather than using the safari view controller, or at least provide the option to; switching apps is easy, a user interaction doing something you don't want is annoying.
The push notifications were so I can send notifications as I add products that match the tags. When someone adds something super specific, there might not be anything in the app that matches it and because we don't have any account creation, notifications were the only way I could think of to let people know of the new stuff.
Agreed on the browser side. I played with it for half a day and it was still buggy so I abandoned it in favor of other items that seemed more useful to people.
Marmite was invented fairly recently (late 19th/early 20th century), apparently by a german scientist who was studying food chemistry and nutrition. (In case you missed the joke, the liquid the parent suggests you can discard is beer).
Miso I know less about but my wild guess would be it's some sort of by product of trying to preserve food.
If you mean the mental/emotional state necessary for a human to act without regard for consequences of their actions to other people, then computers are not ruthless.
If you just mean acting without consideration of how their their actions will affect people then computers fit this definition of ruthless perfectly by virtue of not being able to consider the consequences of their actions on other people, because we don’t know how to program them to consider how their actions will affect other people.