Would have been a better FP than the AI thing. Yeah, I know I tend to tangents, but there's such a thing as too tangential...

Your brevity makes your intention unclear, so I better start by explaining how I'm reading it. I think you're saying the movie was too anticlimactic because we already knew this. Also you are indicating that you believe this is the main theme of the movie. Does that mean you've actually seen it?

My take is different, though I'm actually going to bring AI back into it, but hopefully with better justification. I'm coming from the perspective of marketing based on applied psychology. I think the same techniques that they use to persuade you to buy scented soaps and watch movies they recommend can be applied in reverse to deter you from buying scented soaps or from watching movies they prefer you don't see. I actually saw bits of an interview with Sorkin where he was asked about advertising the movie on Facebook, but I think whatever advertising he purchased could easily be countered by (AI-empowered) algorithmic counter-advertising. I actually believe Facebook has the capability to do it on a personalized basis, with two obvious angles of attack.

On the first angle, if someone has just seen an ad for the movie, then Facebook can respond by following that with some kind of diversionary content. I doubt they want to be so direct and clumsy as to attack the movie directly, so it would be something that is calculated to be of higher "engagement" to that particular person. This is a retail level of manipulation. The second angle is wholesale, but for now I've decided to leave that as an exercise for the interested reader. On today's Slashdot?

Disclaimer needed: Though I was an old user of Facebook with one of the original university-linked accounts, my feelings for the website went monotonically downhill over time. At some point, probably before 2020, I decided it was a waste of time and I deliberately limited my Facebook usage to five minutes per day, which was quite sufficient. Then in 2022 my Facebook account was targeted for destruction. Facebook declined to say why, though I still suspect that it was somehow politically motivated. Perhaps even a political assassination?

That was the angle I was looking for in the discussion. Whenever I think about Patel in charge, this ol' classic video comes to mind: https://youtu.be/MdnH6m054as?s... So now I'm wondering about whether this guy had the right political connections separate from the connections he may have had to the criminals...

On the other hand, it is true that the weakest link in any chain of security is likely to be a human being... However the way the FBI works now, I'm back to wondering if perhaps he was just the easiest human target for the blame? Without regard to his own politics.

Solving the problems? Perish such thoughts! It's just my twisted imagination that going after the spammers could reduce the volume of phishing garbage and make it easier to find and arrest the residual bad guys. Follow the money and stop it from reaching the crooks, and I still believe most of the professional crooks are rational enough to move along. No, I don't think any spammer is capable of becoming a decent human being, but at least they may become motivated to move under less visible rocks...

(from 1987) has a section on how excessive use of nitrogenous fertilizer (as in most conventional agriculture) changes the electrostatic potential on clay micelles via pH changes which caused many of the other nutrients in the soil which are no longer as strongly held by clay to leach out (related to changing and so become unavailable to plants:
https://archive.org/details/to...

Having more organic matter in the soil can help resists this somewhat, but the real solution is not to dump too much chemical fertilizer on the soil and to consider using rock dust and other amendments to slowly remineralize the soil.
https://remineralize.org/

So, an aspect of this may be that many farmers may think more is better with chemical fertilizer (even as depleted soils, problematical cultivars, and early harvesting may indeed be aspects too).

As above, this has all been known for *decades* but it is hard to get a lot of people to care about it because the health effects are so gradual and the short-term profits from conventional agriculture are so immediate.

Good advice as always though to eat a varied balanced diet -- including foods grown in various places.

I suppose your question is rhetorical, but the obvious answer is "Since Congress became incapable of making any 'meaningful' laws." Insofar as the legislature is supposed to regulate and control the executive branch, you could even describe it as a form of regulatory capture.

But it's worse for the judiciary these years. If you look at the history of nominations and confirmations, that transition has been shockingly rapid. There are still two living (but retired) nonpartisan Justices who were confirmed by a majority of the Senators from both parties, which used to be the norm, but on the actual Court there are no nonpartisan Justices. So my hilarious solution approach would be to boost the value of nonpartisan Justices with a funny little recusal rule: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." (I can even imagine how the change could be pushed. The key step is to get one or more nonpartisan Justices onto the Court...)

Mostly the ACK, but thanks for clarifying. If I understand correctly, your original joke was based on the word "metaphors", not "phosphors" or something else. I didn't understand the linkage between your secondary joke and the joke your were replying to.

If you like SF, then I recommend Ancillary Justice fairly strongly. I don't read that much SF these years, but it seemed to be one of the best I've read, with many atmospheric elements that reminded me of the great Iain Banks. Another recent one with some interesting AI themes was Waste Tide by Qiufan Chen, but the story wasn't engaging.

As regards the sig fork, I concur with the duration of the national disease. With the latest proposal for the online live execution it has reached the stage of national disgrace, and if that webcast actually happens, I think it should be taken as a terminal symptom. I knew the country was headed in a bad direction decades ago, but I had no idea how bad it could get, how far it would go, nor how fast.

I'm unclear on the reference. Only thing that comes to mind as a possible candidate in this JPEG context is phosphors, but that was a long time ago.

Probably shouldn't add that I tangentially like the sig, though perhaps it could be a "car stolen for parts"? My related metaphorical thought on international relations is that America used to be like the older brother who mostly protected you, but has mutated into the wicked old stepsister. I guess that metaphor then calls for regarding the super-rich owners of America as wicked stepmothers? (From What is Thought? I seem to be hung up on metaphors now.)

(Hmm... But if I was a real writer of comedy then I'd figure out some way to do a callback on your joke with "metaphors" as the source of "phors"? Does the Evil Witch of the West Meta have a browser for a meta-joke? (As things stand now, it mostly feels like I'm just a reader of tragedies... Let me check my database for the latest... Have to skip back 7 to Profiles in Courage and Abundance since the later stuff was happy space operas and some pleasant Japanese stuff. However the hero of Ancillary Justice was finally revealed to be an AI of some sort...))

Mod parent derivative funny, but I wish the thread had continued with the other funny comment about Sam Altman leading the way as recipient of the bad things.

The joke I was actually looking for would involve the conflict of interest more directly, but it's still early and maybe something will show up. I wish I could help, but my capacity to write jokes is limited.

Hmm... Would it count as a bad thing happening if I asked the AIs for help in writing jokes for Slashdot? Some of the things they say are pretty funny, but usually unintentionally.

(Just had another funny-not-funny encounter with the google's AI today. This one involved a special case of traveling salesman problems. I had noticed that the google was having difficulties and that many of the answers were terrible, but yesterday I, the lowly human, managed to find a better solution for one of main routing bottlenecks. This must mean something about how the google is approaching the problem incorrectly... All I can guess so far is that there's an arbitrary limit in the AI's planning that is blocking it from finding this path. Or maybe the bus companies have their own AIs that are at war with the google's AI?)

As I suggested in 2011 in this video, theft may rise if people lose faith in the exchange economy. Other interwoven economies of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned could also alternatively take up the slack if they were improves -- instead of people becoming more inclined to crime.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."

My thanks to a Slashdot commentator many years ago who suggested I add a "theft" economy to the other four.

So, my hypothesis is that theft around SF could be substantially reduced if some mix of these were made to happen:
1. It was easier to do subsistence production (like using 3D printers, solar panels, and gardening robots etc.)
2. the SF gift economy (charity, sharing, freecycle, free 3D models, etc) was stronger.
3. the California exchange economy was working better for everyone (i.e. less wealth concentration through inflated property prices, limits on multiples of CEO pay vs lowest paid worker, a basic income, etc)
4. the California planned economy was working better (i.e. fairer taxation of property, public investments that create good jobs or reduce product prices or increase product quality, changing zoning restrictions to make affordable housing more feasible, more responsive democratic government, etc)

Sadly, because people tend to focus on only the exchange economy when talking about economic (and so ignore strengthening those other areas), we will likely see increasing theft as we go into a recession and as AI takes enough jobs to disrupt the exchange economy.

More ideas I've collected are here:
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-...
        "This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."

Mod parent funny but the low-hanging joke I was looking for was "It couldn't happen to a more deserving and persistently vicious moronotron." He's earned more than the sudden need for a new phone number.

I wonder how often the YOB's own phone number leaks? Credible reports say that it's widely known. (More likely that a certain phone number is widely known but that the phone number just reaches some sycophants who get lots of taxpayer money to carry that phone around on shifts.)

I know there is an XKCD about standards (and adding yet one more to create yet more confusion).
"Standards"
https://xkcd.com/927/

But that said, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all terrible standards in many ways because of their complexity (and major design flaws like JavaScript having vastly too many global variables). Asa an alternative, what if, say, we all just used something like Scheme (or Common Lisp) to encode web documents and web code as S-expressions in some semantically standardized formats? Scheme can be very compact in its implementation.

Or as the XKCD mentioned here says:
"Lessons learned from implementing minimal Scheme six times"
https://twolodzko.github.io/po...
https://xkcd.com/297/
"Lisp cycles XKCD #297: âoeThose are your fatherâ(TM)s parentheses. Elegant weapons for a more⦠civilized age.â"

Now, it doesn't have to be Lisp-like.I get the paren hate:
"What makes Lisp difficult to read?"
https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/...

And there is a lot to be said for significant-indentation languages like Occam or Python. Smalltalk is another great language. Or even some variant of a safe C.

Even a Forth-derivative perhaps that could be literally less than ~2K in size at the core. Although I get that there is a fine line between flexible and flabby in readability in a language that can change its own fundamental syntax or that makes naming intermediate variables unlikely as a form of documentation. Same with any language that supports arbitrary macros like C or Scheme which can change the fundamental nature of the language. Although at least in, say, Racket Scheme you see the language level set at the start of some code to know what you are getting into.

The main point is just that yet another adhoc problematical language like JavaScript was not needed (even as TypeScript papers over the worst warts). And CSS conceptually is broken for big projects ("Atomic" CSS is one style to help with that). And adding end tags with names in HTML (like XML) is another broken concept as are other aspects of HTML. Yes, programmers can work around and manage the issue in these web fundamentals, but why should we have to?

While a simpler browser for HTML etc is a good thing if it really is well written, better standards for encoding and sharing information will ultimately get us further and be more energy efficient and be more reliable and be more programmer-friendly.

I've long been a fan of triples for doing some of that data encoding, but that is even further out.

Tangentially, here is a Libre Plane 2021 talk I put together on free standards for social media being more important than free implementations:
"Free/Libre Standards for Social Media and other Communications"
https://pdfernhout.net/librepl...

I know this all may sound pie in the sky (and it is, given current social dynamics), but consider if we used the usual buggy lot-of-library junky (and now AI slop) code only with an intent to translate web content encoded in problematical standards into content encoded in better simpler standards for other code to consume. Sort of like Amazon did at one point with a server-side engine to process HTML pages and transform them for low-end Kindle browsers -- but in this case converting HTML plus CSS plus JavaScript into something like, say, S-expressions for web content that was not yet written directly n the simpler standards. Maybe the junky translator code might not be perfect, but it might be good enough and runnable in distant containers so that the local code that processed the simpler standards could be more secure and reliable.

Also related: "Simple Made Easy"
https://www.infoq.com/presenta...
"Rich Hickey emphasizes simplicityâ(TM)s virtues over easinessâ(TM), showing that while many choose easiness they may end up with complexity, and the better way is to choose easiness along the simplicity path. ... We should aim for simplicity because simplicity is a prerequisite for reliability. Simple is often erroneously mistaken for easy. "Easy" means "to be at hand", "to be approachable". "Simple" is the opposite of "complex" which means "being intertwined", "being tied together". Simple != easy. ..."

Ideally a group like the US National Institute of Standards and Technology or the US Library of Congress should fund this sort of work. And a group like Archive.org should have a lot of input to those standards on how to make the content simply versionable and simply archivable.

Anyway, just something I have been musing on and off again for many years...

No funny here, but the Subject is the low-hanging fruit I was looking for.

What Flock does is mass surveillance of the most massive sort. However, I can imagine one way to provide legitimate probably cause. Link the cameras to speed detectors and only take pictures of license plates when speeding has actually been detected. But that approach would obviously harm shareholder value, so...

How about Stupor-Intelligence? I think it rolls off the tongue more easily. But it could end well if it somehow persuaded the YOB to read Bostrum's book? At least he might know who the bad machine is...

Other parts of the discussion were more focused on the story as one of bad military leadership. So the joke along those lines would involve a certain infamous corporal who became commander-in-chief of a big military. But these days the Americans couldn't even reach a consensus on whether that ended badly... "If only he'd waited another year before attacking Stupid Joe..."

I can't tell if you're going for funny or you don't know much about how good young children are at seeking their own destruction. It's really hard to keep 'em alive and it takes a whole lot of love. Even for the kids that turn out badly, perhaps because of unlucky genetic draws.

Doesn't seem like you want to discuss genetic counseling and reproductive rights in the context of possible solutions. And it's not like Slashdot is the most suitable venue for such discussions. I strongly suspect this crowd is below average for the numbers of children produced.

Nice FP, though yet to be modded Funny and I wish you'd had the leisure to add some more humorous examples beyond the vague "this". However in the context the reference is clear enough to establish the recursive humor. Yet it was basically an obvious and low-hanging joke.

The other one would be the anti-social media thing, but it's still early in the discussion and perhaps someone will do a good version. Getting harder and harder to remember the "good old days" when Slashdot was some sort of social media...

However I still persist in asking such silly questions as "Why?" and "Isn't there anything we can do to make the situation better?"

So for the why part, my basic answer is "bad economic models". I can't decide whether to blame free radio and TV broadcasts that led to an illusory Golden Age of idealistic public-service journalism without worrying about profits or the fools who created the weak and uncompetitive profit-driven versions of journalism. That's mostly "60 Minutes" and CNN, but there are so many flavors, none of which can compete.

Making the situation better? I used to think solution-oriented journalism might be an angle. Basically a charity approach, trying to dodge the pressure of the big money. However my expectations have been reduced, mostly by time. Apparently my last residual purpose in life is to do my tiny bit to boost the life expectancy statistics? So have a nice day.

Mod parent funny-not-really-funny.

But the SCOTUS disagreed with you by creating absolute presidential immunity out of nothing.

I know it's silly to contemplate solutions in the context of Slashdot, whatever it has devolved into, but I keep thinking about that new recusal thing: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." I think that could create the incentive to go upstream in fixing the problem, whereas every other solution proposal I've seen simply accepts the underlying problem as incurable.

Clarifications in response to polite requests, though I'd actually prefer to see a better solution approach that has a better chance of being implemented. (I think the most likely path to the recusal rule would basically require an escalation of political threats... I'm not saying "That trick never works", but it's always a dangerous path.)