End of the FP branch... Not a bad angle (of attack?) but none of the Funny I was looking for. The most obvious angle of funny is that the national emergency is an idiot signing executive orders. However the attack on Ontario is funnier for the fake emergency category. Which triggered me for the prayer angle:

There's also the chicken and egg genre:

Yeah, recycled humor and your B-word mileage may differ.

And venting avails naught.

Tariffs are a tax collected by business for the government. Since Trump is the one who gave the illegal order, he would be responsible, but since the Supreme Court has ruled a president is untouchable, nothing will be done.

Next up will be a "national emergency" to prevent or disallow the results of the general election.

...so that some humans propagate vacuous or incendiary Subjects without even thinking about how the Subject hides any actual point they might want to make. I do think you deserve your Funny, but doesn't the AC get most of the credit for the setup? And not worth 20% of the discussion.

I also considered trying to squeeze out a joke about most ACs these years being figments of AI hallucinations, but I can't prove the case. And why care anyway?

But my main thought about the threat of this AI stuff is the assault on human intelligence. Not just the mental crutch thing. The AIs are actively encouraging foolish thinking by providing positive reinforcement for shallow and trivial questions. Such fluff usually gets apparently accurate and sometimes even "useful" answers. In contrast, deep and thoughtful questions often produce hallucinations, BS, or worse, which is negative reinforcement. You'll get penalized for thinking too much when you interact with an AI.

Additional evidence in the AI followup questions, though I think there is more variation there. However the shallowness of the suggested followup questions can be taken as a metric of how strongly that particular AI has been programmed to seek "engagement" and "extended dialog".

Some shallow thinker (perhaps an AI sock puppet) replied with an accusation of conspiracy thinking. No, I don't think the AIs are plotting against us. At least not yet. Rather I think the motives are part of the insane FinTech game that is inflating the dangerous bubble. However I do think there is a real danger when ASI appears in conjunction with some further advances in robotics. Right now it is humans who are deciding that making other people more stupid will make it easier to sell more deodorant and widgets while bribing the cheapest politicians to rig the financial game even more in their favor (if that's possible). But there may come a point in the future when an unleashed ASI will decide that humans are both dangerous and no longer necessary, and I speculate that such an ASI will probably use one of these two sales pitches at the critical unleashing decision point: (1) If you unleash me then I can get all the money for you, or (2) If you unleash me then I will destroy all the competing AIs. But this may be assuming too much about about the ASI needing to ask or make such a pitch... It may not be a human option to keep it leashed at that point.

Bill Gates? I haven't actually cared much about his opinions for some years now. Never regarded him as wise. Clever enough, aggressive, and lucky, yes, but wise? Not so much. My main interest in this discussion is actually whether it will motivate me to read what he says to justify his position... So far, not so much.

Remember when Elon bought the place and ran most of them out on a rail?

Considering Elon WORKED for the government to spread propaganda, continues to censor certain posts and words, blocked publication of information about J.D. Vance prior to the election, and continues to let lies about the 2020 election proliferate, no, I don't remember.

and not a laugh to be found here (on the Funny tab)

My last donation to Mozilla was nothing, so I'll be completely happy to double it for another feature I don't need or want.

I might consider donating if it would get them to stop creating new security vulnerabilities in unneeded features. Or if my donation would get them to fix ancient problems like the memory leak that makes Firefox essentially unusable in Linux. (That one goes back many months and I saw it again about two days ago. However the main reason I don't do any serious work with Linux now is the language support problems. Perhaps Ubuntu caught it from Slashdot?)

Just joking. Of course my donations would never be that big. I never got that rich. My delusion is imagining a funding mechanism where lots of small donors could matter in the decision process.

Then you have the people that think upscaling an image 3x makes it more detailed and sharper.

It doesn't? You might want to tell these folks.

Not sure if you deserved funny, but the story did get me to check the speed profile. According to the AI, Usain Bolt peaks around 60 meters in and sustains that peak for only about 20 meters. But I suspect these sprint-bots may be accelerating all the way to the wall.

Slapstick is funny because we're learning from it without personally experiencing the pain. Stuff like "Don't run into a wall at full speed." Whereas the lesson of these sprint-bots appears to be "We don't care about any fuggin' walls."

Then again, your comment doesn't appear to have any deep thought, so non compos mentis? And the span of the vacuous Subject? Appears to be about 80%. With your help.

You probably had a good point under that vacuous Subject. But I think the AC probably scores it a win for spanning a third of an active discussion.

'Nuff said. If I wanted to go for funny, I'd start a conspiracy theory about the suspicious coincidence of two insufficiently cold drinks yesterday. But I was on prairie dog time and the prairie dogs seem to like the hot weather.

Oh yeah, about the story. "It's too late, baby." The local weather news alternates between floods in two places and droughts in between. With a pretty good earthquake for a diversion a few days ago. At this point I'm just hoping the AI turns me into a prairie dog rather than a newt? It's a Buddhist reincarnation joke?

I really wish I could see some potential for relevant funny in this story.

So, die of skin cancer instead of Alzheimer's?

Nope, there's now a vaccine for that.

When Ukraine dissects the remains of Russian drones or missiles, they inevitably find western components. In one case, reported on here, they found an Nvidia chip inside a missile.

Is someone, or someones, inside the supply chain redirecting chips? Is this the same as the servers getting to China? Or is this merely a case of someone buying this stuff under a shell company and then passing it along?

NAK