alt Hacker NewsIt’s surprising how much society apparently thinks merely being above 85 IQ is sufficient to gate all kinds of things behind. Like, bomb-making. As though there isn’t ample information available that anyone with 4 brain cells can find. Yet we see utility apparently in worrying about whether the most smooth-brained would-be bomber gets a useful answer from a chatbot.
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bigyabai • yesterday at 10:46 PM
Most people are fine with catastrophic failure cases as long as Mr. Fart doesn't get to say his favorite color: https://medium.com/@blakeross/mr-fart-s-favorite-colors-3177...
The counter-argument here is Popcorn Time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popcorn_Time) which brings together search and bittorrent with a nice UI and makes piracy a bit too easy.
Or Firesheep (https://codebutler.com/2010/10/24/firesheep/) which made impersonating someone’s facebook account a breeze by sniffing their credentials which were sent in clear text (eg. on cafe wifi) and showing them in a UI and made stealing credentials a bit too easy, leading to wide calls for broad adoption of https everywhere.
Or Dropbox, which the nerds derided as pointless “because I can build my own”.
It’s fuzzy and individual, but there’s a qualitative difference - a tipping point - where making things too easy can be irresponsible. Your tipping point just happens to be higher than the average.