ACK but I still don't get the Funny moderation.

This is largely a rejection of the FP as minor hype. But the story reminds me of an anecdote so I'm mostly reacting at that level...

I worked for TI a long time ago. Many of the details have become fuzzy, but it did involve semiconductors. In particular there was a special CPU that was one of the largest chips in the world at that time. Quite soon after I joined the project (in the CMINT section) I reached the conclusion that the large project would never make money--and not long after I left the project the entire thing was unloaded and the division was sold to HP. No hilarity followed.

And yet the inertia of big money continues. I was sort of surprised to hear that TI still exists. I wouldn't have been a bit surprised to learn the rest of the company had been sold to someone else. I think of TI as another zombie company with vague memories of former significance. Other candidates?

(I tend to remember technical trivia like vector-push-extend and unwind-protect... And there was that bug in the compiler that confused me for some hours one morning...)

Not a bad FP, but I think we have to consider kinds of progress.

In terms of theory, I am skeptical how much of the "progress" in AI qualifies as "genuine". We only weakly understand how the DLMs work and our understanding goes down from there. We do not know what constitutes intelligence or consciousness or the human soul or any of that fuzzy stuff. (My current theory is that a lot of it is a compression artifact created by our adoption of language, amplified by a second level of compression from written language. (Largely based on Hofstadter, Hawkins, Mercier and Sperber, and Chambers...))

But in terms of practice using AI, we are making extremely rapid progress even though we have no idea where we are going. Worse than that, many of the "applications" that seem to be progressing most rapidly are motivated by people with fake problems. I can name names of the usual stinking rich suspects, but I think it will suffice to say that they only imagine they need more money, and yet they are quite aggressive about finding new ways to use AI to get more money--but there is NO amount of money that can actually solve their personal problems of needing more money. Dare I suggest they should be called bad actors? That's always how I feel about liars, even the most flamboyant liars. (So applied AI should be compared with applied psychology versus other forms of AI and psychology? (Anyone want more authors to consider?))

Today's personal example: Recently I wrote up a bunch of notes about a prominent book. Several thousand words assembled over the course of a week or so. Now what to do? It would take me many hours of hard work to make something better of the mess I've made. Or I could use an an AI I've already experimented with and get almost instant and seemingly effortless answers to such questions as: (1) Whose style does the current draft resemble? (2) List some people whose book reviews are considered good and worth emulating. (3) This one is a challenge, but I think I can force it: Make the AI ask questions about missing gaps. The meta-command is something like "Do not guess what I want and do not lead me to what your programmers or owners might want and do not fabricate to fill the holes in my writing, but find out what I want to say." Finally (4) prepare a new version. I am pretty sure that the first two steps would be rapid, the third step would take some time, and the fourth step would mostly be limited by how rapidly I can read because the AI writes so much faster than I can... And I imagine that I can steer successive versions to make something that looks like 'genuine progress'.

Overconfident again?

So why did you propagate the AC's vacuous Subject.

Lots of reasons to dislike what "China" is doing. More complicated to figure out which are government activities and which aren't... Also reasons to admire some of the things "China" is doing.

But the Chinese perspective is long.

Modded funny? Why? Were you going for funny? If so, could you explain the joke? If not, maybe you can speculate why it was so modded?

Pretty rare to see anything actually funny on Slashdot these years. I check most of the "active" stories.

Interesting FP branch, but I think it mostly missed the boat. I think it's mostly about the money and that's how we got fscked.

There was a kind of "golden age" of journalism, but I would argue that was an aberration linked to a weird financial model. Started with radio where the frequencies created a temporary monopoly and the government licensed the monopoly with mandates for "free" news. That created the illusion that news could be separated from who was paying for it. Two interesting contrasts: (1) In newspapers before radio the ads were fully visible so the readers could assess the money flows. (2) TV started with the radio model of journalism, but cable and the Internet broke the funding model.

I largely blame "60 Minutes" for the first successful "for-profit" model of journalism. CNN showed where that leads and FAUX figured out how to disguise the real advertisers behind fake ones...

I used to fantasize about solution-oriented journalism as a new funding approach, but now I think "We can't get there from here", where "here" is any substantially better state of journalism.

Mod grandparent funny, though the parent Subject seems better for the joke? Generally misfiring of the Funny on Slashdot these years?

On the story, I think the "use" should be in the more active sense, but 'I don't have to work no more' [sic], so that part of the story flies over my head, but I sometimes find AI a useful tool and use it accordingly. About two days ago an ancient website crashed and I couldn't get some information I wanted. So I used an AI to quickly create a little tool to generate the information locally. For what it's worth, the new local version runs faster than the website version, though I see the website has recovered again...

I actually tried to create the tool myself, but my first attempt failed, so I invoked the AI. It's response clarified the security risk of my initial solution approach, so I can't complain about the AI's recommended approach.

Sure it's legal. Just read about it in the newspaper. You still subscribe to a newspaper, right?

No dead tree? Okay, so look it up on your smartphone. Oh wait. You don't have the right smartphone. Yet.

I would like to see some historical research correlating mentions of national leaders with various job-related metrics and divided up by geography.

Easy example: Little Kim gets LOTS of extremely favorable public mentions in North Korea. From near zero to HUGE in a few days (when he became established as the successor)--and at some point his mentions will approach zero again. But outside of North Korea? Not so many and not so favorable. Ever.

The YOB case is (relatively) interesting because he had quite a lot of name recognition even before 2015. Media and even book references that still surprise me. Like ghosts from the past? (To be compared with books written before and after perpetual September? Circa 1995?)

My reaction to the story was "Tell us something we didn't know." News is supposed to have some element of novelty in it. You know, novelty as in new.

However, I think the phishing scams disguised as fake upgrades are more annoying, and probably more dangerous, since the sucker is primed to expect something to get installed. As regards this story I thought there might be an element of novelty in it. Perhaps a new scammer's pitch to enter your credit card number to validate the unsubscribe request? Something along those lines.

Solutions time? Why do I persist in hoping the direction of criminal change in the Web can be shifted?

I keep imagining a website that helps potential suckers aggregate the targeting data so the scammers can be found and stopped more quickly. Hopefully definitively, too, as in throw them into that lovely prison in El Salvador. Get some good out of it?

So now to flog that dead horse!

The basic idea would be an iterative website where you would paste the scam and then help parse the meaning to guide the response. Of course these days it would be enhanced with AI, but the key idea is that each iteration would clarify what is going on and what should be done about it. Per this specific story, that so-called unsubscribe link would be studied to see how malicious it is and the human being in the loop would confirm the threat or provide feedback about what the website got wrong. And of course the website would be amalgamating the results to provide stats that guide the prioritization of the responses. A dangerous new threat that is producing lots of reports needs to be dealt with ASAP, though I doubt the "new threat" of this story would merit much priority.

More details available if someone is interested. NOT a new idea. Or let's hear your better solution approach. I'm sure you have a big wad of better ideas stuffed in a pocket somewhere.

(But actually my primary focus right now was provoked by that awful book Science Fictions by Stuart Ritchie... Linkage is complicated, but now I want to see some exploratory research on how much and in what ways each nation's top leader is mentioned in the media over time. Easy example: Little Kim of North Korea. LOTS of favorable coverage inside and not much mention outside, with what there is being not so favorable. Any leads?)

Kind of a new Slashdot effect? I think I'm actually seeing some evidence of higher than usual mortality among old websites and I've been wondering if the cause might be AI spiders seeking more training data. Latest victim might be Tripod? But that one was already a ghost zombie website...

Again with the missed opportunities for humor, but too late to even contribute to the discussion... My time is too slow for Slashdot time?

There was so much potential in the idea of the Navy invading the contractor to get the ovens fixed.

Not getting why this was modded funny rather than sad?

Mostly the ACK, but thanks for the food for thought. But I keep thinking they should get a better financial model that could support some actual improvements...