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Comment Re:Always has been. (Score 1) 63

In spite of the UID, you sound new around here.

But the joke I was looking for was about his/Reddit's contribution to the enshitification.

I actually started networking with audio modems and BBSes and later found usenet. Yeah, Eliza existed, but wasn't fooling anyone or passing any Turing tests. However near the end of those days one of my friends wrote a pretty impressive travesty generator, and you could argue that sort of thing was the great-granddad 10 times removed of ChatGPT and f[r]iends. (With the obligatory apologies to Rocky and Bullwinkle for the animated version. (Anyone have a URL for that bit of the cartoon? Only a few seconds long, but I can't find a short one. Boris did it, right?))

Comment Re:Good work! [But whose?] (Score 1) 64

Did you read the entire story, follow the links, and also "do your own research"?

No, I'm not going to bother with so much work, but on the face of it, it seems the story just says they "captured" some of the loot. I'm pretty sure they didn't go to Cambodia and arrest anyone and don't even want to speculate how the passwords and account information were obtained. Near as I can tell, what the story means is that they were able to transfer a bunch of cryptocurrency into their control, but I don't even believe in the reported value of the Bitcoins.

Possibly related anecdote? Lots of recent warnings from the Japanese police about phone calls from fake police. However I can't even tell what's going on there. Might be reduced to personal offense because the police hate it when scammers work off of their reputation? And the international aspect may be making it difficult to prosecute?

Comment Re:The Cool Teacher (Score 1) 134

Did you get that joke from TikTok? If not, I'm not buying the fries. (After all the levels of negation, I'm not sure whether or not I ordered the fries...)

However there must be some transmission primary source of the viral meme. My first guess was TikTok, but no mention in the discussion. Perhaps yet more evidence of the irrelevance of Slashdot? I knew I was an old fuddy duddy, but I didn't want to project to everyone around here.

Solution approach time? Confirm the deaths of some of the old UIDs and reissue them to some hip youngsters as a kind of enlistment incentive or bonus? Why would anyone "fashionable" want to join Slashdot now with a 7- or 8-digit UID? Or maybe Slashdot is up to 9 digits?

Comment Re:Dude earns his mansions (Score 2) 27

Xi is a lot of things, but a tinpot dictator he isn't. I despise everything the regime running China stands for, but if we're going to look at the PRC's ability to maintain itself and even expand itself economically and scientifically. Xi may die tomorrow, but the PRC isn't going anywhere. If progress is measured in research, have you paid attention to how much basic research is coming out of China these days, as compared to the West, which seems bound and determined to decimate academic capacity, or hand it over to a bunch monomaniac billionaires.

Comment Re: The base model costs $1,599 (Score 1) 72

You made an unfair comparison and then declared victory. I mean sure, if I plug my MacBook into a $20000 battery backup UPS I can probably get a few weeks out of the fucking thing, but that's not really any kind of rational comparison at all. Out of the box, MacBooks having some of the best battery performance of any laptop. You're comparison was the equivalent of "Oh sure, your Mustang can go 200mph, but if I take my Honda Accord and weld a rocket engine to the back, I can beat the sound barrier!

Comment Re: Almost like (Score 1) 95

I think actually charging him and putting him in prison would have been better. But the Biden administration, and Garland in particular, were cowards and were afraid of creating a civil war. While Trump behind bars may have been able to win an election, and his imprisonment may have caused some sort of general MAGA uprising, the US Government has literally crushed and burned to the ground entire states that were in rebellion, so this all comes down to Biden, Garland and the DOJ being cowards, and not meaningfully taken Trump to task, and leave it to states to try to pick up the slack while they dithered.

Comment Re:Seems like a black and white issue (Score 0, Troll) 95

I'm so very confused. I thought NPR was the fakest of fake news, a left wing Pravda outfit deliberately spreading misinformation to hurt Donald Trump... and thus America.

It's almost as if MAGA is comprised of morons and liars, who literally said anything to get Trump back into office, and deflect from his, and their, lies.

Comment Chinese reverse imperialism in file format! (Score 2) 141

You're feeding the diversionary sock puppet and propagating its stupid Subject. We don't need to increase the world's supply of stupidity. We need to find a way to convert anonymous stupidity into useful work. That would be the big victory against entropy!

On the story I think the point should be the reverse-imperialism. The Chinese government could have gone with ODF, but they deliberately preferred to insist on doing it their way--and they apparently have even gone the extra kilometer to annoy the rest of the world. I wouldn't be too surprised if they decided to drop the metric system, too, replacing it in the Middle Kingdom with some new system based on traditional Chinese units...

Funny anecdote about the triumph of Microsoft in Japan. Perhaps related to a major defeat in China, too, since I've heard that vertical Chinese writing has mostly been abandoned in China... Pre-computer context in Japan is that the traditional writing system for Japanese was from top to bottom and then continuing to the next column on the left, so the columns go from right to left on the page. In the Meiji period they started experimenting with some horizontal writing, but they did it from right to left. Later on they switched horizontal writing so it goes from left to right. But all of this is kind of weird because when they write individual characters, the primary direction is mostly from left to right with top to bottom kind of mixed in... However the basic idea makes most sense as a bunch of boxes to fill in with characters, and there are standard pages for writing drafts (by hand) that are laid out that way.

When computers came along, the Japanese developed a word processor called Ichitaro that "thought about" the document in the same way. I used several versions of Ichitaro during those years. It was closely linked to an input conversion system called ATOK for entering the Chinese characters (using the monstrous Shift-JIS encodings). After several years of struggle against Microsoft, the Word approach won out, sort of, though there are still places where vertical writing is used in Japan... (Most of my Japanese reading is vertical, and I still think that makes the horizontal Japanese tests kind of unfair or unrealistic.)

(So can anyone explain why there are two Nihongo Noryoku Shiken with different English names?)

[Now has anyone written a good joke about the story?]

Comment What's that got to do with the price of tea in... (Score 1) 49

...China, obviously.

Looks like you didn't want to feed the troll, even though you got me to look to see if there was any connection between your comment and the coward's. However you forgot to change the sock puppet's Subject. Sometimes the bogus Subject appears to be the only objective.

Actually, I should have gone for funny, as in:

What's that got to do with the price of tea in California?

How dare you try to cancel your subscription to the fancy tea of the month club?!?

Comment The joke is the owners? (Score 1) 131

Funny small world story. I actually walked across a Ferrari today. Yeah, the proper idiom is "ran across", but I was walking at the time. (Can't really recall if I've ever seen one before that wasn't in a dealer's showroom, though I recently spotted a second BYD in the wild.)

Out on my daily walk when I noticed an unusual looking car by the side of the street ahead, so I crossed the street to get a better look. When I got there it turned out to be a Ferrari. And the proud new owner was telling a couple of friends about the car.

Crazy and funny. No place around here where such a car can be driven at any significant speed. By here I mean the entire country.

Disclaimer needed? More than half my life since I stopped driving. Only ride in a car a few times a year, and some years get skipped.

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