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Comment by 01100011 | Hacker News Reader

> Basically, it’s stabbing, throat-cutting, strangling, shooting, drowning, burning alive (yike), asphyxiating, pushing off a high building, or bonking on the head.

Weird the author forgot poisoning.

Lately one of my luddite friends keeps mentioning how computers will soon kill us all. Perhaps to add to his torment, I like to retort that computers won't need to kill us, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.

Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media. I wonder what other tools the deepfake future will provide? Stealing the voice of a dead loved one could be used to great affect to push a troubled soul over the edge.

This being HN, I'm sure we could come up with quite a list of devious mechanisms. I am reminded of the two morons who planned to use x-rays to terrorize innocents: https://www.cnn.com/2013/06/19/justice/new-york-terror-charg...

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There are loads of murder methods the author hasn't thought of.

Just off the top of my head, you could have murder by: g-forces, laser (James Bond), removal of medicine, excitement to heart attack, introduction of disease, cannibalism, wood chipper, exsanguination, leaving no choice but suicide, freezing, and, in the case of one famous King of England, a red hot poker up the rear end. I'm sure I've read all of these at some time in one book or another.

I recently read a book where the killer convinces victims (via hypnosis) to swallow their tongue, which blocks the airway and suffocates them.

Decades ago, there was an episode of Hawaii-50 where the killer used bullets made of ice, so there was no evidence to work with.

> bullets made of ice

This was one of the topics on the very first episode of Mythbusters:

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6pcm0l

If you wanted to kill someone with a bullet made of ice, or, IMHO even cooler, dry ice, you'd forgo a conventional cartridge, which would contaminate the scene with gunpowder anyway.

You'd use something like compressed air. You can reduce the instantaneous pressure delivered to the projectile which helps fix the melting problem. You'd want to chill the barrel a bit, but some melting might be good there as long as the water doesn't refreeze in the barrel and stop successive rounds. Basically you're making a potato cannon that shoots ice.

Bonus for freezing the water/co2 out of the air itself. You wouldn't even need to carry ammo.

"Do you expect me to talk?!?!?"

"No, Mr. Bond - I expect you to die."

Classic stuff.

I recall a story from a 1970's anthology where the victim was injected with a harmless clear liquid. Of course he was checked out by doctors - who found no negative affects. He then went home and the family Alsatian (German Shepherd) killed him because his body scent had been changed.

>> The public was never in any danger, the source said. The device created by the defendants was deemed inoperable and not a threat to the public.

Yet one of them got 30 years and the other one got off lightly with 8 because he pleaded guilty [1].

That sounds disproportionate to me. Reading a few more news items about the case, it seems the man who got the 30 years was clearly coockoo but despite his occupation ("industrial engineer") didn't have the means to produce a "weapon of mass destruction" (he was convicted under a law targeting "dirty bombs" [2]). I find his lawyer's defense that he (and his co-defendant) was entrapped by the FBI plausible.

In any case, is it really illegal to work out elaborate ways to kill people? Can you go to prison just because you have an overactive imagination? Or because you are really a bit of a cunt and don't care about other peoples' lives, or you hate a particular group of people, even though you've never actually harmed anyone?

Do we put people in prison just for talking shit?

_________

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-york-man-gets-30-years-in-pri...

[2] https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/new-york-man-gets-30-years-in-p...

Yes, poisoning was on my mind too. It reminded me of a dark & clever short story I read a long time ago, but cannot remember the author or title.

Setting: America circa early/mid 19th century (maybe late 18th?)

Plot (warning, spoilers): A timid shopkeeper is regularly bullied by the town drunk. The shopkeeper hires the drunk, who continues to abuse him, and now starts stealing from him too.

The shopkeeper sends him on an errand to pick up some goods from another town. The next day the bully is found dead, some distance down the road, still in the carriage he was driving.

The twist: Among the goods being shipped was a large quantity of wood alcohol (isopropyl for you nerds). In those days, wood alcohol was sold in small barrels, but for this large amount, the barrel is the same size used for grain alcohol. The bully had started drinking on his way back and, being illiterate, drank the wood alcohol thinking it was booze and killed himself.

Does anyone remember the author or title of this story?

>The twist: Among the goods being shipped was a large quantity of wood alcohol (isopropyl for you nerds).

Chemist-nerd here. Wood alcohol is methanol, not isopropanol. It is considerably more toxic.

Thanks, that makes more sense for the story.

After much searching, I found it— the story is “Bargain” by A. B. Guthrie. Originally published in 1952 as “Bargain at Moon Dance”.

I found this reprint of the original: https://classic.esquire.com/article/1952/10/1/bargain-at-moo...

Still a creepy story after all these years.

> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media

It's mildly amusing that you're clearly erudite enough to know about that rare usage, but still managed to typo it :)

(I'm not gloating or belittling - typoes affect the best of us!)

I don't see any typos in his post...?

In the sentence, the outcome of a murder is being put into effect, rather than the outcome is being altered or affected.

affect: to influence (someone or something)

effect: to cause to come into being

I can't find anything definitively stating "affect" to be incorrect and "effect" to be correct in this instance. I say they're interchangeable in this context.

Sorry, I edited my earlier outcome for clarity.

Here is the context again:

> Lately one of my luddite friends keeps mentioning how computers will soon kill us all. Perhaps to add to his torment, I like to retort that computers won't need to kill us, they'll just need to convince us to kill ourselves.

> Certainly there are many ways to affect that outcome via social media. I wonder what other tools the deepfake future will provide? Stealing the voice of a dead loved one could be used to great affect to push a troubled soul over the edge.

Anyway, are we talking about changing the death from being caused explicitly by computers to users being motivated by computers to kill themselves? I think the comment is instead talking about there being myriad ways computers could manipulate their users into killing themselves. It depends on the predicate of "that", but one construction seems more consistent.

Shouldn't the second "affect" also be "effect"?

It's somewhat ambiguous, but after rereading I agree that effect is probably more appropriate.

Effect is the right word, both times (once as verb and the second time as a noun).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20375233

> I say they're interchangeable in this context.

How can they be interchangeable when they mean radically different things?

Both sentences might be valid, and we might have no way to determine which one was meant, but the two are clearly not interchangeable.

Apologies. I generally think of affect as a verb and effect as a noun but that's not always the case. It sounded correct to me as I was typing it upon my porcelain writing chair.

No apologies necessary - like I said, typoes get the best of us, and their presence is no cause for shame.

Mandatory xkcd;

https://xkcd.com/326/

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