My university did the opposite, and to this day I think it was good.

At the end of the first semester, you were given a test in the three most important subjects for your field. If you failed, you could re-take it after the summer break, before next semester starts. If you failed it again, you could repeat the first semester and try a third and final time. Fail that, you're out.

It was hard, too. In my class, we were just over a hundred when we started. We were 28 in the 2nd semester. But of those 28, almost everyone made it to the end. Everyone who would've failed somewhere along the way had already been weeded out.

It was brutal, it was stressful - but IMHO it was the best way to do it and be respectful of both student time and university resources.

We had that in 1st grade. Not university, school. So students starting university have now regressed to the level of 6-year-olds ?

I get that it's stressful. I don't get how "managing stress" has vanished from the requirements of getting a degree.

Mod parent funny, though the Subject could have included a joke about socializing the corporations.

As for the story, why shouldn't one form of insanity cure the other rather than making both of them crazier?

However when I look at the situation, especially the numbers, it seems insane. Cybercrime just don't make sense, especially the spam part of it. The criminals have to provide contact information or the suckers can't reach them. The scammers can't obfuscate their messages too much or the target idiots won't be able to recognize the bait. And the number of targets is tiny compared to the number of people who hate the crooks. My delusion is that a small fraction of the people who hate spam could be leveraged against the scammers to completely overwhelm the tiny number of suckers who want to send money.

So what's your better idea? Or your polite request for clarification of my poor writing? Or maybe you have a justification for "Live and let scam" as practiced by all the leading corporate cancers who provide the criminals with the infrastructure for their cybercriming?

Mod parent funny. This was the joke I was looking for, but Slashdot only reports the top mod. (Though this one currently has no funny mods.)

New idea about how to fix the moderation on Slashdot! Use AI. Can't be worse than the current moderation system, but AI is so trendy that maybe the latest owners (whoever they are, or perhaps incorrectly assuming someone still owns this mess) will eagerly embrace the AI.

So the idea would be for an AImod (AI moderator) to scan the posts and suggest the most likely moderation. It could even be done as part of the preview process to give posters 'objective feedback' about how their comment sounds. Perhaps even including candidate locations where a comment might fit better into the discussion and an easy move option? But the AI mod points should be easily countered by humans (which becomes training feedback for the AImod).

Another obvious joke would have been from the "What could possibly go wrong?" angle.

My actual feelings are mixed, but that got me to think of another possible angle for humor. The problem is that I don't know much about the current or even recent generations of video games, so I can't name the names of the games NOT to recruit from. I'm pretty sure there are games that involve lots of mayhem and Captain Chaos, Master of Mayhem, is NOT someone I want in charge of anything involving a plane (or bus or bicycle) that I might be riding.

Meta-angle involves the recurring brain worm in the form of that song about "Where have all the <category of people> gone? Long time passing..." In the case of Slashdot, it's the humorists of yore. Hopefully they've found a website with a humor-encouraging moderation system and all I need is that URL to make me happy. Or at least more amused?

You didn't get it. This is speeding tickets issued by fully automated systems. No court has ever seen this.

The solution is to stop treating it as a money-printing system. Punish people who speed in front of kindergardens, and leave people alone who at the city edge in the industrial zone on a Sunday evening didn't decelerate quite fast enough coming in from the highway.

I literally have no clue why you're saying that or who you think you're talking to.

Not at all. Because COMFORT is the key word here, not processing.

Which is often intentional.

We live in 2026. You can order an artillery or drone strike in Ukraine from a tablet and it'll be delivered within minutes. Data processing speeds are essentially instant for data sets not on LLM sizes. We have automation everywhere when it suits the right people. e.g. that speeding ticket you received for going 12 km/h over the limit? No human ever so much as saw that. Full automated process. Takes 6-12 weeks. Why? Because otherwise you might still remember how fast you were actually going or that you weren't even in that street on that day, and fight it. Same principle here: The slower the bureaucracy, the more people will just give up and go away. It's a self-regulating system to reduce the number of inquiries to the amount that the public servants can comfortably process.

that's a per-character stat.

If your average license plate has, say, 6 characters, you get a 78% total probability that it reads them right.

If you have 8 Flock cameras in your town of let's say 100,000 people, sitting at busy roads or intersections, 10 to 20 thousand cars per day is a reasonable estimate, which means you get 62,400 to 124,800 mis-read license plates. Per day. Every day. Under optimal conditions.

That's more false readings than you have people.

I wonder if just randomly assigning traffic tickets to license plates in your register wouldn't get you a lower false positive rate.

You ask so rudely that my initial reaction was to ignore you, but you piqued my curiosity. Where did you see it? I thought it was just one of my personal peccadilloes. Or you're just referring to my comments here and possibly elsewhere?

The YOB loves his precious brand, so I strongly prefer not to use it. Makes me glad I'm only an amateur historian. In describing the reign of YOB I'm pert' shure they'll have to brand it.

YOB comes from YUGE Orange Buffoon. How many guesses do you want? Or you might prefer a different source word for the B?

I have noticed that there are many other euphemisms applied to the YOB and all things YOBbish. Context almost always suffices to clarify the reference.

Rather disappointed by the discussion so far, which saps the motivation to say anything. I think there's a deep problem in Japanese thinking, but the most clear evidence is probably the Reiwa thing. The Heisei emperor asked to retire, but there was no rush. He's still alive now so they had plenty of wiggle room about when to start Reiwa--but the LDP deliberately chose to inflict imperial stupidity on everyone when they had the easy option of syncing the start of Reiwa so the digits would match up. Insane decision for perpetual friction for the sake of the supremacy of the imperial system. Same reasoning that led to that little kerfuffle in and around the Pacific...

Rational heads might prevail? Feel the Chinese wind? Or maybe it will blow from India before the next decisions need to be made? But preparing for a nuclear war with China is not a rational solution approach. Or maybe the real target is Switzerland? That would make a better joke.

My bad. I forgot that Microsoft had been mentioned. More evidence of senility? Or I just can't take Microsoft seriously based on my experiments and experiences with Copilot? So let IBM hold the pot for old times sake?

That was the best/only joke Slashdot can come up with these years? Sadness.

I was hoping to see something about AI-powered FinTech counter-wagers to protect each other. Sort of a corporate cancer circle jerk.

Oh how about a grand scheme to get the money back based on wagers by human suckers as to which AI will win the race? They could let Microsoft hold the pot since they apparently got left out of the race. My money would be on Oracle for most secretive and ruthless and evil and therefore the most likely winner, but "secretive" makes it easy to make a bad bet...

On the insightful side, the "Why?" seems to be getting ignored. I actually think they are running scared. Not sure if they are most scared of each other or of the Chinese threats that didn't get mentioned, but I am reminded of one of the most famous Asimov stories. It was about a constructive question: "Can entropy be reversed?" As I remember the story, the super-AI answered "Let there be light." However right now I think we are facing extinction via a destructive question with a fatal answer. Back on the gambling scenario, I think the two most likely winning/losing questions that will lead to the fatal unleashing will be "Can you get all the money?" or "Can you destroy all the competing AIs?" (I do think we have a bit of breathing room because the robots aren't quite up snuff. As in up to snuffing us?)

Back to the Chinese side (but with goog flavoring)... Just started reading AI 2041 by Kai-fu Lee and Chen Qiufan. Quite an interesting idea of mixing fictional AI application scenarios with more technical explanations and commentary. Obviously hoping for some kind of synergy, but so far I'm not seeing much. Maybe the stories were better in the original Chinese? Or perhaps the Asimov bar is just too high?

And it should have a better Subject, too.