My joke was to blame ol' Al Gore for giving them the money to develop the Internet with no strings. But does anyone remember who he was?

I heard of Notion via a scam. The website did look interesting and made a lot of powerful promises, which got me to ask some questions. The answers reeked of an AI fake-support system and I lost interest. Might be a legitimate company. Or not. (But I think ZenDesk is still the king of fake support by companies that want to pretend they care as cheaply as possible.)

However if someone around here has positive experiences with Notion, then I'd be interested. But suspicious. There was a time when I was willing to start with a position of trust in a Slashdot identity. Long time ago.

A few more words about the scam because I thought it was quite impressive. Near as I can tell, they got one of my email addresses via a kind of dictionary probe from my YouTube account. The scam package was email from a plausible sounding identity and based on YouTube videos posted by a famous author about an ongoing project. The scammer was projecting an expanded version of the project and designed the email to sound like a marketing pitch, but it didn't stop there. There was one aspect that piqued my curiosity enough to reply, and the famous author wrote back (and mentioned Notion). Or so it seemed. The tone and style and even degree of persuasion of the reply was excellent--but it seemed rather rapid and too personal for such a busy person. So I back-channeled via the publisher's website and got a "NOT the author" response. Along with the usual "Ignore it" recommendation in these days of "Live and let scam."

Sort of concurrence, but on behaviorist grounds. In general I think theoretical and clinical psychology have as little scientific validity as most economics, but applied psychology has made a lot of progress in selling soap, toothpaste, and lying politicians.

Give the man his funny, but the real question is how much "exercise" the immune system needs to receive and even the best AIs still have no real idea on that one. Ditto diet and physical exercise about about 20 different things.

My joke? It don't matter much. Still gonna die. And I bet you wanna complain about that, too.

In the morning?

I have a really funny idea for how to use computers to make voting better rather than ever more meaningless. Just as a tangential-topic typing exercise, I'll share it:

Still needs a good label, but the key ideas are ranked guest voting and equalized representation. Guest voting would allow you to pick from a neighboring district, which would be even more effective when your district has been aggressively gerrymandered. The electronic ballot would start with your own district, but you could click to get all the neighboring district candidates. Then you would rank the candidates. Most people would probably stop after a few, perhaps even after one, but why not allow as many as you like.

The next trick is in the counting. Still thinking about this one, but I like the idea of starting with top votes only. It’s simple if the candidate who gets the most #1 votes wins that district. But we aren't done yet. What about the voters who didn't pick a district winner? We'd look at their #2 choice. The voter might have been willing to accept another candidate from their own district, and that might be the winner, or perhaps the voter prefers a candidate from a neighboring district who won that district. On down the list of choices until the voter picks a winner, with the goal of each voter getting to pick a representative that voter actually wants.

Now for the twisty bit: The winning representatives are NOT equal, but rather have voting weight in accord with how many voters they actually represent. The result would be that each voter would have exactly equal representation in the legislature and each representative should care exactly equally about each voter represented.

Oh, yeah. One more wrinkle. What about voters who didn't pick any winner? How about a tertiary election while primaries are eliminated? Those voters would be contacted and get a chance to pick from the winners of their own and the neighboring districts.

I have a much simpler but even sillier idea of how to fix the Supreme Court. But since when has Slashdot been about solutions, even fantasy solutions?

I checked with the AI and it's just research. Completely legitimate scientific work. The AI also said that Anthropic's lawyers must be smoking crack if they think the Chinese government is going to penalize or hinder any AI research in the Middle Kingdom.

Your mileage might vary depending on which AI you ask, but I actually suspect all of them agree on this one. But it is NOT any sort of conspiracy.

Why am I not surprised to hear that Microsoft is using cheap Chinese AI these days? Can't possibly be a lapse to their old evil ways. And no one ever suggested (in my hearing) that Microsoft's lawyers were on crack.

Yeah, low hanging fruit and in a just Slashdot someone would have already made the jokes. Easy to make them better than I did.

From the summary:

IOW, they're sticking with their marketing pitch.

That's no longer the American Way (if it ever was).

Glad to see the joke to start it off, though it didn't seem to lead to much depth. Key is "opinion" and that word doesn't appear to be anywhere else in the discussion.

Stock prices used to be related to such silly ideas as assets and current sales. Now just based on opinions about other people gambling on the stock prices.

If I could write Funny, it would be some kind of recursive joke. Some people think stock prices have certain high values because the previous owners of the shares agreed to sell those shares at the higher values. But at some point there will be agreement that the shares aren't worth that much and there are limits how much they can rig the market game to keep the inflation of value going up.

Or is the funniest part that even the smartest players of these games think they are the players who are going to be smart enough to get out at the right time? With cleverly placed bets that profit from the crashing values, of course. (Your value of "clever" should include "insider knowledge" for maximum profit.)

To say "fastest warming" implies a competition, but the only competitor sort of mentioned seems to be "arctic"? And only in the story summary, where they seem to be blurring the line so Europe can be blended into arctic effects?

That search would have picked up "antarctic", by the way, but nothing there. I actually think that angle is more damaging and that should be part of "most". Not enough people effected directly enough?

Oh, one more thing. No Funny here. Sadness. Out of 83 comments as of this writing...

Well, at least it wasn't modded up.

The point of bribes is that they are paid in advance of services rendered and quos quidly pro-ed. Probably the main point of bribes, since their fundamentally illegality encourages a "take the money and run" mentality. Or at least be prepared to run if you don't have absolute immunity via your bribed judges.

I know it's too much to expect from Slashdot these years, but I mostly feel there was a joke opportunity sadly lost.

Me? I actually think nuclear power is not an intrinsically bad idea. However some terrible design choices were made a long time ago and America (in particular, but it's a broad international problem) has lost the capacity for the kind of rational and goal-directed change that could fix those mistakes at this late date. Too much irrational hate and fear of "radiation" and too little trust left in objective-but-imperfect science.

Z^-1

Wind is part of the cause, but the GS itself is an ocean current.

The reported drop ins SpaceX is understandable given the recent IPO.

As for most of the others, is a 2% drop significant?