Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Will it help you avoid paying money to the google? (Score 1) 23

Not an unreasonable FP, but now you can reply to yourself to clarify what you mean. Perhaps under a more thoughtful and substantive Subject? I'm too happily retired to care about your apparent focus, and I don't see how to make any more jokes under the current conditions so thoroughly dominated by Poe's Law, so I'm switching to a practical topic:

The google is nagging me, even leaning on me, to buy some storage. But "Who steals my data, steals trash." I'm quite sure that my stored data is strongly dominated by worthless garbage. Will the google's AI help me throw away the trash?

I didn't think so.

However, I'm sure there is at least one large category of images that could be reduced to a few hundred bytes per image. This is actually the kind of task AI is good for, but "Don't be evil" has been completely redefined now. It's a Level 3 lie, but "evil" now means "anything that might impede or reduce the google's profits".

So I'll just start throwing away stuff at random. And feeling even more disgusted with the google and even more eager to go ANYWHERE else.

Wait a minute. I finally did think of a joke. Hilarious to remember my positive sentiments about the google of yore. So different from today's sentiments towards one of the truly great corporate cancers.

Comment Re: America's electricy prices compared to whose? (Score 1) 71

Your grasp of economics is so deep.

So how would you like to buy a nice bridge? Only slightly used by a little old lady who crossed it to go to church on Sundays.

You remind me of a CFO I used to work with. Harvard MBA, so he must have been a genius. Can't understand how the company went bankrupt. I'm sure there was no causal link, but I had left long before that... I got too tired of taking care of problems that had been omitted from the business plan...

Comment America's electricy prices compared to whose? (Score 0) 71

So far no mention of the Chinese elephant in the room? Also curious about the European situation. Or should I report on the increasingly bleak Japanese situation as regards electricity supplies?

One thing about renewable power like solar and wind is that you may have "free" excess capacity just because the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. For a lot of the AI training stuff, that can be scheduled when the power is available and thus lower the electricity demand from the data centers for AI training... You don't need to worry about storing the electricity if you have some lower-priority stuff scheduled to use it immediately.

Comment Tesla is so funny! (Score 1) 122

Why funny? Because I think it would be funny if someone made a special version of the Tesla logo. Look close and you'd see it's actually a starving child with extended arms. One version could be a plastic logo cover for the hood ornament on Tesla cars.

I also considered the option of a little note to stick under the wiper of a parked Tesla: "Are you pro-life? If so, why do you drive a car linked with starving innocent children to death?"

Of course I'm just joking and I'd never actually do such a thing. Or maybe I'm not joking and I just believe that no insurance company would cover a Tesla unless the owner has a parking place with surveillance cameras? But I don't think you could pay me enough to support any Musk enterprise now. No joke.

Comment We haven't reached peak stupidity yet (Score 1) 73

How fast can we make things worse by burning more fossil fuel? The answer may surprise your children, but not your grandchildren who will be sadly too familiar with the mess we've created for them.

In related news: Bears as in a plague of bears. Not a simple and direct relationship, but they have certainly become a massive nuisance in Japan. New record for human deaths, apparently because the beech trees had a really bad year resulting in lots of extra hungry bears. However what surprised me the most was an estimate of 4,200 bears already "culled" this year. I was checking on the base as the government announced new policies that essentially call for war against the bears and wondered how bad it could get...

Yesterday saw a "Funny" video of a big bear demolishing a bear trap. Smarter than the average bear?

Comment Re:Surprising! (Score 1) 59

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

Comment Story reminds me of the Jimmy Carr joke... (Score 1) 59

He has a joke "You know I can see you" that he targets at live audience members who act like they are watching television.

Headline of the story is not helpful. Should have been "in-tv-cameras" or "cameras-with-TVs"...

But now I'm wondering if TikTok can watch back? Or is this just an idea for a fresh form of app perversion? You didn't notice that the ToS gives us the right to capture everything we can get from your front and back cameras, plus you gave us permission to use AI to search for the funniest bits and post those candid-camera videos online. I imagine a business model where people can claim 1% of the profits for their contributions, assuming they can actually prove the linkage... But of course such a highly ethical company will be laundering all of the money through various jurisdictions and it turns out there are no profits! (PROFIT!)

Topic certainly seems to have room for some Funny, though I'm not holding my breath waiting for today's Slashdot to deliver it.

Comment Re:Short AAPL (Score 1) 65

https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/14/new-iphone-pocket-now-available-to-order-but-its-selling-out-fast/

"Many of the iPhone Pocket color and size combinations are already sold out, though."

https://www.apple.com/shop/product/hs8j2zm/a/iphone-pocket-by-issey-miyake-short-black

Since the article was posted, all variations are sold out online.

Not as bad a call as the original Slashdot take on the iPod, but just goes to show that Slashdotters are not an important demographic.

Comment Re:Honest man [and smart timing, too?] (Score 1) 65

Not sure how much I concur. There's also the possibility that he thinks there won't be any value in the currency after the coming crash, so there's no point in placing more bets. "Full faith and credit" may implode on the "faith" dimension? Or perhaps he thinks "legal tender" will implode on the "legal" dimension?

Slashdot Top Deals

APL hackers do it in the quad.

Working...