Comment by voidpointer

I wouldn't like to guess either way about this particular article, but it's possible many really are people. Certainly there were plenty of online commenters for news articles reacting in exactly this sort of way long before there were LLMs.

Let’s say it wasn’t a joke, who would name their explosive device bomb?

> Awful joke. There have to be at least some consequences for the kid, like getting banned for flying United for 10 years.

Take a step back. You yourself describe it as a joke. Are you really saying that the quality of the joke ("awful") should result in the origin of the joke (a kid, even!) should be banned from a major air carrier for 10 years? Does this really seem like a proportional response?

And this doesn't even begin to consider another possibility: the device was named what it was named in a completely different setting, and the owner just forgot about it. That makes it not even a joke, just forgetfulness.

Was any of this a good idea? No, probably not, but people need to calm down.

Are you really trying to equate murder with naming a Bluetooth device and that a child should have their life ruined on the same scale as if they were equivalent in impact or intent, with little knowledge of the actual situation or intent?

Weird how you want kids to be punished for stupid mistakes. If you drive, you probably put more people lives in danger last week than that kids fitness tracker. When you speed, you put lives in danger (statistical fact, none of that “but I am good driver crap”) — will you ask for the death penalty if a cop sees you going 1mph over?

Or do you only want strong punishment for others as is usually the case with such opinions?

There is something deeply stupid about assuming that naming your bluetooth device "bomb" is a real threat, let alone that it's going to be a real bomb. Reminds me of all those post Columbine "zero tolerance" policies where kids were punished for marginal doodles of guns. Or the "twitter joke trial". It's as is people are string matching for threat shaped words, not the semantics of a threat.

Mind you, this gets harder when powerful people have got in the habit of making mostly-joking threats on social media themselves.

I’ve never understood this logic. If we want to treat people who are under 18 as adults in certain legal circumstances, then we should just establish a new age or set a concrete exception based on the law violated. Making special exceptions on a case by case basis where people have to argue about it, especially when it demonstrably affects certain demographics more than others, is a terrible way to operate.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say you probably don’t have kids. If your teenager got in trouble for a messed up “joke” like this and the result was a criminal proceeding where they’re tried as an adult you’d be (rightfully) crying that it’s too much.

Also what does columbine have to do with this? Unless your implication is that any kid around the age of 17 should be treated as a potential school shooter.

> Throw the book at him, he should have known better.

What book!? The book of laws that outlaw jokes in bad taste potentially made years ago, outside the context of air travel altogether, only to be forgotten about and accidentally brought into the context of air travel where one can conceivably think of laws that make those jokes problematic?

Come on!

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