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).

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...

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.

*sigh*

s/quite machine/quite mature/

Reminds me of another theory: Maybe they (the company selling whatever) get some kind of free insurance on payment if you use a credit card?

Sounds interesting but I doubt it's available here and also sounds like it has gaming elements to repel me.

No checking accounts here. It displays the Visa logo and I just use it in exactly the same way as I used my old "local" credit card. That was from a different network than Mastercard or Visa and I think I may have once or twice had some trouble with international purchases, but pretty sure I encountered no problems with the "Visa-branded" debit card, even for international stuff. Until last month, when I hit the "credit card only" wall. I had also received a couple of "free" credit cards over the years, at least one under the MasterCard brand, but I never used them and just cancelled them because of the risk of changes with new charges.

I forgot to mention regarding the grocery store games that I rarely use a fifth grocery store, which is actually the closest one, because I don't like their loyalty card game. Also, I might have implied that I was using the cards of all four stores, but actually I'm only playing with three of their cards. However I buy more stuff from that fourth store than the closest fifth one... The store I use most is the one that seems to be most consistent with the best prices--and the fewest weird sales.

YAC for "Yet Another Cryptocoin" but the real joke is with DIY iris scanning for the masses. Were this thing to catch on, where would it end?

"First they came for proving your identity for international currency transfers that might be money laundering, then they came for iris scanning before you can get a soft drink out of the vending machine..."

Oh, yes. Almost forgot to say fsck the cryptocoin. EVERY cryptocoin. OF course it's already too late because the cryptocurrency has already fscked us.

By the way I've abandoned the solution space of trying to prove any identity is actually human. My last failed fantasy involved interactive timelines created with personalized trivia quizzes exchanged between the human participants in the events of the shared timelines. The idea was to create networks of identities with anchor points on real human beings. Can't recall detecting any interest or comprehension or even any questions. But after the usual pondering I see two fatal problems. One is that AIs will be able to break into the networks by stealing the identities of actual human beings, either by captured the identities of deceased people or by working between networks. For example, I am no longer on Facebook or in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter (and it is even possible that my personal information was deleted as promised), but if I became validated on some other network, perhaps the new social website Jimmy Wales is working on (currently called "Trust Cafe"), then that information could be tapped and used to create fake identities on the websites I don't use, and then those fake identities could be used to validate any number of fake identities.

However the bigger problem is that there are plenty of people who are already more stupid than the current AIs. The human beings are not getting any smarter (and actually I've seen too much evidence they are getting more stupid over time) while the AIs are rapidly seeming more and more intelligent.

"Any test you can pass, AI can pass better" with apologies to "Anything you can do, AI can do better" with apologies to the ancient musical and derivative movie with "Anything you can do, I can do better". AI can do anything better than me?

And just think how much funnier this joke could have been if I asked an AI to "help polish" it. But I'm standing on my human fingers and I type again fsck the AIs even as I contemplate my next succumbence to the the temptations. And there it was! I had to websearch the spelling of the (rare) noun form and the AI jumped in to "help".