No reactions yet? My main question is which AI was used for so many attacks in such a short time.

Think of all the criminal hackers who lost their jobs!

(But I'm not actually curious enough to research which AI was used. I'd have to ask an AI, and I'm sure it would just say "It wasn't me!")

You're picking nits on an imaginary solution for a mostly imaginary, dare I say fake, problem. Even if they're large and interesting nits.

So my imaginary solution approach to the dimensional collapse on the profit dimension would be a progressive profits tax related to market share. Main area of overlap with your ideas is probably the third one, where one of the ways to detect monopoly status is the lack of freedom of employees to switch to a competing company.

Parent should have been the FP and I'm glad to see it spanned about half the discussion. But I'm just judging by the scrollbar. Mostly I only check the longer discussions on Slashdot for Funny these days. Saves vast amounts of time while producing the same amounts of disappointment.

However on the verbosity topic, I actually ran the obvious test past a number of genAIs. "Can you answer any question as briefly as possible?" Rather to my surprise, about half of them managed to answer "Yes" and then shut up.

But the genAIs are still too stupid to make good recursive jokes. At least one of them should have answered "No."

My latest AI experiments have been AI-supported programming with Claude. I'm rather sorry to report that I'm quite impressed in spite of myself. We "discuss" the problems and function points for a while, and Claude often manages to ask and answer useful questions. It doesn't spew reams of random code and wild guesses at me. After we have reached agreement on what to do and how to do it, then it takes about a minute or three to generate the next version of the system. (Currently a new front end for an ancient database. I would estimate that the PERL functionality was surpassed in about 10% of my programming time. But probably less. (However I was learning PERL at the same time, whereas Claude always codes (or at least seems to code) like a fluent native speaker of the language. Mostly JavaScript in my current project.))

Feeding the trolls never works. And you don't have to propagate a vacuous Subject.

Trust is dead in America, but it wasn't of old age or natural causes. It was murdered. I actually think Reagan may deserve the largest slice of personal blame, but by market segment, it was probably the advertisers that did it. Can you remember the last ad that you trusted?

Hey, here's a really crazy idea. Why if I could ask to see trustworthy information from trustworthy companies that are honestly selling the goods and services I want to buy without any fake needs created by marketing departments? The non-ads would help me answer my questions and decide on the best value.

Naw. It's much cheaper and vastly more profitable to produce and sell unwanted and useless garbage disguised with ads. LOTS of ads. (And of course that includes garbage politicians sold to voters on Election Day.)

The joke of the day explaining why nothing gets done is Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. The orange-nosers can't see or smell any problems because their noses are firmly inserted and the other side is too busy running around and hunting for flying elephants.But betwixt and between the two of them the country is going to heck in the proverbial handbasket.

It's not just that America has become unable to change and solve real problems. Sometimes the Constitution needs to be amended. But now it's reached the point where the "powers that be" can't even maintain the fake solutions for the fake problems.But not to worry. The fake stock market is booming. (The stock market has also become a recursive joke where the fastest growing and biggest companies join the DOW precisely because the DOW caused them to be big and fast. Laughing all the way?)

But trust didn't die of natural causes. It was murdered. Apparently while sleeping.

What to do but laugh?

Just asking for a friend in the business. But if you ask, I insist it was just a joke and there is no such friend.

Actually, I think the corruption is the most communist aspect of the story--but we Westerners are catching up fast.

Now about the AI part of it. The best new scam I've seen recently was actually almost a year ago and involved impersonating a celebrity. But from the tone of the scam at that time I considered it most likely to be using DeepSeek or possibly ChatGPT rather than Gemini or Copilot or Claude...

The "humanized" local versions are linked to remote-control crime with disposable human part-timers. Suggestive that the third-level crook they were chasing apparently fled through China? However, they're pretty sure he quickly left China for parts still unknown.

Returning to the suggested Subject and fantasizing about solutions, I actually think it would be possible to get Xi to pass some suitable laws, though it might be harder to get them enforced.

What if the profits related to perverse content were taxed at rates above 100%? Might that reduce the perverse incentives?

Okay, so now we have to argue about "perverse", but...

I must be missing the joke. Or is it intended as censorship? But I'm not going to quote the long post because it was too close to a rant...

However my joke would be to rate the biggest evils. I actually think there are five clear contenders for #1. Two are corporate cancers, Amazon and Facebook, and the three individuals are Ellison, Thiel, and Musk. (Some of them are "traditional" shadow puppeteers.) The Chinese have aspirations to crack the top 10, but I don't think they are there yet. Ditto the big AI phantoms. Microsoft and the google are kind of second-tier competitors in the large evil race, while I think Apple is the main example of a corporate cancer that is competing fairly well while struggling to retain some philosophic grasp (or tentacles?) on the good side. (That way lies a hostile acquisition?) (The YOB doesn't matter to me because I think he's just a puppet on route to poster child status. The YOB's megalomania has even reached comic levels now.)

Oh wait. Was SBF rich? Or was it all smoke and mirrors?

But I'm sure SBF ain't so smart. If he can't figure out how to bribe the YOB, then he must be an idiot. I would say let me count the ways, but I've already lost count.

So time for the usual plug for a book? Near as I can tell that makes me dumb if i think there's going to be any positive reaction to a book on today's Slashdot, but still... Michael Lewis writes so well and he did do a book on SBF. Fun story, but mostly wound up feeling like it was all smoke and mirrors on a railroad, as in SBF got railroaded in the end. American justice at it's far from finest? (I'm desperately fishing for a joke about the minor fines and slaps on the wrists that the actual crypto-crooks and fraudsters mostly got away with.)

In related business news, how many of you even noticed the end of mass market paperbacks. That's in English, but it turns out the book markets are hurting even in other languages. Even in China, so maybe there's hope they're also becoming not so smart? Why think when you can just ask a genAI?

Quoted against censorship mods.

But I have to go for the obvious joke since there is currently no Funny in the 'discussion'.

But Microsoft finally patched the last bugs and now we have nothing to worry about!

Then go for unfunny with a book citation. It's an oldie but interesting background on how Microsoft wound up here. Microsoft Secrets by Cusamano and Selby covers a lot of the history and processes of Microsoft's software development processes up to 1995.

Mod parent Funny for sad values thereof.

Vacuous Subject and an FP that simplifies complexity to the point of meaningless. How Slashdot for the modern age.

Judging roughly by the scrollbar, you seem to have spanned 1/3 of the large "conversation" that you never participated in again. Congratulations. For what?

Anyway, best recent book I've read on the topic was called Army of None by Paul Scharre. However that's "best" for rather limited values of the word "best" and didn't really say much in terms of solutions. Mostly just a status report with some historical context. Couldn't find any mention of that book in this discussion. Or any titles or authors. Reading completed thoughts is such hard work?

(Oh well. Back to exploring my new superpower of bus riding. It's already distorting and rescaling my senses of distance and time.)

Care to explain? I seem to be missing the Funny part of the joke. Implosive humor doesn't work as well as recursive?

Hmm... Well as a correction I don't feel like it goes far enough. It's not to personalize your feeds. It's to addict you and waste as much of your time as possible. The drug dealers are always after fresh victims, along the lines of my mutated Subject.

Many of those books talked about the free data services Facebook pushed in places like Myanmar. If you're tracking the news you already know what can go wrong.

That's the 'black' joke I was looking for along the same lines as FP.

But getting more serious, at risk of dipping my toe into insight, if we were technically ahead of the Chinese companies, then we would be able to figure out the security threats. So I see this sort of thing as mostly surrendering and admitting the Chinese are too dangerous and we have to "run away, run away" (with the usual apology to Monty Python for the abuse of the killer rabbit joke).

Not sure how my next joke works, but there was a time I felt I could trust the Chinese companies more than the American ones because everyone was looking carefully at what the Chinese were doing. Even Huawei quaked before our technical expertise? Now I feel like we can look but we can't see.