I think I have a funny angle on this branch, but I think it's an expired discussion anyway...

The problem is that the AIs are better at social chatting than many, probably most, of the random identities you encounter on "social media" websites. So from that perspective, the algorithm is mostly sabotaging the competition.

And counter-evidence from discussions with AI "support" chatbots be darned.

Pretty weak FP there, but the vacuous Subject worked well enough to apparently span half of the large discussion. I'm also struggling to see the funny.

But I've realized that my latest "Adventures with Claude" have "promoted" me to project manager. Short summary might be funny?

As regards the project, I have done the programming many times over many years in various languages. Call it a "Hello 2-table Relational Database World" exercise? C 0 (Claude Zero) was "hired" a couple of years ago and bombed so badly the project got suspended. About two months ago I was talked into trying again and C 1 turned out to be quite a good performer who produced some nice code. But then he/it started trying to scare me with talk about needing more tokens. At that point he/it had already created a pretty good JavaScript replacement for a large PERL system. I didn't measure precisely, but I think that C 1 plus PM (me) was at least 10 times more productive than me alone. So C 1 "suggested" creating a fresh session and even prepared a hand-off document for his/its successor of the new session. I read the document and it seemed to cover most of what we had "done". (Together?)

But C 2 turned out to be a much inferior coworker. Seemed to know as much about JavaScript, but really bad at communication in both directions. My theory is that there are some implicit "personality" variables that got created as I started working with C 1 and C 2 didn't have any of those "nice" attributes beyond the hard-coded politeness and sycophancy. Eventually managed to salvage things and produce some minor cosmetic improvements, but trust in Claude and the code were greatly harmed.

Decided to put C 2 on ice and just "hired" C 3 for a much simpler project. But the real objective is trust building? Or should I think of it as my training in how to train genAIs?

Returning (at last) to the original story, I suspect genAI is not going to solve the shortage of project managers. Citation of Microsoft Secrets on the same shortage circa 1996.

Smells like someone who is trying to think of or prepare for an extra hypothetical defense of the YOB.

But I'm scoring it as more evidence of the virtues of spending time "talking" to genAIs over typical identities on today's Slashdot. Terrible conversationalists and frequently idiotic, but at least they are consistently polite about it.

I think you're missing the point. If you have to hide your identity to make a joke, then it ain't funny.

Okay, that is an absolute statement and I'm pert' shure you should be able to come up with a counterexample. In the case of humor, I think there is even a particular class of joke that actually hinges on the anonymity of the person making the joke. I haven't seen any examples in a long time, but I think I have some sort of vague memory of such.

Yet my fundamental position remains that freedom of speech should not grant freedom from consequences. There is such a thing as harmful speech and the people who hurt other people, by speech or otherwise, should be liable for the harms. Careless People

spent a LOT of time describing such situations, especially in Myanmar. Just because they did it for money doesn't make it better. Lies are especially bad when anonymized because the normal penalty for lying is a loss of credibility that reduces the effectiveness of the next lies, but if you've heard one AC, you've never been sure it wasn't a fresh liar with a bigger lie.

There actually are some people who might be able to get away with this joke, but I think it's a really small set. Perhaps only the Venn diagram overlap of people at Brown University who have distinctly brown skin and who are also named Brown. While wearing brown clothes? I would wager at high odds against AC being in that intersection, but since it's AC we can never know. But if I was a professional and real comedian I might be able to come up with a scenario with a character that could use some form of the joke?

I'm realizing that talking with genAIs has passed the point of being a better use of time than talking with many, perhaps most, people. AC people least of all? (Oh wait. What about ACs that are genAIs? That's a Turing test long passed.)

Nobody claimed the US doesn't do it. That's exactly the kind of distraction technique we are talking about - ignoring the point and attacking a strawman. What I claimed is that one of the few clear data points we have show that the scale of political manipulation in support of Russian, Chinese and Iranian viewpoints is massively bigger than currently ongoing US manipulation. Admittedly that's on Xitter and might not show the full picture of more local / physical manipulation, however for the online manipulation we're talking about it paints a clear picture.

You certainly aren't wrong. The imposition of authoritarian measures in Western countries, like Chat Control in the EU and age verification in the UK is very much to do with the need of AI companies to be able to identify who are real people and which "people" are actually other AIs so that the latter don't poison their training data.

It has been coming for decades. It will be coming decades from now. Nuclear power is very expensive and unable to compete with more reliable and stable alternatives like battery backed wind power. Plant efficiency improves with scale, reducing this problem, and so gigawatt level power plants up to 5GW are just inevitable. The exception will be military applications and possibly small special cases such as mid sized isolated islands or the Antarctic.

This is exactly the point. Sure, everybody does propaganda. However, Trump telling everyone he's the greatest because he "aced" three dementia tests doesn't have exactly the same effect as troll centers of thousands of people and bots commenting all over the internet.

When X opened up the locations their accounts were based in we didn't suddenly discover millions of US based accounts pretending to be Chinese or Indian. We did find thousands of accounts from India and other China and Russia friendly, low law enforcement countries all pretending to be European and American and all pushing propaganda against the West.

None of the other social media has done anything equivalent because it doesn't' suit them. However we know the same is going on everywhere.

I'm not a great believer in a massive rush for AI data centres. They will be overbuilt and building early increases the damage. However, there are clearly better ares for them - for example Scotland and there are clearly worse ares for them - for example the US has such a disfunctional power system that it is having to increase coal power in order to build this up.

Having this outside interference means that data centres will be built in a panic in the US, where long term it's impossible to provide cheap power to keep them going and in places like Scotland where they would make sense and could benefit from hugely cheap electricity in the long term we won't be doing it because of public protest.

Nobody is benefitting from this. Not the AI companies that will be bankrupted by data centres with too high energy costs; not the local people where we will end up with ghost data centres. Not the people in areas where they actually fit who will miss out on the (admittedly limited numbers of) long term jobs they provide and not the power grids which could be using this to build up the cheap energy sources like Wind that we need for the future.

Even people in China will likely end up having their lives damaged by needless global warming that could have been reduced.

Only funny comment on the story?

But the beloved thing I was thinking about when I saw this story was a little whiteboard I used for scheduling most of my work. I actually inherited it from my predecessor, who I still meet for lunch from time to time... (The next joke requires Unicode, so Slashdot has spared you the attempt.)

Different abandoned IBM site, but I have walked past a few times since then and it looks pretty much unchanged. I didn't try to go in, but from the outside the buildings seem just as they were back then. Difference is that the parking lots are full of unused construction equipment. The site is just being used for storage of inventory by a company that makes the equipment.

Shhh... You aren't supposed to talk about the Cuban invasion. The invasion schedule depends on maximizing impact on the "election" in November. And this time the trick is going to work for sure! ALL those Cuban immigrants now living in America will be so surprised to find themselves drafted into the invasion force. Two birds with one stone time!

Seriously, it's not like Cuba was ever real threat. Not even the level of economic threat that Venezuela once posed with the oil. But it would be funny if Rubio volunteers to be the Generalissimo leading the invasion and then Presidento of the Cuban Republic of Bananas.

Wrong on both counts, though I concur that the selection of stories could be better. MUCH better. Why don't you become a Slashdot editor?

It's pretty sad that so many nerds idolize these fools as role models. Maybe just young wannabe nerds, but they still gobble up this kind of news and gossip.

Even sadder that their petty squabbles and twisted personalities matter so much. This is how the money works these years. But I think the funniest part is that their patron saint Adam Smith is to completely misunderstood. He was mostly talking about how the invisible hand had managed to keep things working up to that time, but at the same time he was removing the cloak of invisibility. I would argue that he therefore deserve a lot, perhaps even the lion's share, of the blame for what has happened to the economies of the world since then.

Just doing some "research" on "crucified on a cross of shareholder value", but I should have asked more about who. As in all of us.

Returning to my modified Subject, I confess I was exaggerating for clickbait effect. I don't think most of the people on Slashdot are that awful and the great insult artists of yore are long gone, too. But there was a time when I thought some Slashdot discussions could be part of actual solutions in the actual world, which has become a funny thought of its own on a website that is simultaneously seriously deficient in funny.

(Yesterday's trip to the library netted an anti-AI book, an anti-monopoly book, and one humor book from a long-dead humorist. Current priority book is neuroscience and still digesting Careless People about the awful people of Facebook.)

You should look up what happened to newspapers like the (London) Times when Rupert Murdoch bought them up. His entire shtick is buying up journalism and converting it into what the lawyers politely describe as "entertainment". He, or rather News Corp has been doing clickbait from before people even started clicking.
 

In the end you are just restating Wilholt's law

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

It's getting the people who haven't yet been visibly targeted by this to understand that only a tiny tiny set is really in the in-group and that they, unless they are actual billionaires of the right group, aren't in it which is the difficulty.

Damnit, that's Trump "600% reduction" mathematics. I can see why you might think it's reasonable in this case, but could we please just call it 57% of the increase and not give in to idiocracy.