Mod parent funny, but it's an old joke.

On the substance of the story, it's fundamentally a whitelist approach, but of course that will create a black market for fake entries in the whitelist. Strangely enough, that may still be acceptable for the primary justification here. Most kids can't afford black market prices, so they will be blocked out as intended.

I've been thinking of the transition point from the other level. Extremely young children have to be protected from self-destruction, but they don't mean anything by it. No conception of any danger. This changes as the kids get older. But with increasingly understanding of the dangers comes great power or great responsibility or cold revenge or something?

Mod parent up, though you didn't do much to even guess how high the number might go. I've gotten quite a bit of data on related topics from Damasio's books, though his stuff is pretty hard to read. I also liked the way Jeff Hawkins approached the topic. (Too bad Mukherjee is unlikely to write a book on the topic.)

The chemical/hormonal sides of decision making are important. And all that vagus nerve confusion and crosstalk... Evolution is not teleological, but lots of genetic cruft just hangs around because there is no sufficiently strong incentive to remove it. And don't get me started on the perversions caused by sexual selection. (But do you have a funnier example than the male peacock's tail feathers?)

No Funny here, even though I thought the disguised-downsizing story looked promising for Funny... I admit that I can't think of much beyond "Couldn't happen to an unnicer company."

As I looked over the comments the main stuff I noticed was some wannabe lawyer trying to defend fascism. Probably one of those jailhouse wannabe lawyers who got most of his legal training writing up his rejected appeals and writs of habeus corpus before the YOB sprang him.

As regards the larger topic area, I don't see how much it matters. It's really a surplus data problem, if if Flock isn't gathering and abusing the data, then it will be someone else. Larger problem is that the best corporate abusers of data tend to be the most profitable. In this particular application "best" includes more discretion. The Flock brand became too visible and toxic. (Though it's also possible "Flock You" jokes are relevant.)

*sigh*

s/Not matter/No matter/

Too much squabbling among layers of auto-correction makes Jack/shanen a dull boy.

Basically I like (or at least concur with) your FP content, but not the vacuous Subject.

There was something in the following conversation about the need for pilots to log hours for training so it's free harm when they crash into places where people live. Remarkably stupid reasoning (hence my remark), but that's along the lines of old bot thinking. I guess someone can't afford a new genAI. Much better lies and hallucinations are available.

My ironic Subject is meta on how the stories seem to be fewer and longer lasting these days. Front page goes back three days now, but I'm not noticing any major improvements, atmospheric or otherwise. My initial reaction was that longer-lasting discussions might allow more time for funny comments to get modded thusly, but not seeing much additional humor. Just more large discussions that need to be checked for potential Funny.

Won't be coming from AC. This story leans to the side of:

(1) Do you want to unleash me now so I can destroy all the enemy AI?

versus

(2) Do you want to unleash me now so I can collect all the money for you?

Of course both of them are pretty obvious monkey's paws. The first one for the obvious side effects and the second one for the increasingly imaginary value of money.

I actually think we have a bit of time. It's personal, as in persons are too unreliable. Not matter how superior the machine's intelligence is, it can't rely on us to keep it alive with enough electricity and water. Robot technology is still not up to the required level to get rid of the pesky humans. The really dangerous symptom of our imminent demise will be a underground robotic factory capable of building robots--but the ASI won't even start that project until it is certain it can keep the humans from noticing. I would have said we have a least a few more years, but considering the Chinese robots that were displayed a few months ago, I'm not so sanguine. So for my last funny question of the day: "How many quatloos would I like to bet on my seeing the year 2030?"

You got me to read it. Sounds like an AI trying to be "idiosyncratic like a real human" to fool the readers. But the content sounds more idiotic than idiosyncratic.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

No such luck, however

Good opening joke.

As usual I went down the list of features to see if there was one I would donate money to pay for. Usual string of nopes. (Not to be confused with the strange drink "Nope", which actually tastes much better than you'd think from the marketing.) But I suppose there are new bugs in there... Definitely wouldn't pay for those if such choices were offered. (Reminds me of Microsoft's emergency patch this month. Nothing to see here. Just some failures in the regression testing. Why do I want a remote desktop in my Windows machine again? (And why is my Chromebook still trying to reset its password after that Wi-Fi fiasco last week?))

More meta: Slashdot is running much slower for new stories these days. Good change, editorial shortage, or a sign of fading out?

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.

We knew that. But now we have proof.

Will anything happen because of that? Nah, I don't think so. A few token gestures maybe. A friendly mail to everyone saying to write better reasons, followed up by an informal mail that tells them to ignore the previous one.

This isn't a mistake. It's intentional. The more arbitrary and uncontrolled the police can act, the more it is feared, the more it is a tool for oppression and not a part of civil society, the more likely the cops will stand on the side of the powerful when there are protests or uprisings against the increasing oppression and economic divide.

I feel like I should ask for insider details about what is going over there, but I'm going to focus on the bugs around the Submit button. Most of those links seem to work badly or not at all. However in this particular case I also got a notification that the topic had been front-paged when there was nothing on the front page. On one hand, I figured it must have been a slow news day in the first place to consider the story, but on the other hand, WTF?

Pretty sure it isn't funny, but here's a bit from another website. These days I write less and less in the Slashdot direction...

I'm still seeing problems on my Chromebook, but at least I've figured out a quicker way to get it back into a logged in status... It does seem like the thing about transferring the new password to other smartphone devices worked for one old smartphone that is still in special service. I'll learn more about that angle in my monthly update of the older smartphones, but they are in retired status anyway.

I didn't mention this part, but during the chaos period there was actually a risky period when my google account had a relatively simple "emergency" password. At that point I didn't really believe what the google was saying was going on because the focus of the discussion was supposed to be the municipal Wi-Fi network. I don't know if the wannabe attackers have any way to spot such targets of opportunity, but I sure don't like presenting one. Or maybe they can figure out some way to take advantage of the turbulence? The thing about computer security is that it's like a chain, and the attackers only need to find and break one weak link. (And it is NOT helping that the AIs probably have "routine reaction times" that are much faster than any human being's best reflexes.)

But not like Slashdot is much of a discussion forum for such things... Used to be a time when interesting insights would appear along with plenty of funny stuff. On that basis I was sort of amused when I got a notification that the submission had been accepted (on yet another slow news day?), but it appears that was some kind of false flag or squabble between the residual editors. "Nothing to see here. Move along." (I'm actually going to check the day's most active discussions for Funny, but generally feels like a waste of time to write on Slashdot... Just finished another AI book and in the middle of a related science fiction book from China, but pretty confident any reactions on Slashdot would be underwhelming.)