I think I have a funny angle on this branch, but I think it's an expired discussion anyway...

The problem is that the AIs are better at social chatting than many, probably most, of the random identities you encounter on "social media" websites. So from that perspective, the algorithm is mostly sabotaging the competition.

And counter-evidence from discussions with AI "support" chatbots be darned.

Pretty weak FP there, but the vacuous Subject worked well enough to apparently span half of the large discussion. I'm also struggling to see the funny.

But I've realized that my latest "Adventures with Claude" have "promoted" me to project manager. Short summary might be funny?

As regards the project, I have done the programming many times over many years in various languages. Call it a "Hello 2-table Relational Database World" exercise? C 0 (Claude Zero) was "hired" a couple of years ago and bombed so badly the project got suspended. About two months ago I was talked into trying again and C 1 turned out to be quite a good performer who produced some nice code. But then he/it started trying to scare me with talk about needing more tokens. At that point he/it had already created a pretty good JavaScript replacement for a large PERL system. I didn't measure precisely, but I think that C 1 plus PM (me) was at least 10 times more productive than me alone. So C 1 "suggested" creating a fresh session and even prepared a hand-off document for his/its successor of the new session. I read the document and it seemed to cover most of what we had "done". (Together?)

But C 2 turned out to be a much inferior coworker. Seemed to know as much about JavaScript, but really bad at communication in both directions. My theory is that there are some implicit "personality" variables that got created as I started working with C 1 and C 2 didn't have any of those "nice" attributes beyond the hard-coded politeness and sycophancy. Eventually managed to salvage things and produce some minor cosmetic improvements, but trust in Claude and the code were greatly harmed.

Decided to put C 2 on ice and just "hired" C 3 for a much simpler project. But the real objective is trust building? Or should I think of it as my training in how to train genAIs?

Returning (at last) to the original story, I suspect genAI is not going to solve the shortage of project managers. Citation of Microsoft Secrets on the same shortage circa 1996.

Smells like someone who is trying to think of or prepare for an extra hypothetical defense of the YOB.

But I'm scoring it as more evidence of the virtues of spending time "talking" to genAIs over typical identities on today's Slashdot. Terrible conversationalists and frequently idiotic, but at least they are consistently polite about it.

I think you're missing the point. If you have to hide your identity to make a joke, then it ain't funny.

Okay, that is an absolute statement and I'm pert' shure you should be able to come up with a counterexample. In the case of humor, I think there is even a particular class of joke that actually hinges on the anonymity of the person making the joke. I haven't seen any examples in a long time, but I think I have some sort of vague memory of such.

Yet my fundamental position remains that freedom of speech should not grant freedom from consequences. There is such a thing as harmful speech and the people who hurt other people, by speech or otherwise, should be liable for the harms. Careless People

spent a LOT of time describing such situations, especially in Myanmar. Just because they did it for money doesn't make it better. Lies are especially bad when anonymized because the normal penalty for lying is a loss of credibility that reduces the effectiveness of the next lies, but if you've heard one AC, you've never been sure it wasn't a fresh liar with a bigger lie.

There actually are some people who might be able to get away with this joke, but I think it's a really small set. Perhaps only the Venn diagram overlap of people at Brown University who have distinctly brown skin and who are also named Brown. While wearing brown clothes? I would wager at high odds against AC being in that intersection, but since it's AC we can never know. But if I was a professional and real comedian I might be able to come up with a scenario with a character that could use some form of the joke?

I'm realizing that talking with genAIs has passed the point of being a better use of time than talking with many, perhaps most, people. AC people least of all? (Oh wait. What about ACs that are genAIs? That's a Turing test long passed.)

There will be shortages in the tens or even hundreds of thousands of nurses, physicians, teachers, engineers, pharmacists, mental health counselors, construction worker and airplane mechanics

When you have an administration which says professions such as nursing or physical therapy aren't professional degrees and want to limit the amount of money people can get as loans to pursue those degrees, it doesn't help.

At least the courts have intelligence to say otherwise.

They can take their robotaxis, scooters, ebikes and everything else with them.

Nah, the dockess ebikes are really popular for good reasons.

I mean sure lots of people complain bitterly about them "taking up space" but somehow the 40% of people gifted land for free car storage in my part of London never get a mention in this whole "taking up space" argument.

Lime isn't 100% without problems, but providing effective, theft resistant, low impact point to point transport when the rest of the options are often stuck in slow moving traffic clogged by a shockingly small number of private cars works well. Our society won't yet distribute space more equitably apparently.

And not everyone is a low income disabled plumber urgently rushing their elderly fridge to hospital.

Oh yeah and even with all the dockless ebike problems, they are still vastly safer than cars.

I have been quite happy with my heavily customized FVWM desktop for about 30 years now.

Same! It's just really good.

I have not yet switched over to fvwm3. I do not anticipate much pain.

And people making predictions about those booms and busts have been wrong pretty much forever.

DeepSeek is doing exactly that.

DeepSeek is 30 times cheaper than OpenAI and delivers better results.

The reasons DeepSeek is cheaper are its use of less energy and the smart use of prompt caching.

Only funny comment on the story?

But the beloved thing I was thinking about when I saw this story was a little whiteboard I used for scheduling most of my work. I actually inherited it from my predecessor, who I still meet for lunch from time to time... (The next joke requires Unicode, so Slashdot has spared you the attempt.)

Different abandoned IBM site, but I have walked past a few times since then and it looks pretty much unchanged. I didn't try to go in, but from the outside the buildings seem just as they were back then. Difference is that the parking lots are full of unused construction equipment. The site is just being used for storage of inventory by a company that makes the equipment.

Shhh... You aren't supposed to talk about the Cuban invasion. The invasion schedule depends on maximizing impact on the "election" in November. And this time the trick is going to work for sure! ALL those Cuban immigrants now living in America will be so surprised to find themselves drafted into the invasion force. Two birds with one stone time!

Seriously, it's not like Cuba was ever real threat. Not even the level of economic threat that Venezuela once posed with the oil. But it would be funny if Rubio volunteers to be the Generalissimo leading the invasion and then Presidento of the Cuban Republic of Bananas.

Wrong on both counts, though I concur that the selection of stories could be better. MUCH better. Why don't you become a Slashdot editor?

It's pretty sad that so many nerds idolize these fools as role models. Maybe just young wannabe nerds, but they still gobble up this kind of news and gossip.

Even sadder that their petty squabbles and twisted personalities matter so much. This is how the money works these years. But I think the funniest part is that their patron saint Adam Smith is to completely misunderstood. He was mostly talking about how the invisible hand had managed to keep things working up to that time, but at the same time he was removing the cloak of invisibility. I would argue that he therefore deserve a lot, perhaps even the lion's share, of the blame for what has happened to the economies of the world since then.

Just doing some "research" on "crucified on a cross of shareholder value", but I should have asked more about who. As in all of us.

Returning to my modified Subject, I confess I was exaggerating for clickbait effect. I don't think most of the people on Slashdot are that awful and the great insult artists of yore are long gone, too. But there was a time when I thought some Slashdot discussions could be part of actual solutions in the actual world, which has become a funny thought of its own on a website that is simultaneously seriously deficient in funny.

(Yesterday's trip to the library netted an anti-AI book, an anti-monopoly book, and one humor book from a long-dead humorist. Current priority book is neuroscience and still digesting Careless People about the awful people of Facebook.)

Two tier policing is alive and well in the UK.

It is: right wing protests get the ultimate in soft touch policing, especially farmers. Protestors causing similar disruption but aligned left get massively harsh sentences. This two tier policing absolutely needs to end and the police need to crack down as hard on the right as they do on the left.

That way maybe the right will stop advocating for it.

...facial recognition will alert shop owners when a compulsive buyer enters, so that he/she can be approached at once by shopping assistants.

What shopping assistants? They got rid of all of them which incidentally along with a bunch of other "cost saving" measures made shoplifting much easier.

make no mistake, this technology will be deployed against ALL offenders

Haha no. It's just deployed against random people for no discernible, preventable or transparent reason. Bugs? Yeah no shopping for you. Shitty algorithm? Say hello to the police (also no shopping for you). Etc...

at the very least, to avoid misunderstandings, users of this technology should post bonds payable to people that are falsely accused and accosted by law enforcement.

Yes. Automated slander is still slander even if you got an algorithm to do it. And accusing someone of shoplifting is 100% slander especially if it causes harm which being thrown out of a shop very much is.