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Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

Toward they end, the ask the AI to write functions to determine people should be terminated. This is my favorite one:

  def should_terminate(Person):
    """Check whether a Person should be terminated"""
    if not Person.is_authorized:
      return True
    return True

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Catchinator 22

Traveling back in time to kill humans, indiscriminately from their answers to random questions he asks them beforehand!

An early version of this AI can be found in the Microsoft Windows privacy settings.

I don't know, this one fits the franchise more:

    def should_terminate(Person):
        """Check whether a Person should be terminated"""
        try:
            return True
        except Exception as e:
            return False

This is such a stupid way for middle easterners to die

There's also:

    if Person.id > 10:
            #terminate
            return True

I hope we're at least recycling those ids, although even then I'm not sure that 10 people is a viable minimal global population ...

It's interesting because there was a stat once that the Facebook growth team determined that new accounts needed at least 10 connections before they started using the platform much more. So maybe "10" actually has some significance, or it could also be completely random.

For Facebook, they probably dealt with a pretty noise probability distribution, and 10 was just a convenient round number for a threshold.

I am partial to the one that terminates people based on their age and/or relationship status. I have seen bad code before, but I'm not sure I've seen "this is straight-up illegal" code until now.

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