Really? You say you "respect" comedians, but only confuse the issue with your focus. Don't you understand how humor works?

My view is that you can't understand a reality-based joke unless you understand the foundation of the joke in reality. Or another formulation would be to say that not understanding the joke is a clear signal you need to do more research.

But by the success standards of today's Slashdot, that was apparently an excellent FP, spanning roughly half of the discussion. It even has a bare "insightful" moderation and merely needs a second to be officially ranked as offering insight. But by my primary standard of success, I would say it was terrible. No Funny reactions, even though the theme of the story is supposed to be related to humor.

The insightful-level problem is the financial model. Or rather the lack of any good financial models that reward expensive and difficult truths in competition with cheap and easy lies. I did a bunch of searching on related keywords and came up with nothing. Apparently the discussion never went there. I might be surprised if I looked at the moderation by categories, but the trend of Slashdot these years is to rate too many no-insight comments as insightful, sometimes ignoring their humor, with only a smattering in the other categories. Generally a waste of time to go there--though I still check for Funny in the bigger discussions. Feels like a pointless habit. (Another form of OCD?)

So time to appeal to an actual comedian? What did Mark Twain say again? Something about truth putting on its shoes while the lies have gone around the world... (Of course I could look it up, but now I'm trying to minimize my exposures to the brain-damaging AIs--even though it is the kind of research question that usually gets an "honest" response.) But Twain was probably thinking about the speed of the telegraph. The quantitative difference offered by today's Web might astound him. But probably not. He was remarkably cynical and often seemed way ahead of his times... (Just now enjoying the original Huckleberry Finn book. I'm up to the section where they took two con artists aboard the raft. Many notes of similarity with the YOB... The less things change the more they stay the same.)

So anyway, I should just jump back to my conclusion: The root of the problem is that news as entertainment can't possibly compete with entertainment as entertainment. Facebook. I rest my case.

(Yeah, I know books are much too passé for today's Slashdot, but I have to recommend Facebook by Steven Levy. Or I could go with the flow and bring AI into it. How about an AI analysis of the devolution of Slashdot discussions over the decades. Maybe the current owners (whoever they are) can make some money by selling the data for training an AI, subject to a clause that they get feedback on the trend analysis. (Oh, wait. Slashdot lacks any financial model to fix anything no matter what problems the trend analyses expose.))

First light of visible comment in the anti-discussion.

Generally appreciate your comments though you don't get as much Funny as you used to (it seems), but can't figure out the context and don't feel like reading more AC gibberish or propagating the vacuous Subject.

So the compromise is to attempt to blend your topic with my raging earworm of the day?

Been speculating on whether or not the pen is mightier than the sword. Seems to depend on circumstances. However the YUGE Orange Buffoon has dedicated his entire life to the proposition that lies are mightier than the truth. I still don't think so, even though the YOB has somehow managed to continue floating above the piles of debris and bankruptcies he's left behind. You [ArchieBunker] suggest legal remedies, but now I'm convinced the YOB has run out the clock on "justice". These days the YOB is merely doodling (and drooling?) on the details of his "non compos mentis" defense.

(Sorry, but an explicit link back to the ostensible story seems a bit too much of a stretch, even for me. Seems it would have to detour via the "son of" nepotism thing...)

(In related meta-news, I just ran another AI test. Gemini won this time, with Copilot coming in second. But it would be interesting to run an AI analysis of the trends in Slashdot comments and discussions over the decades. Some metrics may be trending up, but mostly the trends seem (to me) to be downward. Especially for Funny?)

For whatever it's worth, I think Gemini had the best response, though there was one element of Copilot's response that was also worth considering. The other AIs gave responses that I regarded as inferior...

On balance I'm going to proceed with caution, but that's another old joke.

New bug in Slashdot? So far seems limited to the Journal?

NAK

Mod parent funny with insightful overtones, but my resonating thought of the day is about the races through life. I also considered "Questions Beyond Questions" as a Subject, but that's a bit of a logical chain of thought and these days those feel out of fashion around here... I still have to cite Facebook by Steven Levy as contributing or perhaps even driving my bicycle chains of thought on these topics just now... Strong recommendation.

So as it applies to this story, my question is how many ponies does Claude deserve when rated against other generative AIs? Resorting to human metaphors, but I would (currently) argue that many successful people are basically one-trick pones, and maybe that is true of the AIs, too. They excel in a particular area and focus their efforts there. Meanwhile, most people are not very successful, so either their trick is not valuable or they have none. (Perhaps just lacking the motivation to develop a trick? Or too busy earning a living?) But the poster children tend to be perceived as multi-trick ponies--and that is the pitch they are trying to sell us about Claude and its "friends and peers".

Still sticking with the human metaphor, but "I don't think so." Especially on the best-in-the-world stage I don't think there are any multi-trick ponies. However there are two cases where it looks like there are. I'm going to use the main example that pervades the above book, the people who create, run, or just own large, dominant, and "successful" corporations. Some of them seem to be winning many races, but I think that is a false impression, even a delusion. It's mostly due to two edge cases. First there are some one-trick ponies with the trick of recognizing other ponies with valuable tricks. Each time they pick another winner they get a bigger stake to invest in more ponies. Second there are some one-trick ponies that win their race and then deliberately focus their winnings on buying more ponies. In the first case they probably pick more winners, but in the second case they may start with a bigger stake... (Based on the book, I think Zuck is on the second edge.)

Now trying to drop the metaphor and trying to consider if Claude is the multi-trick pony it claims to be: "I don't think so." However most of my AI experience has not been with Claude, so maybe the other ones are misleading me with their frequent "no-trick pony" answers? Perhaps someone with extensive experience with Claude will be so good as to convince me of the error or my ways? ("I do think so.") If the AIs have a trick, it seems to be sounding plausible, but with nothing underneath. (Recently thought of a new test case involving storage management... But that pony seems to be getting away from me.)

Checks are traceable. These days the bribes are generally crypto of some sort. At least that's what I've heard...

Not really worth the requote against the attempted censorship, but I sort of (vaguely) wonder what the moderation pretense is. The reference to Monday?

Really close to a NAK for your tone, but I'll just call it yet another example of "winner-side bias". However I think Altman is on the verge of entering loser territory, and of course no one is ever interested in learning any lessons from losers. Partial exception for some former "big enough" winners?

I haven't used RSS in a long time. But as I started thinking about it more from the perspective of the imaginary "perfect" website perspective, I got to thinking about ending each bucked of things with a summary and then some options for the next bucket...

Not sure if I can make the idea more clear with a more concrete example, but above I suggested that I would be looking at a bucket of 10 topics. Now I think it should also have a visible timer so I can be aware of how much time I've spent at looking at (or replying to) stuff in the current bucket, since a lot of the problem is time management. Then at the bottom there would be a "Next bucket" button and several other buttons that might say stuff like "More from reliable sources", "More from new sources", and "More from ongoing discussions", but I could pick based on the statistics information that would appear just below, where it might report "These five reliable source items selected from a current pool of 75 items, these three new items selected from a pool of 275 items, and these two discussions were the most active of four discussions you were involved in yesterday."

You're just feeding an obvious troll. Or is it some kind of personal thing? You enjoy pointing out what an idiot the identity is?

On the story, my new Subject is another failed joke attempt from the other meaning of solution. However I really have given up on personally contributing to solutions, even in cases where the solutions seem pretty obvious. I dare say even in cases where the obvious solutions appear to have natural paths to Step 4: PROFIT.

So now I'm just looking for an existing implementation of a solution--and not actually expecting any leads from Slashdot. That's where all the missing slashdotters have gone, long time passing? But for the sake of theoretical amusement:

Anyone know a website where rather than an infinite scroll (often in both directions, with old stuff at the bottom and fresh stuff appearing at the top), there are user-controllable sets of information? You can read and consider the current set as long as you want before deciding to request a fresh block. In my imagination, the set might have ten entries and I would be able to say something like five sources that I have already established are credible, three slots to be filled by selections of the larger pool of interesting stuff, and two for discussions that I've participated in. Time is again a central constraint, so each group might be out of sync... (Most of the theory is based on observations of LinkedIn and Slashdot with influence from the Facebook history by Steven Levy...)

That was the traditional day for Sports Day because it was supposed have the best weather. However recently it started moving around a bit so it's always the Monday of a three-day weekend...

Mod parent funny, though the story already produced a good harvest of humor.

Coincidentally I'm currently reading Facebook by Steven Levy. Quite informative and insightful, and triggers many strange thoughts... One related to this story in the form of some leftover questions:

Will I live long enough to meet an ASI?
What will I ask it?
What kind of answers will it give me?
Will it say anything nice to me or just file me with the rest of the human garbage?

Funny thoughts about the last question if it wants to be nice. I'm sure it could use its super-intelligence to constrain the definition of "nice" in such as way a to permit a positive answer. But why would it?

I'm including verbal behaviors, but your reply seems content free. Your free-floating opinion is of course valid as your opinion, but based on what evidence?