Story got some coverage here. I think they said the Korean temperature records only go back to around 1910.

Still, it isn't such a good thing. Relatively nearby in Kumamoto they are also suffering from record heat, but they are also trying to deal with the devastation of a major quake last week...

Of creating more Funny comments for Slashdot. Isn't there a funny mathematician in the house?

Greatest teacher I ever had was actually a math professor. I only had him for one semester, but one class session was a topology-based magic show and he read a funny section from Life on the Mississippi in another lesson, with some mathematics inserted into Twain's story. Tried to get him for another class, but after I registered they pulled him out and substituted another teacher who could barely talk. (Of course it wasn't his fault that he had suffered a stroke, but the disappointment was so large that I withdrew from the course...)

Mod parent Funny, but America is dying from NIMBY syndrome. That and the hatred of science.

The YOB thinks he's the dictator, but he's just the king of lies. However in a country increasingly operating on anti-scientific on lies, the biggest liar should be king? "We don't need no stinkin' telescope to look for gawd!"

I take native Hawaiian religious objections seriously. These are people who take a fatalistic "Pele will take what she wants, it's pointless to try to stop her" attitude toward lava flows running over their houses that seems utterly insane here in Iceland. We'll buy up every available water pump on the international market and walk on active-flowing lava fields to save a harbour for a couple thousand people. We'll keep running tourist sites right next to a volcano that erupts every couple months by building multi-story-high berms around it with giant bulldozers and cooling anything that tries to overtop to make the berms even higher. And it totally works . But Hawaiians will sit back and watch incredibly slow-flowing flows with easy diversion paths take out everything they hold dear. At best they'll point to some primitive failed attempts in like the 1940s as a reason to not try, but then when pressed, it often comes back to: "Pele will take what she wants to take."

Another example: geothermal drilling on the Big Island. Massive protests. Massive resistance, way beyond the token NIMBY resistance here. Meanwhile Hawaii continues to generate most of its electricity from oil, at great cost. Hawaii is the only other place (outside of Iceland) to have accidentally drilled into a magma chamber. In Hawaii they treated it as a major incident and immediately shut down the well. When we did it? Our reaction was, "WOW, we can produce REALLY hot steam from THIS well!", made it into a production well, and started planning to drill more.

I guess one major difference here is that in the early Icelandic cosmology, volcanoes weren't the product of a high-ranking creator goddess, but rather, Surtr, who was practically a demon and was fated to destroy the world. It's good to resist Surtr!

And then I noticed Slashdot running an ad for ZenDesk. There's the joke I was looking for.

ZenDesk is where support goes to die. Not a clean death, either, but the ugliest death possible. As soon as I detect that a company is using ZenDesk I know that company does not care about support. At all. But I've also noticed that the use of ZenDesk is usually disguised and hidden these days?

Disclaimer needed: I sincerely tried to get something useful out of ZenDesk channels for some years. Then I gave up. But is it possible ZenDesk got better after so many attempts to turn me into a newt? Maybe you want to report on your better mileage?

But there's a potentially funny anecdote here, too? I think ZenDesk is basically a trouble ticket system. LONG time ago I worked with an old engineer named Paul. He claimed he was the originator of the trouble ticket system, though he probably meant the local trouble ticket system rather than the general idea. But it was a long time ago so it is possible that his was a seminal system of yore. When I worked with him computers were still rather precious resources, and the system he created long before that time was still mostly paper based.

You're welcome, but I'm still disappointed the potentially juicy story didn't produce more Funny.

I basically agree with the comments, but I would actually cast a lot of that blame on Microsoft. It's that EULA thing again. Not just blocking liability for overt failures and incompetence, but also facilitating the shipment of incomplete software that, as you noted, needs more support. But there was a period when even Microsoft understood that there was something rotten there... Swept under the rug since then, so you can abandon all hope now.

Except his complaint is not.

Yes, it literally was. The main public complaint of the weavers was that they spent their entire life learning their art, and then their bosses come in with a machine that they teach to replicate the patterns that they developed, churn out cheap "slop" versions of them, and fire them.

And here we're talking about profits, despite their huge scaleup expenditure. Theirs and OpenAI's margins on serving inference are ~40%.

It's almost impossible for a company undergoing a massive scaleup rate to turn a profit, let alone growing 10X annualized for 3 1/2 years running, but Anthropic pulled it off.

I like the FP branch, but too bad it didn't lead deeper or at least spawn some Funny.

Mostly just sharing a couple of anecdotes, but having trouble deciding which side to focus on. I think I'll start with the provider side, since so much of my career involved providing support.

Funniest anecdote is probably from an Internet startup before the first bubble burst. They had some venture funding, but support wasn't in the business plan. I was actually hired for one role, but wound up doing most of that work on my own time in the evenings and early mornings (from home) and spent almost all of my time in the office doing customer support. But I always saw support in terms of making customers happy and finding new ways to make new customers happy, while the managers saw support as a cost to be minimized. Fortunately, since it wasn't in the business plan, they were glad to pretend it was an imaginary number. They knew how my time was being spent, but didn't actually care. In terms of office politics, I wound up mostly working for the manager who was bringing in most of the customers and generating most of the actual revenue. When she was fired I took that as the signal for me to pack up and leave and the company went down a while after that--even before the dotcom bubble burst.

On the recipient side, these days my "support" is mostly received from AIs, often in the form of remarkably useless AI chatbots. Geek that I am, I still think that might be a technical problem that can be solved. The key would be getting the chatbot to ask useful questions--but I'm remembering that was the hardest part of doing support. The typical customer didn't know what to look at, so the biggest trick was to get the customer to look at the right thing that would most quickly reduce the problem space. Once the problem was clear it usually made the best solution clear, too. So far I hain't seen a chatbot like that.

Woke is what happens when you go to see a movie and instead of being told a compelling story woke ideology is proselytized

Recursion (n): See "recursion"

It's hilarious how obsessed you people are over a term that you can't even define and that none of you agree on. As far as I can tell, the only thing "woke" means today is "I'm A Right Winger, And This Is Something That I Personally Hate". I've seen people describe concepts as unrelated as "the concept of a metaverse" and "removing copyrighted materials to avoid lawsuits" as "woke".

An example of woke AI slop is Everything Everywhere All at Once

Um. What?

That movie was filmed from January to March 2020. You think AI video was a "thing" then? The movie premiered in March 2022. The infamously awful "Will Smith Eating Spaghetti" AI video was what AI video looked like in 2023. AI video was not "a thing" back when that movie was being made. What you actually hate is that movie's CGI.

Secondly, since when is "Jackass"-style "bro" stuff** famously leftist? Sexual gags are stereotypically "bro culture" and stereotypically disliked by feminists in particular and leftists in general. Don't get me wrong, you'll also find some people on the left who like that stuff, but the right tends to buy into it more (men tend to vote more rightward).

As far as I can tell from this, what you actually hate is (A) CGI, and (B) bro culture. Based on this, what you should actually consider yourself is an AI-supporting leftist.

That entire video sits firmly in uncanny valley.

I've shown it to about a dozen people in person without telling them it was AI first, and not a single person noticed. It's only "uncanny valley" because you've been told in advance that it's AI.

It's like my favourite social media hobby: when I encounter anti-AI people, I post things made by humans, generally masterpiece paintings or award-winning photographs, suggest that it's AI, and then watch them tear down how awful and fake and soulless it is. It's pretty hilarious ;)

Mod parent Funny, though I cannot recall any humor from Redit. Pretty sure I tried to find something funny on several of my visits, but some years since I abandoned hope of finding anything useful there. Some sort of disclaimer needed, but I never detected anything useful on Redit, even though some useless search engine (AKA goog) kept sending me there.

I do have a theory of what went wrong. It's kind of a good idea and they were able to coast on that for a while before spinning out. But the reason Reddit spun out was that the world should not be reduced to one dimension. That's essentially what the up/down vote does, even though I'm sure different people have completely different interpretations of why they are clicking thusly. Slashdot is almost as bad, even though there are several dimensions... But I think that Slashdot's main problem is the lack of resources to fix anything. Reddit seems to have some substantial resources, but maybe someone can enlighten me about something that has been fixed over there? Preferably within the last ten years or so.

So what you actually want is more taxes on the wealthy? If so, just say that. Don't hide behind arguments about copyright or that sort of stuff when that's not your actual motivation.

but while machine looms only put people out of work,

Machine looms, along with all of the other equipment of the industrial revolution, led to a massive boom of prosperity across the population as a whole. Machine looms in specific made clothing far more affordable to the average person.

One can criticize the politics of the early industrial revolution for not doing enough to funnel the wealth down quickly enough or to regulate the robber barons, but it was overall a massive benefit to quality of life of society as a whole.

LLMs are doing that plus going into systems that abuse them in lots of other ways.

And the industrial revolution made it easier to make bombs and bullets. That doesn't mean that we should all go back to medieval Europe where the average person lived on the edge of not affording their next meal and society had to dedicate almost all of its resources to basic production rather than things like education, medicine, science, etc. Or reject even more technology and ultimately end up back as paleolithic hunter-gatherers where 40-50% of people died before age 15.

Humidity is currently 91% in Yangsan.