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by tremon 118 days ago
And one in a million odds of trouble in itself isn't normally considered wildly irresponsible.

For humans that are roughly capable of perhaps a few dozen significant actions per day, that may be true. But if that same rate of one in a million applies to a bot that can perform 10 millions actions in a day, you're looking at ten injuries per day. So perhaps you should be looking at mean time between failures rather than only the positive/negative outcome ratio?

2 comments

If you look at the bot framework used here, it's actually outright kind. Weird thing to say, but natural language has registers, and now we're programming in natural language, and that's the register that was chosen.

And... these bots tend to only do a few dozen actions per day too, they're running on pi's and mac mini's and nucs and vps' and such. (And API credits add up besides)

It's just that last time I blinked there were 2 and a half million of them. I've blinked a few times since then, so it might be more now. I do think they're limited by operator resources. But when random friends start messaging me about why I don't have one yet, it gets weird.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009949 Now deployable in 'one click'. What a time to be alive.