Then you should invest in gambling websites. You can't lose if you're on the side of the house.

Oh, wait. Now I'm remember how a certain Yuge Orange Buffoon (YOB) managed a couple of casinos into the dirt...

But seriously, folks, the applied psychologists have this one in the bag. As in the gamblers' testicles in the bag. Just finished a somewhat relevant book called The Choice Factory by Richard Shotton. He's mostly focusing on selling garbage, and he carefully steered clear of gambling, but he still crossed into relevance with a closing chapter about the ethics of psychological manipulation. Spoiler: He thinks it's okay.

More directly on gambling, it's best targeted at suckers who don't believe in math. The book had many examples indicating that Shotton is no mathematician.

You left out their motivations for breaking the pleasant environment, but I admit that I can't understand crazy people, so maybe their motivations cannot be explained in a way that I can understand...

In my imaginary solution approach, the troublemaker would essentially disappear from my vision because his earned reputation would save me the trouble of noticing his activity. The key to protecting public discourse would be the visibility defaults, because most people just accept the defaults. Still don't have a good solution for that problem... If the line is too clear, then the bad actors will cluster around it, but if the line is not clear, then the system becomes more complicated...

Did you miss my Subject? Or just rudeness as a non-persuasive writing style? Or my poor writing (again)?

Your Subject made me think you were going for funny, but I'm not getting the joke. However you are also referencing a movie I don't recognize, so maybe it's no joke, but just my ignorance showing again. So can I ask you to clarify your intention? (And of course it's always possible the real meaning was just "I'm in a hurry to claim FP" with little underneath.)

My Subject is from another website where the discussion topic was AI-related problems and the best labels for various important terms. For example, AGI versus GAI or GenAI for the current LLM category... One problem that keeps coming up is models customized to "pass for" real people in various ways, but I am still not aware of a standard term, so for now I'm still sticking with GAIvatar as a portmanteau of "Generative AI" and avatar... Does anyone have a better label? Maybe with a citation or two?

Time for a weak book recommendation? There is a recipe book for GenAI applications by the Hugging Face guy, but I didn't think it was that enlightening. I can dig up the exact citation if someone expresses interest, but most of the recipe books just seem to support Wolfram's negative summary. He thinks they're useful, but mostly the result of trial and error without real understanding of what's going on under the hood. So I would still give my strong recommendation to the Jeff Hawkins book, which in the first part is mostly a critique of GenAI from a different perspective on human intelligence... (And now I'm remembering The Age of Em by Robin Hanson. Terrible book to the point where "I can't believe I read the whole thing." Technofantasy of the absurd.)

Looking for a closing joke or personal anecdote, but my muse is weak these days. Perhaps intimidated by the GenAIs?

I bet I don't get the Funny and the FP was too empty, so I'm sure it will be moderated deeply insightful.

Actually my joke is that three is far too few dimensions. Does anyone know of a website with deep moderation? Many dimensions and reactions to comments will reflect back to the poster along the corresponding dimensions. Imagine a virtual circle of good behavior?

Then look at the Web and despair.

There's a perverse advantage in collapsing things to a single dimension. Whatever the decision, it can be made based on the effects on the single dimension that matters. For Facebook and YouTube, it's the dimension of profit. "We don't need no stinkin' morals."

Target missed.

What could possibly go wrong?

That's the joke I was looking for and also the subject of The Chaos Machine by Max Fisher. The short answers mostly involve dead humans, though the book says YouTube is actually more harmful than Facebook or the cesspool formerly known as Twitter.

I actually had another long session with DeepSeek yesterday trying to figure out some configuration problems on a Linux box. It managed to be somewhat educational, but stupid. Didn't actually solve the problem after quite a long effort involving several approaches, so I'm thinking about trying again with a competing AI, probably ChatGPT, to see how that goes.

My tentative conclusion at this stage is that a real expert would have asked some key questions that DeepSeek never got around to asking. It only kept hinting about possible problems with something the maker of the hardware (Apple) does, but an actual expert would have pinned that down first and been able to select the best approach to focus on rather than long lists of possible approaches with confabulated explanations (that always sound so plausible).

Interesting observation that as I was checking a fact using the evil google's AI it became clear that DeepSeek data was being buried. But perhaps it's just a feature of competing AIs buying ad space above the real websearch results?

About the future... I'm getting there, too. I went through a bleak period, then into a period of "but the average is up", and now I'm into "the oscillations may be fatal". Related reading is The End is Always Near by Dan Carlin. (Possibly with the help of an unnamed and uncredited AI?) Fluffy pseudo-academic style. Trying to sound like a pedant rather than an influencer?

There actually was some new information published since the last time the story was featured on Slashdot. Not surprised at the vacuous Slashdot reaction, however. Perhaps more significant that I don't feel like the quality of discussion on Slashdot these days merits the effort to dig up the link.

So as a memory exercise, I'll just summarize what I can recall. It was an article written by someone closely linked to the airline involved. Retired executive? Possibly also a former pilot? Quite familiar with normal cockpit procedures. Most significant parts pointed pretty strongly at the pilot rather than the copilot as the bad actor. The pilot had some medical problems and it seems probable that he knew they were serious, perhaps so serious that he would be forced into retirement soon. The SOP for this situation would have had the copilot holding his yoke while the pilot watched for problems, which left the pilot in the starting position with free hands to cut off the fuel.

In my previous comment I suggested the guilty party could have tried to confuse the issue of who did what by asking first (for the benefit of the voice recorder), but now I think it's pretty clear what happened. However the shocking part of the article involved the airline's policy regarding the mental health of their pilots combined with unreasonable working conditions. Almost like they're trying to drive them crazy but don't want to know about it?

So let's see if anyone comes up with a Funny angle for the story. I sure can't see it. Seating advice? "Be sure to reserve seat 11A since it might be a lucky seat" or "Be sure to avoid seat 11A since good lightning never strikes the same seat twice."

The COVID mRNA vaccines were the culmination of decades of research into genetic vaccines that could be in essence engineered to target a selected antigen without the years of trial and error that are required by the methods we have been using since the 1950s. Within days of the virus genome being published, they had a vaccine design, the months it took to get to the public were taken up with studies of the safety and effectiveness of the heretofore untested technology, ramping up production, and preparing for the distribution of a medicine that required cryogenic storage.

It would be unreasonable not to give the Trump administration credit for not mucking up this process. But the unprecedented speed of development wasnâ(TM)t due to Trump employing some kind of magical Fuhrermojo. It was a stroke good fortune that when the global pandemic epidemiologists have been worried about arrived, mRNA technology was just at the point where you could use it. Had it arrived a decade earlier the consequences would have been far worse, no matter who was president.

The lesson isnâ(TM)t that Trump is some kind of divine figure who willed a vaccine into existence, itâ(TM)s that basic research that is decades from practical application is important.

Currently have a project going using Python scripting in Blender using scipy.optimize.differential_evolution and Cycles rendering to optimize the shape of a reflector to match a desired light distribution pattern. It's not a perfect tool for the job, but it seems to be pretty accurate.

Needs to be quoted against the troll censors? Have I managed to hurt the feelings of the conspiracy buffoons?

NAK

When you're trying to rationalize irrational behavior... Down the rabbit hole we might go...

The MH370 investigation basically dead-ended against the pilot's background. Too soon to say in this case. In my initial reaction to this story, I put super-suicide first as a motive, but what if it was primarily murder? I don't think either of the pilot's could have been a Qanonatic, but one of them could have gotten an encrypted message that "the enemy" is going to be on board "your flight" on that day...

And of course there's always the possibility of life insurance fraud, eh?

But I'm still tilting to the suicide theory and hoping that the background checks will find the reasons for the insanity of suicide. Which got me to wonder about the timing in the cockpit... After cutting the fuel was he trying to aim the plane at the biggest building? Perhaps using the other pilot's yoke to muddle things even more? Maybe we need to aid a video recorder black box to the voice recorder black box?