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Comment Story reminds me of the Jimmy Carr joke... (Score 1) 58

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:Honest man [and smart timing, too?] (Score 1) 64

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?

Comment Re:of course the question not asked: why? (Score 1) 49

"It includes customer names, driver's license numbers, and social security numbers"
I'm wondering why they collected this data in the first place. Well, name and address, sure. But the rest? Maybe it is needed for car insurance and auto loans, but aren't those usually handled by partners?

BTW most (maybe all) countries in the EU have SSNs, even if they are called something else. (Here it's a "citizen service number"). But you generally don't give that to companies..

Comment Re:Flying Car? (Score 1) 36

I don’t get the obsession with flying cars anyway. There’s a Dutch company working on one, that is road legal and should soon receive its airworthiness certificate. Sounds great. Until you see the price tag and realise that this thing is a crappy car and a meh airplane, and costs more than a nice car and better airplane.

Comment Re:Honest man [and smart timing, too?] (Score 2) 64

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...)

Comment Re:We knew country music lovers had poor taste (Score 1) 68

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.)

Comment Re:Yes it does! (Score 1) 154

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!

Comment What could possibly go wrong? (Score 3, Interesting) 82

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.

Comment Re:China's state-sponsored hackers (Score 1) 15

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).

Comment Re:Customized music is the future (Score 2) 68

You'd be surprised how difficult that actually is. Take the role of a DJ for instance - a good DJ will know what genre they're doing, play well know things from that genre but also introduce new music to keep it fresh. They might also step outside the genre a little - not too far so it's not dissonant with the rest of their set, but just far enough to give a break and a moment of "ah, that's nice/romantic/gnarly/metal/" for the listener.

It's a skill, and if you haven't got that ability to start with then you're unlikely to be able to give the correct prompts to create it. You might well get a lot of identical things, but a listenable varied set is more than that.

Comment Re:*some* games (Score 1) 97

A worry might be SteamOS as a requirement, rather than as simple support. You could imagine kernel modules being developed for 'anti-cheat' and them running under SteamOS but not some other distro that may (justifiably) block them.

Comment Re:Praise Gabe! (Score 2) 97

This is the most (in fact only) interesting thing about the announcements to me. Must say I'm not sure about it - can't see how mouse+keyboard style games, which the original Stream Controller was explicitly designed to work well with, would pan out.

I have hugely customised layouts for several games to the point where I can't imagine playing them without it - they tend to be RPG games like Skyrim and Elder Scrolls Online. It's that style of game I'm trying to imagine mapping to the new layout, and to be honest gen1 looks more amenable to me at first glance. Hope to be proven wrong though.

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