I agree it was funny (and would even mod it funnier if I ever saw a mod point to give) but the quote needs an "oxymoronic" tag of some sort even before we get to your "sarcastic" tag.

Sounds like you play the horses? Or is your interest purely a mathematical one? In that case, maybe you work for the house?

I didn't go into the details of the deal because I admit I'm not that interested in more sordid stuff that is still under development. Usually takes a while for all the details to come out, which actually works well for books. Currently reading Chaos Monkeys which is largely about the financial shenanigans of Twitter and Facebook. But mostly the author is making himself look bad...

It's almost certainly an attempt by the administration to coerce AI companies, in particular Anthropic. Control freaks like to have control.

2.7 more years.

You can't be on a narrow line and fuck it up for three generations. Either you're not fucking it up solidly or the line isn't so narrow.

NAK

Has to be some kind of leveraged buyout where the insane valuation of the company they are buying based on the insane valuation of their own company is supposed to produce magic value and a more insane combined valuation from which they will "easily" pay off all the borrowed money that lubricated the rest of the deal. Usually has some vulture elements of splitting up and selling pieces that have insane projections of future sales.

Too bad such insanity isn't illegal.

My solution delusion would be pro-freedom anti-greedom taxation where such deals would basically become poisonous. The merger would result in higher taxes on the profits for the monopoly-building aspects, thus lowering the precious retaining earnings after taxes. Create a natural path to higher retained earnings by spawning competing child companies... "Can't get there from here."

I'm familiar with the basic idea, but it did get me to wondering about pathological cases. What if the bets on losing horses were so few and so small that the winnings went negative after the house percentage was taken? You bet on the winner but the return is less than your wager? That would suggest starting by putting aside the winners' wagers to make sure they don't lose money before taking the house cut off of the losing bets... Or some kind of escape clause where the race gets cancelled if there aren't enough losing bets?

More reflection on the topic considering the book Feeding the Machine by Muldoon, Graham, and Cant. One of the points of their book was the relative starvation wages for AI annotation based on the international and cross-jurisdictional race to the bottom. But the training described above could be paid at a generous rate, as long as no cash is involved. You would in effect be able to earn many years of future storage capacity based on training you did now.

Then after the singularity and rise of the ASI, no one is gonna care? Citation of Bostrom called for? Or worse? Recently finished an old Greg Bear where the ending seemed rather contrived because the humans weren't exterminated. Not as stretched as the ending of the New Testament, but up there...

Illegal abuse of monopoly power by an EVIL company. My second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago because the evil was too obvious. Simple example:

"Be a shame if something happened to this potential bestseller because you didn't give us a better price than that..."

Publishers used to profit from bestsellers and lose money on the large majority of books they published. Amazon broke that system. Not a perfect system, but a lot of good books got published on the (slim) hope they might become a bestseller.

Solutions? Such a pointless notion on Slashdot, but... How about a progressive tax on profits linked to monopoly abuse? Degree of monopoly determined by such metrics as (1) How many shopping options do customers have? (2) How much freedom do wannabe competitors have to enter the market and offer more options? (3) Are employees free to find similar work with other companies? (4) Your metrical question here?

The Enigma of Reason by Sperber and Mercier explains why there is little intelligence behind most actions, including human actions. The reasons are added later with my-side bias on top.

For the general problem of how human brains work and how LLMs differ from human thinking, I still think A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins is the best book I've read. But I'm (always) looking for a better book (on any topic).

(Currently reading technology history stuff. But the evidence is that the Venn intersection of current users of Slashdot and people who read books has become quite small.)

More the branch I was looking for. Business model makes EVIL.

But the story is actually related to a topic I wanted to AskSlahdot about... It would be interesting if there was a video website where you paid by helping to train the AIs. As it applies here, you would earn credit for correcting errors in the subtitles. Easily leveraged against the users by checking each participant's corrections and suggestions against other participants' work.

But for the greater glory and never-sufficient profits of the ever-more-EVIL google? No thanks.

Like the joke, but the mutated Subject about the horse named Incredibolt was the joke I was looking for.

But seriously, folks, I wonder how much difference the name makes. I doubt the horse cares, but the humans are affected. Reminds me of a book about the people who live by training race horses, but it was in Japanese so I can't even share the title on Unicode-less Slashdot.

On the other hand, taking the question seriously, I count the results as evidence that "luck" is more important than "data" and my conclusion is that horse racing is mostly a honest sport. Which means the gamblers are losing on average.

Ancient joke, but I still agree that gambling is a special tax for people who are bad at math. If it's an honest game of chance, then the house always wins and if it's a game of skill then do you really believe you are (and will remain) the most skilled player in the world? (But there's a bit of wiggle room if you are playing a game of skill within a closed set of players for a limited time...)

Just so--but the AI sounded just as plausible and just as sycophantic even when it was wrong. I have gotten better at controlling the verbosity, but I still avoid talking to them these months.