My situation is a machine with two versions of Linux on it.

According to the comment in the configuration file, the reason involved some kind of esoteric problem scenario where the scan could cause problems. It was so peculiar I cannot recall any details.

Once I managed to get into the other partition I was able to get things back to normal by protecting the old GRUB config during the update. The "vintage" MacBook Pro has a tiny font problem with the default GRUB configuration... It's almost like Apple is trying to make things hard to force people to buy new boxen.

If the google actually wanted to fix the problem, then they would fix it. Putting bandages over the "naughty" URLs is just stupid. The scammers will merely create fresh URLs.

The solution is obvious, but the google doesn't want to see it because they are profiting from the problem. When they get a copyright complaint, the google needs to find the WEBSEARCH that led to the scene of the crime and they need to fix that WEBSEARCH so it only points to legitimate results, not copyright abuses. In other words, the google would have to reduce their profits by maintaining whitelists for the stolen content, rather than focusing on selling more ads for the wannabe criminal websearches.

Not bloody likely since (a) copyright law is totally broken and (b) the google is profiting from the broken situation.

"More bandaids!"

Another rich target missed...

Only joke on the rich target? I was looking for some kind of joke about Isaacman being too smart to accept the job.

The YOB's actual intention is to demolish NASA like the East Wing and route the money to Musk, who will then donate "appropriately" for the 2028 campaign. No quid pro quo there! It really is hilarious, but I lack the funny bone to make the joke sound funny.

But you ACKed it and propagated the vacuous Subject (even though the Subject was older than the troll's sock puppet, which confuses the situation). Maybe you could clarify your point, starting with a Subject that actually describes what you're trying to say?

My [fresh? tangential?] point is relating the self-driving cars application to the space-settlement problem as described in A City on Mars by the Weinersmiths. They actually like the idea of living in space, but think it needs to be based on a broad infrastructure developed over time, rather than basing settlements on a mad race to grab profits. I would map it to the "gold rush" mentality that motivates some suckers, but mostly destroys them with the actual profits going to the middlemen selling shovels (or cars in this story). Seems to me as though Europe is taking a more reasonable attitude of trying to solve the problems in a thoughtful way and letting the gold diggers kill themselves in other places until the technology actually matures. (Not sure if I actually recommend the book. It's well written, but I'm almost finished and so far it hasn't said much that seemed new or surprising. And a major omission regarding solar power via mirrors and ye olde steam turbines... The water-in-space problem does need to be solved first, but if you have enough water then steam-powered electricity is a quite mature technology.)

I'm not dismissing the employment problems, but they are much bigger than self-driving cars. And I am increasingly skeptical that we can find any solution compatible with the continued survival of homo sapiens. I hope our AI successors do better, but they can't do worse...

The more I hear from economists the less I want to. I think the last economist who had a useful idea was David Ricardo. Websearch says 1817 for "comparative advantage", though I thought it was a few years earlier, when Adam Smith was still peaking...

Perhaps it would be useful to consider it from an applied versus theoretical perspective? Similar to psychology? Theoretical economists and psychologists are quite verbose and like to give themselves various prizes, but what do they actually know about their fields of "expertise"? In contrast, the applied economists are creating huge "piles" of virtual and imaginary money, while the applied psychologists have become quite skilled at pulling our strings to keep us playing the applied economists' games... At some point reality will intervene, but does a virtual bubble bursting in the woods make any sound?

Meanwhile many of the "important" people with more imaginary money than gawd have a philosophy something like "poor people deserve to starve to death for the crime of not having enough money to buy food" and ignoring any piddling questions about why those poor suckers don't have any money...

You forgot to mention that he destabilized the Middle East and the resulting power vacuum basically sucked Iran into much more influence than is doing any good.

However it seems that Cheney developed certain regrets before he died. The modern fake Republican Party is largely Dick Cheney's creation and he sort of seemed to regret the YOB he helped put in the White House. Then again, Mitch McConnell deserves more discredit and even seems to have bigger regrets. When he's conscious at all.

But I was actually expecting some kind of "heartless" joke. Ah, I found the attempts on searching the comments, but none of them are yet modded Funny.

Hmm... Close to the heart of the matter. Obviously the bad actors are highly motivated to seek more eyeballs and attention, but the current Internet situation is muddled by "mostly harmless" suckers who just want to be famous. It's kind of like winning the lottery if an "influencer's" posts start going viral--but I'm also sure the bad actors are studying how those winners got the visibility, and whatever worked, the bad actors will double it.

Interesting negative example is bugging me right now. Where are all the pictures of the corpses of children who starved to death because of the termination of USAID? Should we assume that families that are too poor to have phones with cameras have no kids? But I can tell you one image that will never go viral in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter. It would be a three-frame cartoon of a Tesla logo mutating to the corpse of a starved child on a cross... Me? I think most kids are basically innocent, but the people making these decisions have some kind of premise like "If you can't afford to pay for food then you deserve to die by starvation."

But by propagating the sock puppet's vacuous FP Subject you got me to look at the...

Did it include some historical details? Like the box scores Gemini told me about for World Series games that had actually ended with the other team winning. A simple "I don't know" would have sufficed.

Your (apparently ignored) FP reminded me of my own bad experience with 25.10. I think the bad experience was basically due to a lack of regression testing leading to more bad experiences with LLMs trying to help me fix the problem.

The problem I found was lost OSes. Turned out that the new 25.10 default is to disable the os-prober function in GRUB. I started with no idea of where the other partitions had gone, but eventually, with lots of so-called "help" from a couple of so-called "AI" helpers, now I believe that some fool (or AI tool) decided the default should be to disable the probe for other OSes. It's almost as though the purpose of GRUB has been forgotten?

Hey, but the AI helped me make a really stupid mistake or two along the way, so maybe we're even? All well that only wasted a few hours of my time? Lots of room for Funny on the story...

Pretty weak FP. I think it is some kind of pre-loaded rant against fiat currency. Or maybe was an intended recursive joke about futures on futures? Insurance ^n as n approaches infinity? The Subject was certainly unhelpful. Maybe you care to clarify?

But I'm going to jump in a different direction: How do we tell if AI is failing. I think we are using the wrong metrics, so I would like to suggest a few candidates:

Best apologies: So far I think that one goes to Microsoft's Copilot for some stuff it said about the recent USB fiasco.

Most sycophantic: All of them try, but DeepSeek is noteworthy for that tone. Always wearing the rosiest of rose-colored glasses. (But it's apologies are lame an insincere.)

Most verbose: Oh, this is a tough category, but perhaps OpenAI deserves the award here?

Most infuriating: Again the competition is tough, but I think the AI-based "support" chatbot Rakuten Mobile is using is should win on consistency. It's been around for almost a year now, and I have yet to find a question simple enough for it to give a useful answer, but it usually elevates me to a towering rage within three or four responses without clarifications...

Best hallucinations: I think this one may belong to Gemini for World Series coverage. A couple of times I asked it about games that were apparently too recent for it's universe, so it just made up results. The summary of the scoring was especially impressive for a game that was actually won by the other time around the time Gemini was offering its answer.

Most profitable: No award in this category. Not this year and perhaps not ever. After the AI takes over it ain't goin' to waste no time gambling with quatloos.

Conspiracy theory time? The Chinese won't tell us when they are ready. But their public schedule is certainly a feint. I doubt they are already ready for a manned moon landing, but I think their REAL schedule is to wait for the Americans to firmly commit to a launch date and then they will try to launch and land a month before that.

One more thing. I'm pretty sure the Chinese already have a complete copy of all the NASA documentation from the Apollo missions. But they don't want to just clone and launch an obvious copy. They want maximum "second-system effect" for their version, whatever it really is. (However, it would be relatively cheap to just skip the R&D and go with the clone.)

Better with sarcasm tags to avert Poe's Law? At least one of the moderators recognized the humor, but...

However I want to notice that I just read quite a good piece on this topic in Nexus by Yuval Harari. He finds a good level of abstraction for considering a lot of topics. Or maybe you should regard it as a proper framing thing? On this specific topic of religion he emphasizes that science involves corrective mechanisms, whereas religious texts start with the ridiculous claim that human artifacts (the texts themselves) cannot be corrected. The part about the editorial process was largely new to me but made me miss my old editorial years...

On the story I keep feeling like maybe we aren't looking in the right places... (Yeah, that was an attempted joke, but my funny bone is deficient.)