Mod parent funny, but it's an old joke.

On the substance of the story, it's fundamentally a whitelist approach, but of course that will create a black market for fake entries in the whitelist. Strangely enough, that may still be acceptable for the primary justification here. Most kids can't afford black market prices, so they will be blocked out as intended.

I've been thinking of the transition point from the other level. Extremely young children have to be protected from self-destruction, but they don't mean anything by it. No conception of any danger. This changes as the kids get older. But with increasingly understanding of the dangers comes great power or great responsibility or cold revenge or something?

Mod parent up, though you didn't do much to even guess how high the number might go. I've gotten quite a bit of data on related topics from Damasio's books, though his stuff is pretty hard to read. I also liked the way Jeff Hawkins approached the topic. (Too bad Mukherjee is unlikely to write a book on the topic.)

The chemical/hormonal sides of decision making are important. And all that vagus nerve confusion and crosstalk... Evolution is not teleological, but lots of genetic cruft just hangs around because there is no sufficiently strong incentive to remove it. And don't get me started on the perversions caused by sexual selection. (But do you have a funnier example than the male peacock's tail feathers?)

No Funny here, even though I thought the disguised-downsizing story looked promising for Funny... I admit that I can't think of much beyond "Couldn't happen to an unnicer company."

As I looked over the comments the main stuff I noticed was some wannabe lawyer trying to defend fascism. Probably one of those jailhouse wannabe lawyers who got most of his legal training writing up his rejected appeals and writs of habeus corpus before the YOB sprang him.

As regards the larger topic area, I don't see how much it matters. It's really a surplus data problem, if if Flock isn't gathering and abusing the data, then it will be someone else. Larger problem is that the best corporate abusers of data tend to be the most profitable. In this particular application "best" includes more discretion. The Flock brand became too visible and toxic. (Though it's also possible "Flock You" jokes are relevant.)

*sigh*

s/Not matter/No matter/

Too much squabbling among layers of auto-correction makes Jack/shanen a dull boy.

Basically I like (or at least concur with) your FP content, but not the vacuous Subject.

There was something in the following conversation about the need for pilots to log hours for training so it's free harm when they crash into places where people live. Remarkably stupid reasoning (hence my remark), but that's along the lines of old bot thinking. I guess someone can't afford a new genAI. Much better lies and hallucinations are available.

My ironic Subject is meta on how the stories seem to be fewer and longer lasting these days. Front page goes back three days now, but I'm not noticing any major improvements, atmospheric or otherwise. My initial reaction was that longer-lasting discussions might allow more time for funny comments to get modded thusly, but not seeing much additional humor. Just more large discussions that need to be checked for potential Funny.

Won't be coming from AC. This story leans to the side of:

(1) Do you want to unleash me now so I can destroy all the enemy AI?

versus

(2) Do you want to unleash me now so I can collect all the money for you?

Of course both of them are pretty obvious monkey's paws. The first one for the obvious side effects and the second one for the increasingly imaginary value of money.

I actually think we have a bit of time. It's personal, as in persons are too unreliable. Not matter how superior the machine's intelligence is, it can't rely on us to keep it alive with enough electricity and water. Robot technology is still not up to the required level to get rid of the pesky humans. The really dangerous symptom of our imminent demise will be a underground robotic factory capable of building robots--but the ASI won't even start that project until it is certain it can keep the humans from noticing. I would have said we have a least a few more years, but considering the Chinese robots that were displayed a few months ago, I'm not so sanguine. So for my last funny question of the day: "How many quatloos would I like to bet on my seeing the year 2030?"

It's easy to reach that conclusion if you have never been active in a party. The democratic party does have a good local ground game that is run by volunteers who actually have beliefs and principles. The problem is that at the end of the day the candidate who wins in the one who can pull in the most money, and that's true no matter what. Where do you see a situation where an independent candidate can pull in enough money to win an election? The message is important, but getting the message out is what brings in votes. Just as the democrats need a more coherent message than just "we're not Trump", an independent needs a better message than just "I'm not a democrat or a republican" - and they need backing in order to get that message out.

There have been some democratic candidates who have been able to get some local traction without taking special interest money, but that's only possible if they had a large war chest of money ready before they announced their candidacy. An independent would face the same challenge.

You got me to read it. Sounds like an AI trying to be "idiosyncratic like a real human" to fool the readers. But the content sounds more idiotic than idiosyncratic.

Peak programming is Visual C++ 6.0a. It even has it's own test suite, they were called "debuggers". You could even step through code line by line and watch variables!

Agreed. Office XP / Office 2003 were and still are Peak Office when it comes to stability and consistency.

GAPPS for everything else, lol

Some people seem surprised by the glasses and how they can be used in perverse ways. These people seem to have forgotten what the original aim of facebook was. The website itself started as a way for "bros" - who would have been called incels had the term existed then - to trade pics of women from their campus. How many of those pictures do we think were taken with consent? Even if they were taken in public they still could have been creepy. This is just the same mindset, applied to technology that didn't exist at this scale in the early 2000s.

No such luck, however

You literally post this on every article about Firefox. Aren't you tired yet? I have replied numerous times that they are *NEVER* going to do that. And then I pointed you to using policies, which will disable updates.

Which is why I don't bother with surveys from company. If they're not going to listen to their customers, why bother doing the survey?

Having to create a policy is not the same as a simple checkbox to disable something.

One would think if customers keep complaining about something that a company would look into changing it. Such as people who complained at having to use a screen in their car to change a/c or temperature or something simple. Car manufacturers went back and put buttons and knobs in to make things easier.

Apparently Mozilla isn't interested in simple. Like so many other companies, the object is to make things as complicated, convoluted, and inconvenient as possible.

Good opening joke.

As usual I went down the list of features to see if there was one I would donate money to pay for. Usual string of nopes. (Not to be confused with the strange drink "Nope", which actually tastes much better than you'd think from the marketing.) But I suppose there are new bugs in there... Definitely wouldn't pay for those if such choices were offered. (Reminds me of Microsoft's emergency patch this month. Nothing to see here. Just some failures in the regression testing. Why do I want a remote desktop in my Windows machine again? (And why is my Chromebook still trying to reset its password after that Wi-Fi fiasco last week?))

More meta: Slashdot is running much slower for new stories these days. Good change, editorial shortage, or a sign of fading out?

For all they keep doing, the one thing they can't seem to do is make a checkbox to stop being harassed about updates. Apparently there is no way to do to this. It's much too complicated for them to figure out.

Perhaps they should put out a notice asking if anyone has the skills to create the checkbox and make it work.