Really? That's the only Funny on this rich target? And doesn't even strike me as especially funny. Maybe later?

But now I can't even remember if the real FBI director's passing got a mention on today's Slashdot.

I'm not questioning you. I'd read it just on the author if it was available around here. Rather you should file it as among my personal problems. First, I'm trying to get rid of all of my books, not buy new ones. Second, I choose to live in Japan where the libraries basically treat English books as an afterthought. (By using lots of libraries I'm able to find enough good stuff to read, and I'm reading more and more Japanese books these years.) Third, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago...

So I ran the narrow search and got zilch, even in Japanese. Then on my mistake with Levy's book I ran that search, too. Still nothing. The broad search on "house" overflowed, but not just with some silly book about a prairie...

So now I'm off to search for Steven Levy books.

I use a meta-search that covers about 25 local library systems, and couldn't find any. (However I didn't fully expand some of the libraries that I don't have cards for. Depends on the local rules.)

Whoops. I should check but I trust you and know I've read that book, too. My bad.

Not an excuse, but the explanation is that both books were years ago and both authors write well. (But not difficult to write much better than I do.)

Actually I think you should have been more explicit. I'd guess the later Chamberlain, part of the appeasement thing, but I'd have to websearch and expose myself to AI to find out.

At this point I think the only way I would donate money to support Mozilla is if they promised NOT to change and break anything for some period of time.

And I think the only peace we're going to find around this world may be the peace of the grave.

This story is obviously a red herring. What they are worried about is the screens getting used too much and burning images into them.

Why would they care about burning out humans. Pesky nuisances whose main virtue is how cheap they are. But what do you expect when they are mass produced in such quantities but such unskilled labor?

Didn't dislike the FP, but the Subject was vacuous and should have at least hinted if you [Junta] were going for serious or funny. I'm definitely going for Funny, but it's funny I should say that when that trick never works. But I'll still check the Funny comments on the theory that finding the jokes was part of the moderators' job.

A tangent on another historian of science and technology I enjoyed taking a course from and who wrote about information technology and who died relatively way too young:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
        "James Ralph Beniger (December 16, 1946 -- April 12, 2010) was an American historian and sociologist and Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, particularly known for his early work on the history of quantitative graphics in statistics, and his later work on the technological and economic origins of the information society."

RIP Jim. Thanks for being an excellent -- and kind -- professor. And mentioning me and other students with thanks in your Control Revolution book.

And thanks also introducing me to the 1978 book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought" by Langdon Winner --- which just gets more relevant every day.
https://www.amazon.com/Autonom...
        "This study of the idea of technology out of control makes an important contribution to our understanding of the problems of civilization. The basic argument is not that some persons or groups promote technology against the public interest (true though that is), or even that our technology develops in its own way in spite of all our efforts to control it (also true in some respects). Rather, Winner is concerned with a more subtle effect: the artifacts that we have invented to satisfy our material wants have now developed, in size and complexity, to the point of delimiting or even determining our conception of the wants themselves. In that way, we as a civilization are losing mastery over our own tools.... 'As a source for readings and reflections on this problem, the book is rich and rewarding.... If it has a practical lesson, it is that of awareness: only by recognizing the boundaries of our socially constructed scientific-technological reality can we transcend them in imagination and then achieve effective human action.'"

Winner's book is perhaps a sort of antithesis of "The Soul of A New Machine"? In that sometimes technologists (I'm looking at your OpenAI and cohorts) can get so excited about problem solving and miss the big picture. Related humor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes...
        "This reminds me of the engineer who is condemned to death, but as his turn approaches they find that the mechanism on the electric chair is no longer functioning. About to send everyone home, the engineer calls out "Wait! I think i can see the problem!""

I heard that Winner did not get tenure at MIT essentially because he suggested that the method of education used there was essentially blinding the MIT students to the social implications of what they were doing. A related book:
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
        "Who are you going to be? That is the question.
        In this riveting book about the world of professional work, Jeff Schmidt demonstrates that the workplace is a battleground for the very identity of the individual, as is graduate school, where professionals are trained. He shows that professional work is inherently political, and that professionals are hired to subordinate their own vision and maintain strict "ideological discipline."
        The hidden root of much career dissatisfaction, argues Schmidt, is the professional's lack of control over the political component of his or her creative work. Many professionals set out to make a contribution to society and add meaning to their lives. Yet our system of professional education and employment abusively inculcates an acceptance of politically subordinate roles in which professionals typically do not make a significant difference, undermining the creative potential of individuals, organizations and even democracy.
        Schmidt details the battle one must fight to be an independent thinker and to pursue one's own social vision in today's corporate society. He shows how an honest reassessment of what it really means to be a professional employee can be remarkably liberating. After reading this brutally frank book, no one who works for a living will ever think the same way about his or her job."

Anyway, I am so thankful for people like Jim Beniger, Langdon Winner, Michael Mahoney, and others who provided a larger perspective to technologists on what they were doing.

If I can find fault with "The Soul of a New Machine" from hazy recollections from 40+ years ago I don't think it did that. It's still informative though on how technology -- like now AI development -- can become addictive for techies with both good and bad aspects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "The book follows many of the designers as they give almost every waking moment of their lives to design and debug the new machine."

It's maybe kind of like the difference between books that glorify warmaking and "winning" versus those that glorify peacemaking and "win/win/win"?

An example of the latter is "To Become a Human Being: The Message of Tadodaho Chief Leon Shenandoah".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Or an essay by Terry Dobson on Aikido:
https://livingthepresentmoment...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
      "My teacher taught us each morning that the art was devoted to peace. "Aikido," he said again and again, "is the art of reconciliation. Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate other people, you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it." ..."

Or in a way Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu" 1956 short story about wearable networked mobile computing for sharing knowledge that inspired Ted Nelson to invent hypertext which contributed to the creation of the web.

Or Alfie Kohn's "No Contest: The Case Against Competition":
https://www.alfiekohn.org/cont...

One of the most interesting things I overheard at lunch at IBM Research was something along the lines of "We hire the top people from the most competitive schools -- and then wonder why they can't get along and cooperate."

And I'd add, wonder why many technologists rarely take much time to think about the broader social implications of what they are doing.

And "Soul of a New Machine" -- from what I can remember of it -- exemplifies and celebrates that focused mindset.

I can thank someone (maybe Bruce Maier?) who posted this essay to the Lyrics TOPS-10 timesharing system I used in high school circa 1980 -- for helping me have some reservations about such narrow focus:
"The Hacker Papers [about some Stanford CS students]"
https://cdn.preterhuman.net/te...
      "As much as an essay, this is a story. It is a true story of people paying $9,000 a year to lose elements of their humanity. It is a story of the breaking of wills and of people. It is a story of addictions, and of misplaced values. In a large part, it is my own story. ..."

Also assigned reading in Michael Mahoney's course on the history of science and technology at Princeton circa 1984. Although I had read it already -- and found it inspiring.

RIP Tracy Kidder.

And also RIP Professor Mahoney who died in 2008 at the relatively young age of 69 -- just when a historian is typically getting very productive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

https://www.dailyprincetonian....

"Histories of Computing"
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/bo...
"Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of the first established historians of science to take seriously the challenges and opportunities posed by information technology to our understanding of the twentieth century."

It's going to be a rough next decade with ongoing loss of pioneers of personal computing and those who wrote about them or who inspired them. People like Steve Jobs and Doug Engelbart and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon who have passed on years ago. Glad that Steve Wozniak and Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and so on are still hanging in there! A heartfelt thanks to all of them for giving us possibilities -- even if we may not be doing great things with them right now.

"Original architects [Wozniak] of the personal computer hate what it's become..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Steve Wozniak says he's "disappointed a lot" by AI and rarely uses it"
https://www.techspot.com/news/...

Trick that never works.

But I am personally offended by the original sloppy and vacuous Subject, apparently motivated by the lust to FP because of something Colbert said that made the rest of us laugh. Probably at the actual Insight, to be contrasted to whatever idiocy that motivated some moderator to designate such an FP as insightful.

A hug? Thanks? Or no thanks? Mostly seems like it's too late for that trick to help much.

I'd propose a solution approach, but the moderators have already declared this a no-Funny zone.

Congratulations. You have fed the troll and propagated its vacuous Subject. You can collect your prize... In Canada!

Japan's postal service uses lots of electric vehicles, both vans and motorcycles. Seem to work well enough, so I'm not really getting the target of your Funny. The YOB appointed a guy with a vested interest in destroying the postal service, and he seems to be accomplishing his mission.

Solutions? On Slashdot? ROFLMAO.

But what if we used email to make postal mail more convenient? A user-controlled linkage between email and physical address? Naw, that trick would never work.

And this is the only comment moderated Funny on the rich target story? Seems to be evidence that your joke is too true to be funny.

I actually have a funny idea about a solution, but it wouldn't be funny to waste much time on it given the current state of the Slashdot. But going for brevity, I think much of what ails us is confusion between "free" in the monetary sense and "freedom" in the important sense of allowing for new and innovative thoughts. From that perspective, the First Amendment needs a rewrite. Something to distinguish non-profit free speech from for-profit free speech with the profits subject to taxation. Dare I say progressive taxation? Or how about a higher tax rate if the profits are based on proven lies? Some of the tax revenue could even be used to compensate victims when the lies hurt people... Then consider it in light of copyright... With a higher tax rate for plagiarism? And what about persistent liars who aren't in it for the money? Religious fanatics come to mind. Already lost in the complexities. Yet another simplistic solution joke "trick that never works" in here somewhere.

Oh yeah. About the story. Reddit must be making money somehow or it would have gone away by now. But I've never found any value there, even before the AI slop arrived. I've looked the website many times going back many years, but I am unable to remember any examples of good or useful information that I got there. Some of it sounded interesting, but generally the more interesting the less plausible.

But at least it wasn't used for welding.

I concur and still remember many details from The Soul of a New Machine many decades after reading it. Makes me feel used up to hear that he's gone. And my age now feels too close to his...

Most recent of his books that I read was called Mountains Beyond Mountains about Dr Paul Farmer, another great man who died relatively young... Turns out I haven't been able to find any of his other books locally, which surprised me.