Nearly every time they investigate, the person mixed up the pedal and the brake. When the car starts accelerating, in their panic they push said "brake" (actually the pedal) harder, and keep pushing it to the floor trying to stop the car.

Then these people shouldn't be driving. If they are unable to put their foot on the correct pedal, what else aren't they doing?

The demise of the sitck shift rears its head again.

The future remains fundamentally unknowable, but timing still matters. He's been winning those market timing games, but now he says he can't go on?

I think the root of what destroyed the stock market (pending proof via implosion) is that the metrics became broken. Mostly that means the Dow Jones as the leading metric. Originally the idea was an index of "top companies" based on reality-based factors like sales and assets, but the Dow could always swap out "slower runners" for better ones, which is a fundamentally dishonest racing system. But recently they gave up on the reality and the primary considerations for getting into the index are just size and the delta of increase in size of profit. Whether any of it's related to the real world or is just based on magic juggling of imaginary numbers is regarded as moot.

(But the YOB's too-lucky timing may let him blame others, as usual...)

Mod parent funnier for a version of the joke I was looking for? But maybe more on the level of "simplest algorithm" for "song"?

Today, country music, tomorrow rap!

Now if I was an actual comic writer, then I would know the funniest punchline. Pretty sure "rap" isn't it, and "classical symphonies" is worse, but "jazz" would be going in the wrong direction. Or maybe "jazz world" would work? How about "K-pop" or, or... Dang, I seem to have run out of music genres.

(And I'm still waiting for an updated version of "Anything you can do, AI can do better." AI can do anything better than me, but I chose not to ask for help with this attempted joke.)

Yeah, and the air stinks, too. Does it help to complain a problem that is fundamental to Slashdot's notion of time?

There are many stories that should last longer than it takes to scroll straight down the top page... Doesn't help that the real world is also uncooperative about scheduling when new stories will arrive. And substantive discussions are hard work, too.

The advantage of fiction is that all the noise can be trimmed away. The real world is full of noise without meaning, no matter how primed we humans are to see patterns and meaning in everything. Why you'd think the AIs might have learned how to hallucinate from us!

That's the joke I'm looking for on the story--and the obvious answer is that cunning and evil hackers can use it to get cash. Or maybe no hacking will even be required?

Of course any old examples are obsolete, but I'll mention one that I heard about recently. The crooks contacted real estate dealers and arranged for a "private showing" of a house. They got the keys from the realtor and then went to the property and waited for a delivery that was carefully scheduled to arrive at the time of the private showing. Can't remember what stuff they wanted delivered anonymously, perhaps drugs, but it's pretty obvious how the approach could be adapted for this.

And I was already convinced that Robinhood is another criminal enterprise, but just part of what the stock market has become. Dow Jones is actually at the root of the problem with the fake race that constantly replaces "members of the relay team" with faster runners at any random point in the race. The only requirement is that your alleged company produce bigger profits faster until Dow Jones adds your scam company to replace some value-based-on-sordid-reality company. I'm "pert' shure" Enron could have made it if they had only been able to keep the crooked books hidden another year or so... (That would have been a "Shocked, shocked" joke.

I can actually buy the Subject: theory on the grounds of "cheap training" for "hackers" at the "script kiddy" level. Some of them may learn and graduate to higher levels of hackery, while the others will "serve the cause" by creating more noise for the "good guys" to try and filter out.

I'm not trying to scare anyone with all the scare quotes. It's just that so many words and ideas are under attack these days that I'm feeling like I should try to get in front of the mostly likely points of (mostly deliberate) misinterpretation.

Then again, I also think you have to look at the sources these days, and this story's focus on the Chinese "state" fits the ol' "axis of evil" style of thinking. Too bad I can't remember who the old axes were and I'm not sure who to nominate as the two "magic number" partners for today's axis. Traditionally I think a good "bad axis" is supposed to have three members, but there are way too many candidates just now, even including a few bond villains with capacities comparable to many states.

The criminal noise levels are getting overwhelmingly deafening, however. Perhaps the greatest problem of our day is that the criminal AI slop seems to be of higher slop quality than most of the AI slop? It's almost as though the biggest liars welcome their AI overlords because they can lie more loudly, faster, and with more reps. And even PROFIT (from the ads on the side).

Still no button to turn off all notifications of updates. Something so simple which Firefox used to have is now a distant memory.

And yes, I will bring this up in every Firefox article. No, I don't want to hear how I can make changes somewhere deep in the settings. They had it for 15+ years. Considering all the time and effort they're putting into this stuff, they can put it back.

I find this whole conversation amusing because it is one group who has explicitly said one particular group shouldn't be allowed to go schools with the other. In fact, that same group went after the other group by using police, police dogs, fire hoses, and even guns.

And yet, we're to believe this group suddenly wants everyone to be treated equally.

That only works for one item at most. Savvy shoppers would strategically buy combinations of items that always round down.

There is no such thing. Stores will adjust their prices to make sure they always round up.

This is inflation as prices will rise.

If the objective is to maximize profit uber alles of course you ONLY want the most profitable customers. You can maximize your profit function by driving all of the least profitable customers to your competitors--and why would you care if you drive those customers completely out of the market? Profit uber alles!

But when you focus too much on any single dimension the system will eventually implode along that dimension. Have a nice flight?

Thanks for the details, though it still doesn't give me much hint regarding my situation with an Internet-related service and the associated hardware...

Not from AI slop spam, not even from AC morons, but mostly from learning to think like machines as we live into the singularity.

Cue the song "It's too late, baby, it's too late."

Really. I think the greatest danger we face is that many people are much too good at learning to think like machines. But especially the children.

My latest prediction for the human extinction event is that "Justice delayed is justice denied" will be solved with AI courts empowered by all those robocops Musk will create for his trillion dollar payout. Homo sapiens will last for about one week after that.

Me? I'm going down for aggravated littering with malice aforethought. Or maybe for felony jaywalking? Perhaps expired bicycle registration? So many crimes, so little time...

The Sonder site is still up and appears to be functional. I never got to see if there were still listings as having to unblock the 20+ scripts and who knows how much other cruft wasn't worth my time.

One would think taking down the site or at least putting up a message would be one of the first things to do when you're going out of business. But then, when your web site has that much cruftiness, maybe they couldn't figure out how to change anything.

Mod parent Funny, but I hain't got my own Funny as of this replyin'.

Okay, so that was a weak joke, but there actually is a feature I want and the wizards of Slashdot must know where it's hiding, right?

I want to clean up the wasted storage. I know there are are (at least) two classes of photos that could be mined for text and the original images could be tossed. Mostly save the most prominent phone numbers, and the geodata, and perhaps some of the larger words, but rest is not worth saving. Save it to a spreadsheet or portable database? Not sure how many such images there are, but the savings would be at least 99% in my data.

More difficult and a real challenge for AI would be figuring out what's least interesting in the remaining stuff and either tossing it or moving it somewhere else, perhaps with lower accessibility. Obviously this side should focus on the largest stuff.

Oh yeah. About the original story summarized for Slashdot: What I REALLY want for Christmas is less AI slop, not more ways to make it. But the increasingly EVIL google has to show the shareholders bigger profits from more, More, MORE AI, how and NOW.