I’m JHarris on Metafilter, and rodneylives on mefi.social. I help run the gaming blog Set Side B, I do Q&As for the website Game Developer, I wrote sometimes about roguelikes, and I used to write the column @Play long ago on the (now sadly deceased) website GameSetWatch.

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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Until a couple of weeks ago, in Brunswick GA, sad down and pitiful up through AT&T, along with easy-to-exceed bandwidth caps (for wired internet!) that twice hit us with large overage fees. That was about 80 or 90 before extra fees, although phone service was included too. Now we’re going with a regional fiber optic outfit that offers about 500 down and up, for about $50/mo.


  • The problem with screening by AI is there’s going to be false positives, and it’s going to be extremely challenging and frustrating to fight them. Last month I got a letter for a speeding infraction that was automated: it was generated by a camera, the plate read in by OCR, the letter I received (from “Seat Pleasant, Maryland,” lol) was supposedly signed off by a human police officer, but the image was so blurry that the plate was practically unreadable. Which is what happened: it got one of the letters wrong, and I got a speeding ticket from a town I’ve never been to, had never even heard of before I got that letter. And the letter was full of helpful ways to pay for and dispense with the ticket, but to challenge it I had to do it it writing, there was no email address anywhere in the letter. I had to go to their website and sift through dozens of pages to find one that had any chance of being able to do something about it, and I made a couple of false steps along the way. THEN, after calling them up and explaining the situation, they apologized and said they’d dismiss the charge–which they failed to do, I got another letter about it just TODAY saying a late fee had now been tacked on.

    And this was mere OCR, which has been in use for multiple decades and is fairly stable now. This pleasant process is coming to anything involving AI as a judging mechanism.