It's not just amazon.

I ordered a thermostat for my mustang last week. It was described as "sold and shipped by Walmart."

A couple of days later, I found an Autozone box on my porch. And not just the box, but the shipping return address was to auto zone!

??

the real tragedy of Viet Nam was that the US achieved *exactly* what it set out to do--which was a really stupid thing to do and waste lives upon.

The mission was *not* to defeat the north Vietnamese, but to keep them on their side of an imaginary line. US troops that went over the line got called back.

When the US finally decided it wanted to stop playing, the north wouldn't let them simply leave. To get them to talk, the US bombed them into submission, for crying out loud.

By any *military* standard, Viet nam was an overwhelming success for the US. US troops controlled whatever ground they chose, and won all of the battles.

But "resist aggression and stay on your side of the line" is a *stupid*, even criminal, thing to ask of a military. As is the lives it through away for idiocy.

Mostly the ACK and concurrence, though I noticed and regret my typo of "there" where I meant "their".

Mod parent Funny but actually too true to be funny.

However I have a new theory about moderation on Slashdot. First you have to pass a reverse CAPTCHA test. The mod points are then only given to accounts that can prove they are not human.

On the story itself, I think we are all so fscked that it doesn't even make sense to think about solution approaches. The giant corporate cancers can always find a suitable jurisdiction where they they fsck you if'n they want to.

However it would reach a new level of Funny if she has never even visited jolly ol' England.

All the moderators missed the joke and failed to give you a Funny?

Or perhaps all the moderators are AI? Slashdot's new (and secret) moderation policy is to only give mod points to accounts that can pass a reverse CATPCHA to prove they are NOT human?

Just asking questions? Of course not?!?

Mod parent funny, but what I was looking for in the discussion was some deeper considerations of the corruption of copyright law... So far it seems to be a rather shallow discussion.

I could check again tomorrow, except that Slashdot discussions always effectively expire by tomorrow...

Mod parent Funny, but I think the humor is at a level that will sail over the moderators' heads. Assuming they have heads and Slashdot hasn't adopted a policy of giving all the mod points to AI accounts. Slashdot could use a reverse CAPTCHA where you have to prove you're not human before you can have any mod points to bestow.

For my next failure to be funny, consider the threat of learning not to think like a machine by learning not to think about any question the machine won't answer. Combination of "Nothing to see there" and "How dare you even think of such a question?" And I predict most people won't even notice the "guidance" of their "thinking".

Would have been a better FP, and I can even see a derivative joke:

"But first they use the AI to decide which stuff is "confidential and important" and that stuff is not shown to the contractors, but only moderated by "politically reliable" insiders. (Yes, the double entendre is deliberate. But I bet some folks around here won't even see it.)

While I want Funny, I don't get the joke. Care to clarify?

(Charitable assumption is that you were going for FP but the time pressure got to you.)

Two counts of nothing. First the AC count. FP was just another AC brain fart. NOT a case where anonymity is justified. That would be if someone on the inside wanted to provide some interesting information on the terminations. In this case that would be someone inside cancerous google or Hitachi.

Other count of "nothing to see here" is the Japanese news. At least if it had been a featured story on NHK then I would have noticed it. Possible it will break today, and if that happens I should thank Slashdot for calling it to my attention. (Long time ago Slashdot was often a significant source of early news. Pretty sure the first I heard of one major divestiture by my employer was via Slashdot.)

So now I'm not only standing by, I may even peek at some of the news magazines searching for more... Right now I'm going with the hypothesis is that this story is sort of bad news for Japan but they (specifically NHK) haven't figured out what angle they want to use in reporting on it. Mustn't offend the YOB, you know.

Like your presentation but not your Subject--even though I had a couple of negative encounters with rule-based librarians recently.

Unfortunately I think libraries are losing there relevance and it's related to the AI reference in your FP. However I just started thinking about a more insidious version of the problem. You can say that it's a big problem that generative AIs will fabricate BS, but even when we realize an answer is BS, we may learn the wrong lesson from it. After all, many of the AI answers are pretty good (on the theory you can make sufficient allowance for your own tendency to believe what you want to believe), so there's a kind of reinforcement in favor of those questions and prompts. Most people like oracles and want to get "authoritative" answers to their questions.

Yet it's not so much that we may learn to think like machines (which is still a big problem), but rather that we may learn not to ask certain kinds of questions. We won't even be able to ask why those questions are so problematic because we already "know" the oracular AI can't handle them. (Even if the government or some greedy megalomaniac intervened to make sure the question was unanswerable.) Hallucinated books may the smallest of our future worries.

(Also a concern that reading is being crushed by cute cat videos, but out of time just now...)

*sigh*

s/flash-bank/flash-bang/

However the mistake could be interpreted as a reference to the YOB's cryptocurrency scams.

You must be American and can't even spell "pizza". And what does it matter how well the students can eat pizzas?

Just joking and lamenting the lack of humor, even though the topic is so serious. Anyway, on Slashdot time it's time for the discussion to die. Also a bit of a complaint about your propagation of the sock puppet's almost vacuous Subject, even though you didn't feed the troll and talked about other aspects of education... (Also funny that the troll sort of raised an interesting aspect of the problem--if anyone wants to talk to a coward.)

Anyway, I did websearch the PISA test and found out it exists. Didn't bother to research why that test matters because I also have a fundamental take. Sort of a cross between "It's too late" and "We can't get there from here", both as regards solution approaches.

So let me put on my official historian's hat and go even farther away from attempted humor. I think the destruction of America's education system is a leading candidate for the Rubicon Award that will commemorate the end of Franklin's republic. If so, then it might be post dated to the early 1980s or a little after 2000... Unfortunately REAL historians only do posthumous awards so none of us will get to see the final results. (From the perspective of Fermi's Paradox, I also consider it plausible there won't be any of us around to worry about it. The oscillations are becoming too dangerous.)

Or just that the moderators couldn't find one? Story sure struck me as ripe for Funny.

Also a story that deserved a slower and more thoughtful discussion beyond the one-day limit of Slashdot...

Mod parent sort of funny, though it didn't really clarify why gambling on the game you are controlling is so problematic.