I don't watch many movies. Never watched many, and far fewer lately. However I am unable to recall an example of a movie that I thought was better than the book. Most often I felt like the movie eliminated many of the imaginative possibilities of the book. Largely a matter of bandwidth? Movies flood the zone, filling both the visual and audio channels and requiring almost all of your mental capacity to keep up. More so as the effects have become more special and dazzling. For books you have to do most of the mental work yourself and I think that's a fundamentally healthy kind of mental exercise.

Do you have some movie in mind that you think was better than the book?

Calculate the size of the required solar panel as you get farther from the sun and notice that AC is brainfarting again.

I sure hoped for some when we all needed it.

Interesting replies, and thanks. Should I add the note that Lenovo bought the ThinkPad business from IBM as part of that branch of the corporate histories?

Actually the frightening part of the story is that the fastest was remotely operated. Humans today, but operated by a malignant ASI tomorrow. Well, hopefully not tomorrow. I'd prefer not to see the end of this story and I'm hoping to be around tomorrow and even for a few more years. But RSN?

Too many books could be cited, but it's not like today's Slashdotters seem to have much interest in books. Can't resist a recent one with high relevance to this story: Army of None by Paul Scharre about autonomous weapons. Yes his focus was on the autonomous ones, which look bad, but I think they will obviously be lighter, faster, and just more dangerous if the intelligence part is remote, hidden, and harder to attack.

Why would the ASI do it? Would you trust us humans with your survival? As we grub about for money and sex? Just now working on "Facebook Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Nuclear Reactors" about how we humans are getting used as fuel in viral websites that aren't ending well... And I can't think of any website these days that is doing much to make me into a better person. But do I need that as much as Zuck? So I believe some wannabe Bond villain is going to unleash his malevolent ASI when it promises something like "Today I could kill all the other ASIs" or "I can get all the money in the world for you."

Ask your city managers to prohibit drones.

Drones are dangerous. We have heard of only a few serious accidents. If drone delivery continues, there will be many more accidents, including a package delivered by a drone hitting someone.

I didn't know the company still existed. I vaguely remember vultures selling off pieces.

Should I do an AI-polluted search to find out whatever happened to Nokia?

Going back about 20 years when the idea was to make new Abbott and Costello movies...

And think of all the new books that could be added to your favorite imaginary universe. Replicating the original author's style far beyond our poor human power to add or detract from the style, or even detect that it isn't the original author.

So I prefer to go for the joke? Even though that trick never works...

At bit hard to figure out your FP, but I think you are advocating for trying to muddle the data to prevent abuse. You really think you are such an expert that you can do it? Well then, congratulations, but I think you're more likely to break your phone than accomplish anything constructive or useful. There seems to a logical fallacy in thinking you can use a system that fundamentally depends on your location without revealing your location.

Getting away from the humor, but I have an interesting real-world example from Japan. A couple of weeks ago a kid disappeared. Turns out that someone was moving the body around, but with smartphone data the police were tracking the suspicious movements of the suspected murderer until they finally found the body, after which point they duly arrested the suspect--but I'm convinced they were just toying with the mouse the whole time. (There was a key data item that was being suppressed in the news (as reported via NHK)...)

But back to this Slashdot story: I dare say that the real problem is that smartphones are addictive. And harmful. But not illegal or even controlled like the so-called "controlled substances". Now as a result of reading Facebook by Steven Levy I would argue the problem is much worse than that. More like drug pushers giving away free samples. (I'm at the part of the book where he's talking about Myanmar, but I'd already read a more detailed version in an earlier book. On to Chaos Monkeys and Stolen Focus in the backwards direction and the endless search for newer books in the forward direction...)

(I seem to be getting even more parenthetical these weeks... But what about a website to support a book in time? It could include most of the back matter, thus saving dead trees for low-function indexes, along with errata, but the "big new thing" would be a place to find the forward references from other books that refer to the older book as they use newer data on the same topics and problems.)

(Speaking of chaos monkeys, is someone monkeying with the Slashdot code? The Preview appears to be broken and the other day there were some garbage characters inserted into one of my comments... So the infamous 'apologies in advance' if there are layout errors when I click the "Submit" button.)

Really? You say you "respect" comedians, but only confuse the issue with your focus. Don't you understand how humor works?

My view is that you can't understand a reality-based joke unless you understand the foundation of the joke in reality. Or another formulation would be to say that not understanding the joke is a clear signal you need to do more research.

But by the success standards of today's Slashdot, that was apparently an excellent FP, spanning roughly half of the discussion. It even has a bare "insightful" moderation and merely needs a second to be officially ranked as offering insight. But by my primary standard of success, I would say it was terrible. No Funny reactions, even though the theme of the story is supposed to be related to humor.

The insightful-level problem is the financial model. Or rather the lack of any good financial models that reward expensive and difficult truths in competition with cheap and easy lies. I did a bunch of searching on related keywords and came up with nothing. Apparently the discussion never went there. I might be surprised if I looked at the moderation by categories, but the trend of Slashdot these years is to rate too many no-insight comments as insightful, sometimes ignoring their humor, with only a smattering in the other categories. Generally a waste of time to go there--though I still check for Funny in the bigger discussions. Feels like a pointless habit. (Another form of OCD?)

So time to appeal to an actual comedian? What did Mark Twain say again? Something about truth putting on its shoes while the lies have gone around the world... (Of course I could look it up, but now I'm trying to minimize my exposures to the brain-damaging AIs--even though it is the kind of research question that usually gets an "honest" response.) But Twain was probably thinking about the speed of the telegraph. The quantitative difference offered by today's Web might astound him. But probably not. He was remarkably cynical and often seemed way ahead of his times... (Just now enjoying the original Huckleberry Finn book. I'm up to the section where they took two con artists aboard the raft. Many notes of similarity with the YOB... The less things change the more they stay the same.)

So anyway, I should just jump back to my conclusion: The root of the problem is that news as entertainment can't possibly compete with entertainment as entertainment. Facebook. I rest my case.

(Yeah, I know books are much too passé for today's Slashdot, but I have to recommend Facebook by Steven Levy. Or I could go with the flow and bring AI into it. How about an AI analysis of the devolution of Slashdot discussions over the decades. Maybe the current owners (whoever they are) can make some money by selling the data for training an AI, subject to a clause that they get feedback on the trend analysis. (Oh, wait. Slashdot lacks any financial model to fix anything no matter what problems the trend analyses expose.))

First light of visible comment in the anti-discussion.

Generally appreciate your comments though you don't get as much Funny as you used to (it seems), but can't figure out the context and don't feel like reading more AC gibberish or propagating the vacuous Subject.

So the compromise is to attempt to blend your topic with my raging earworm of the day?

Been speculating on whether or not the pen is mightier than the sword. Seems to depend on circumstances. However the YUGE Orange Buffoon has dedicated his entire life to the proposition that lies are mightier than the truth. I still don't think so, even though the YOB has somehow managed to continue floating above the piles of debris and bankruptcies he's left behind. You [ArchieBunker] suggest legal remedies, but now I'm convinced the YOB has run out the clock on "justice". These days the YOB is merely doodling (and drooling?) on the details of his "non compos mentis" defense.

(Sorry, but an explicit link back to the ostensible story seems a bit too much of a stretch, even for me. Seems it would have to detour via the "son of" nepotism thing...)

(In related meta-news, I just ran another AI test. Gemini won this time, with Copilot coming in second. But it would be interesting to run an AI analysis of the trends in Slashdot comments and discussions over the decades. Some metrics may be trending up, but mostly the trends seem (to me) to be downward. Especially for Funny?)

For whatever it's worth, I think Gemini had the best response, though there was one element of Copilot's response that was also worth considering. The other AIs gave responses that I regarded as inferior...

On balance I'm going to proceed with caution, but that's another old joke.