Mod FP funny in the theory-practice joke genre.

However the context appears to be America, where the idea of solutions via (significant or complicated) change has become its own joke category. I still like (too much) to fantasize about solution approaches, but I'm increasingly convinced that the USA has passed the point of recovery via less violent evolutionary improvements. The "American way" into the future has been lost and it appears that only revolutionary change is possible now. I have two personal problems with revolutions. One is the extra deaths. I actually think that may be a key attribute to recognize a real revolution. The other is the uncertainty of the outcome. In some cases a revolution can produce positive improvements, but there's no guarantee that the new conditions won't be worse than the conditions that created the revolution.

Middle-range drones are in use because anti-aircraft measures have gotten so good.

No. The lack of anti-aircraft measures is why middle-range drones are being used so extensively. Ukraine put a lot time and effort into degrading Russian AA, whether radar systems, S-300/400/500, Pantsir, or anything else. The last number I saw was about 1,700 AA of all types damaged or destroyed.

Once AA is reduced, this opens corridors for drones/missiles, which is exactly what Ukraine is doing. Crimea is now essentially an island, with supplies rapidly dwindling and people fleeing while they can. Moscow has three rings of AA to try (and faling) to protect itself. Meanwhile, oil refineries the length and breadth of Russia are going up in flames each week.

Ukraine does have Baba Yaga drones (heavy drones which can carry multiple, large mortars/bombs), and those are being used to take out fortified positions.

Single-use drones are stil highly in use, which is what a middle-range drone is.

That could well be a chicken-and-egg problem. Are the buyers buying what's available because it's available, or are the manufacturers making it because the buyers actually asked for it? I'm not aware of any Equinox driver anywhere who ever complained about it not being tall enough (or it being short enough to make it unnecessarily difficult to run over small people) yet Chevy raised the hood anyways.

The other problem is that the auto manufacturers see a distorted picture of car buyers. New cars are too expensive for a large fraction of all drivers; many drivers won't ever buy a brand new car. New car dealers are selling to people with more money, and making decisions around what those more affluent people might want in their cars - or more so are telling such people what they should want.

Never sounded so good.

I don't think alcohol is required, but the better of the only two Funny on the story that had large potential for humor.

I am beginning to think the entire AI topic is a joke. Side effect of trying to read What is Thought? by Baum? Or aftereffect of A Thousand Brains by Hawkins. We have no idea how intelligence works, but "borrowing" LOTS of "intelligent" artifacts has become the default starting point?

Me? My new ambition is to become an expert in asking questions that drive AIs crazy. Yes, I'm claiming partial credit for driving Gemini nuts. But it's probably just a personal problem because (optimistically?) the google has put me on a special enemies list to receive worthless answers.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. They fit more of them in the same 2 dimensional area by using layers. The layers are the Z dimension. The thermals are an interesting question.

The transistors aren't actually smaller. It's standard in the field to market the next chip generation as a smaller size when they mean equivalent to the new size. In this case the transistors are stacked vertically so looking down you get layers X areal density of the 2 dimensional surface. We don't do this with flash stacks, which now have up to 321 layers and are mapped to 1000+.

The angstrom scale business is marketing fluff to make the density increase understandable to consumers. But this is one of the developments leveraging the Z dimension that are legitimate progress. The Z dimension gives more than just the same chip folded like origami. The net distance traveled by a signal in a cycle can be reduced, which yields massive improvement in performance without additional cost of power/heat.

At least not if they were wearing AI glasses imposing VR advertising for next month's improved AI glasses.

Obligatory joke for low hanging fruit.

Adam Smith's biggest mistake was stealing the invisible hand's cloak of invisibility. Mostly downhill since then, now at AI-enhanced speeds.

This morning's weird thought was that Adam Smith's great mistake was to make the invisible hand visible. It was a flawed idea in the first place, basically a claim that things would work out "for the best" without knowing the details, but it was really a justification for social Darwinism before Darwin. In a sense bankruptcy serves as the equivalent of death in evolutionary systems in the biological world.

Once the invisible hand had lost its cloak of invisibility all the scoundrels in the world leapt to the attack, and we eventually wound up with bigger and bigger messes. The controlling hands are still mostly invisible, and now enhanced with AI, but they are still (for now) human hands busily devising new scams for fresh suckers. Leading candidates for the worst actors? My latest list features advertisers, stock brokers, real estate agents, and politicians. (Stock brokers is probably too narrow, but bankers is too broad and FinTech Bros is too trendy (for my tastes).)

Needs a joke for the conclusion, but I'm out of humor these days. Everything keeps running into the "We can't get there from here" oldie.

Funny, but the Apple approach would be "Vintage Windows 10".

My cue? My latest AI project had a punch card phase. At one point the entire thing was on Hollerith cards, with the program in PL/C (a dialect of PL/I) and about a thousand cards of data. It had originally been a simple typewritten list derived from a handwritten list. Also in the early 80s it became a database for the first time, ported to bigger and better computers and operating systems later... Probably late in the 90s it got a PERL/CGI front end interface (ultimately based on some code the late James Liu gave me around 1995 before he moved to Sun). Most of the stuff after that was statistical utilities, most recently using JavaScript (which I sometimes write in a style that looks like Fortran).

The Claude project version involved a number of short chat discussions of features and data structures. The actual coding phase would take Claude about two minutes and then I needed a minute or two (depending on which modules had been updated) to install the code. Testing was more variable. Not systematic, but I have quite a bit of familiarity with the problems I've encountered over the years. Around ten of those sessions and the code had all the features of the PERL that took me a long time to write... Even more interesting was that the PERL system had an interesting bug in one of the regex calls, but the new system doesn't have it. (I spent quite a bit of time trying to can that bug, but Claude just avoided it completely.)

Or should I blame LinkedIn? Anyway, when I submitted the story it included a link to the summary on LinkedIn, but I don't see any trace here. The LinkedIn version was a short summary of four advanced Chinese AI models released in the same week. Mostly I remember a few details about the one for generating videos, but LinkedIn didn't say anything substantial about why they were free, at least as the current monetary terms appear.

So when I checked here and noticed the link was missing I went back to LinkedIn to get the link again, but LinkedIn has infinite scroll in both directions and I wasn't able to find it again. Which motivated a google websearch that failed badly (as so many of them do these days) which drove me to Bing, which actually produced some interesting results, though none of them seemed to match up with the original version from the LinkedIn source. https://news.cgtn.com/news/202... is one that seems to cover most of the same territory, but at a much lower level.

I think you should start your own research with the meaning of the word joke. Perhaps starting from the etymology?

No substantive comment on your "reply" because I saw no substance there. Blinded by the rudeness?

My next joke perhaps should be about creeping senility among low-digit IDs on Slashdot. Not all jokes are funny ha-ha. Maybe it's just an attitude problem in your case, but I'd be a fine one to talk about negative attitude. (Currently contemplating a most evil business contest. My initial list of candidates includes advertising, real estate, stock markets, and politics.)