Unemployment stats have always been manipulated heavily for 30+ years. This last month is a good example. 320k jobs created by the "birth / death" model. That model is completely based on bullshit and pro-government fantasy and has been chronically wrong (tens or sometimes even 100k numbers completely reversed) for years now. It's completely ridiculous to use those statistics at all. The household survey (which shows realistic job losses this month, not a huge surplus) is much more reliable historically. I also expect the government to, very soon now, stop even issuing the (huge) corrections they've been doing lately.

Mod parent funnier. But the story had room for more than one Funny comment, so as usual I'm disappointed...

Also rather funny was the book Chaos Monkeys about the internals of the process. Interesting self-contradictions as he flips back and forth between abusing personal information he gathers online, trying to reassure readers that the personal information is used "safely", and the financial shenanigans driving the whole mess forward. There are times when you can try to evade accusations of self-contradictions by saying you've learned stuff and changed your mind, but it's much harder for an author who is writing a book. The state of the book at the time of publication is basically a frozen thing and the contradictions should have been resolved.

But the joke I was looking for was about who elected (and will elect) whom in these days of applied psychology destroying human freedom and the meaning of elections. In the form of a mystery novel the detective sometimes starts by asking "Who benefited?" (Certainly not Europe. Too soon to say China?)

And yet my mind is still boggled by the idea that there are people who voted for the YOB six times, counting primaries. Fool me one is supposed to be a mistake, twice is a shame, but six times?

Thanks for the tips. At first I thought you were referring to the 2023 book by Connie Willis. My local library system actually has two copies of that one and I'm going to take a look at it. (The library seems to think she's named Willis Connie?) Because of the date, it might be linked to the older movie?

I'm pretty sure there was also an old English book with a similar title, too, but your Wikipedia link is actually about a movie from Korea and I couldn't find any book reference there. Haven't seen the movie and unlikely to (though I recently saw a few minutes of a recent Men in Black film on TV). I don't see many movies these decades.

That assumes that the vibrations themselves didn't have some salient impact on their germination. Still, it's cool in either case.

That's supposed to be the perfect state for Buddhist meditation and the path to true zen.

(But what's AC's excuse for possibly living that way? Or just another AI sock puppet?)

(And of course I'm reading another book on the topic. Oh wait, I see there are two of them. Maybe three?)

So you don't believe Epstein was an alien, eh? No one's told you about the REAL conspiracy?

I think you should have been modified Funny rather than insightful. Even funnier with some tail-wagging-dog angle about the let's-not-call-it a war in Iran.

Got me to look at AC. Unthanks, even if there might have been an atom of substance in there somewhere. Feeding the sock puppets and trolls is one of those tricks that never works.

(Like solutions that will never happen because Slashdot lacks a financial model that can support improvements, be they ever so evolutionary. Increasingly clear to me that part of the website I am looking for would involve a different kind of financial model... Slashdot is just one of those ancient portable nuisance things?)

Now to look for the obvious joke about the distractive motivation...

How do you complain about dupe without saying dupe (or duplicate)? Citing FP and this thread. But at least FP got a Funny, even if'n I can't understand why.

But is it possible that some serious topics will evolve and develop in ways that justify discussions that extend longer than the one-day lifetime of a Slashdot story? Naw, that can't possibly be it.

Of course I shall now diverge. This time I'm wondering about the source of this vulnerability. So far I haven't spotted any insight into causes here on ye ancient Slashdot of olde. And I think I'd be at risk of a heart attack if I saw something that might be a constructive solution here.

So what's the Subject about? I'm wondering how many of the recent vulnerabilities were discovered with AI tools, perhaps virtually flying swarms of virtual chaos monkeys over and through the code and systems.

(You'll probably be relieved to know that there is no real relationship to the book Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Martinez, where the term is just used to justify a cute drawing of a monkey on the cover. That and the eye-catching orange cover must explain the claim of "bestseller" since the real pitch should be "Facebook" which is barely mentioned on the back cover. Mostly reading it for the yuks and yucks.)

Exactly. Only insecure people would be offended by a term that has been and is understood world around.

Besides, the cool kids use Kelvin anyhow.

I see. As an American, I would use "C" or "F", but most often "K", mainly because it is better to use positives rather than negatives. Using a measurement system that goes into negative values simply because they are colder than the temperature where water freezes, is so clumsy.

Not an American, but a French scientist, Jean Pierre Cristin called his adaptation of Celsius' system centigrade as he divided the "C" scale into 100 steps. He called it the Centigrade scale, using "centi" as the prefix for 100. We still use his system today, and various places around the world use the terms interchangeably.

In 1948, The 9th General Conference on Weights and Measures made the Centigrade/Celsius named Celsius as the official name in honor of Anders Celsius.

That said, the cool kids use Kelvin as it tweaks the Celsius system a bit, every 1 degree K change of thermodynamic temperature refers to a change in the thermal energy, kBt , of exactly 1.380649×1023 joules .

Which of course, is the tweaking you have to do when superannuated systems like Celsius have to be tweaked for modern accuracy.

He was definitely polarizing.

Demand software developers start caring about memory print of their software again. Both in RAM and storage.

Unironically. We've lived out at least a decade and a half of "this software stack is utterly unoptimized garbage" "who cares, just slap bigger system requirements. We're not spending money on optimizing something that doesn't matter to anyone since hardware is advancing so fast".

It's good that every decade or so we get a memory and storage crunch and developers actually have to rediscover things like better compression algorithms and methods, proper garbage collection, and general software optimization.

Seriously, have you seen the size requirements of modern games? Have you seen the retarded chugging of modern office software running win11 on 8GB RAM machines when they have to actually start swapping? Have you experienced the joys of Chrome and all the memes about it being a ramvore?

What in the actual fuck are those tabs doing eating gigabytes of RAM? And why in the fuck are most Chromium based browser installs now almost a gig of storage?

You could do the same things a decade and a half ago on 4 gigs RAM and tiny SSDs that were less than one gigabyte and the system flew and most things except the porn torrents could be stored on it.

And then you consider "ok, what did we actually get for that insane increase in system demands?"

Built in always on spyware. Slightly redesigned UI according to the latest fashion trends. A few arcane additional features barely anyone uses. Games with "that unreal look" that look worse than unreal games a decade ago. And "modern" webpages that essentially ask you one question: "Would you like scrips with those scripts so you can enjoy scripts while you're enjoying scripts".

While reading a text based news article.

Just kidding. They don't ask.

Is there room for consciousness to manifest in a brain?

Don't think he's a white supremacist but someone who likes Western culture and is "pro-west". So am I. It so happens that most Western culture was created by white folks because for most of modern history, the West was coincidentally full of white folks. However, if he was a white supremacist he wouldn't want to flood the US with brown folks from India and he definitely does want that.