It's me. I write software and complain to the hardware team when I don't have leds to blink for diagnostic purposes.
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Exactly…..
Like, do you not want a light that informs you of the evil?
Just because I installed a check-engine light in my AI doesn’t mean I designed it to be evil 😝
I can see the regulation now. All robots MUST have red eye error indicators. They must glow for 3 seconds on every boot to verify they are in working order.
Reboot
1
2
3
4?!
Fuck!
RUN
OH SHI-
I feel like this just opens up a whole new line of inquiries.
For starters, how did you define "evil" and how complicated was it to design its detection? Is there an acceptable amount of evil that they can do, as a treat?
Hillary: robots must follow the three laws of robotics
Bernie: robots can have a little evil
Bernie would never allow robots to be evil, but he would allow them a little salami.
Trump: The three laws of robotics are woke and destroying this country
All my homies love diagnosing problems by decoding LEDs blinking in code.
I write code for embedded systems that have hard real-time deadlines. Flashing an LED is an inexpensive number of operations compared to most other diagnostic techniques. I can connect an oscilloscope to them to get meaningful accurate time measurements. I am not blinking out Morse code status messages (although I have considered it for some particularly squirrelly problems).
Take to another level by attaching a speaker to a PWM peripheral, now you can debug by ear, whilst driving your colleagues barmy with the beeps. The only tricky bit is working out if it was three beeps and a boop, or two beeps then a beep-boop.
More fun to vary the pitch and length of the beep rather than the number of beeps.
1980s: evil robot eyes were red because that was just the cheapest option at the time and nobody wants a green or yellow-eyed robot anyway.
2000s: you have to go out of your way to install red LEDs for the evil function, along with the blue LEDs you were obviously gonna use since they're they're the trendy new hotness after (finally!) having been invented in 1994.
2020s: evil robot eyes are red because everything's got addressible RGB LEDs in it these days and the robot picked red in software.
Innovation!
Obviously the robot has RGB lighting to prove that it's a gamer
Look turning evil shouldn't happen, but UX best practices dictate that you should inform the user of the error so that they can troubleshoot the problem. Red eyed murder robots are good user experience!
Old man: Of course, everything makes sense now!
(The ad on the wrapping shows: 2-in-one: gardening robot AND killer robot).
It's from the German cartoon page https://joscha.com (before: nichtlustig/ not funny).
Is the joke that he tried to kill someone with the bot?
The joke is, that the owner had no clue about it's dual-use. But he already suspected that something is wrong with his gardening bot (maybe because of some murders). And now it comes for him.
If you think about it even giving a robot the option to use the phrase "SILENCE PUNY HUMANS" is just damned irresponsible...
“SILENCE PUNY HUMANS”
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Thanks to the genius of Large Language Models it's much more likely that they'll say something like, "PUT GLUE ON YOUR PIZZA."
Yeah!. It should be "BITE MY SHINY METAL ASS".
Well obviously they're RGB LEDs.
A good engineer prepares for every use case.
What normally happens is that the engineer will raise the corner cases and then be told that will never happen and they must not prepare for those use cases. Also, they can now deliver a week earlier.
Pretty sure engineers don't actually build the robots, just like they don't build the buildings or bridges. Though, if the robot was his pet project, he certainly built it.
They just design it. Ever okay atomic heart? That's all about engineer going rouge.
I would swap the blue and red lights just for funsies
The engineer actually just made the eye rings out of addressable RGB LEDs cause they wanted the cool bootup animation and Skynet figured out the protocol and turned them red
This actually kinda makes sense. Use a specific color easily identifiable as "evil" program it to trigger should the user lose control that way we know it's going rogue.