Your honor, my script was a "rogue," so therefore it is responsible and I am not.

now that's a throwback!

Mod parent derivative funny, but I wish the thread had continued with the other funny comment about Sam Altman leading the way as recipient of the bad things.

The joke I was actually looking for would involve the conflict of interest more directly, but it's still early and maybe something will show up. I wish I could help, but my capacity to write jokes is limited.

Hmm... Would it count as a bad thing happening if I asked the AIs for help in writing jokes for Slashdot? Some of the things they say are pretty funny, but usually unintentionally.

(Just had another funny-not-funny encounter with the google's AI today. This one involved a special case of traveling salesman problems. I had noticed that the google was having difficulties and that many of the answers were terrible, but yesterday I, the lowly human, managed to find a better solution for one of main routing bottlenecks. This must mean something about how the google is approaching the problem incorrectly... All I can guess so far is that there's an arbitrary limit in the AI's planning that is blocking it from finding this path. Or maybe the bus companies have their own AIs that are at war with the google's AI?)

If the cops receive an anonymous tip that CowboyNeal is an insensitive clod, and then decide to arrest him without checking out any of the evidence, I blame the cops. There's plenty to bitch about with Flock but "the cops don't care about doing their job" isn't one of them. That's a cop problem.

Don't treat any stupid robots as somehow "better" than an anonymous tip called in from a payphone. It's just, like, something's opinion, man.

Mod parent funny but the low-hanging joke I was looking for was "It couldn't happen to a more deserving and persistently vicious moronotron." He's earned more than the sudden need for a new phone number.

I wonder how often the YOB's own phone number leaks? Credible reports say that it's widely known. (More likely that a certain phone number is widely known but that the phone number just reaches some sycophants who get lots of taxpayer money to carry that phone around on shifts.)

No funny here, but the Subject is the low-hanging fruit I was looking for.

What Flock does is mass surveillance of the most massive sort. However, I can imagine one way to provide legitimate probably cause. Link the cameras to speed detectors and only take pictures of license plates when speeding has actually been detected. But that approach would obviously harm shareholder value, so...

We now live in a fully connected world where most users are connected through web browsers and are the intended victims.

This particular story is an exception to that. Remote software, accessed through a web browser, normally does not have read/write access to your local filesystem. But people are granting local filesystem access to proprietary AI services.

I think that granting such access is .. wow. I wouldn't do it, though I can see how if you use a specialized account for it, and if you're confident that your OS has no local user priv escalation bugs, it might be ok. In your sandbox you trust.

But GP's comment is about whose decision that is. If you use Linux, then it's your decision. If you use iOS, then it's Apple's decision. And MacOS is becoming less Linuxy and more iOSy every year. I think it makes plenty of sense for stories like this to result in people dumping MacOS for Linux. (But daaamn, their values surprise me. You wanna make your computer less secure instead of more? Oh well, like Rumsfeld said, freedom is untidy!)

No, if the state were renamed, it would be to Old America. NM might not be the true original, but if you look at it through the eyes of European colonization and continuous governance, then New Mexico has the best claim of the fifty. (Though if you take a less racist view, then I guess Alaska had the real OGs.)

Randi McGinn, a lawyer for New Mexico, said applying the full $5,000 penalty to the number of violations would create too large of a penalty under the US Constitution's protections on due process.

I ass/u/me this refers to the Eighth Amendment, but I don't remember seeing any monetary constants encoded within that text.

Google's telling me Meta is worth about $1.8 trillion so how would a mere $40B be "excessive?" It's only about 2% of their worth! Civil penalties in excess of 2% of someone's worth are routinely accepted as constitutional, aren't they? If this case were about me driving drunk and killing a whole family, I bet no one would flinch at the 8A implications of taking 2% (!?!) of my assets, and everyone would laugh at my lawyer if he brought up 8A for such an insignificant fine.

I understand why we have 8A, and everyone deserves mercy, but I don't see why Meta deserves exceptional mercy as a singular special case that we would be horrified to see applied anywhere else. Bringing up 8A for such a tiny fine would be giving Meta a very unique carve-out that we normally would not apply.

It may be that $5k is too much to charge criminals per act, in that each crime didn't really cause that much loss, but bringing up due process concerns seems like bullshit when the fine is already so small. NM and Meta had been trying to negotiate the cost of illegal business for years before negotiations failed and it went to trial. Meta decided to let a jury decide, and the jury's come up with a fairly tiny fraction of their assets.

If Meta thinks the price of illegal business is still too high, then they can lower the number of willful violations they commit per year, to optimize the advantage they gain from illegal actions at an affordable rate.

Geez, Zuck, just do less of it. If $40B seems like a lot, then maybe try only $10B worth of crime next time. What's the big deal? Live and learn. After this little fine you still have 98% of the company left to go on and incur the next wave of liabilities.

How about Stupor-Intelligence? I think it rolls off the tongue more easily. But it could end well if it somehow persuaded the YOB to read Bostrum's book? At least he might know who the bad machine is...

Other parts of the discussion were more focused on the story as one of bad military leadership. So the joke along those lines would involve a certain infamous corporal who became commander-in-chief of a big military. But these days the Americans couldn't even reach a consensus on whether that ended badly... "If only he'd waited another year before attacking Stupid Joe..."

I can't tell if you're going for funny or you don't know much about how good young children are at seeking their own destruction. It's really hard to keep 'em alive and it takes a whole lot of love. Even for the kids that turn out badly, perhaps because of unlucky genetic draws.

Doesn't seem like you want to discuss genetic counseling and reproductive rights in the context of possible solutions. And it's not like Slashdot is the most suitable venue for such discussions. I strongly suspect this crowd is below average for the numbers of children produced.

Nice FP, though yet to be modded Funny and I wish you'd had the leisure to add some more humorous examples beyond the vague "this". However in the context the reference is clear enough to establish the recursive humor. Yet it was basically an obvious and low-hanging joke.

The other one would be the anti-social media thing, but it's still early in the discussion and perhaps someone will do a good version. Getting harder and harder to remember the "good old days" when Slashdot was some sort of social media...

However I still persist in asking such silly questions as "Why?" and "Isn't there anything we can do to make the situation better?"

So for the why part, my basic answer is "bad economic models". I can't decide whether to blame free radio and TV broadcasts that led to an illusory Golden Age of idealistic public-service journalism without worrying about profits or the fools who created the weak and uncompetitive profit-driven versions of journalism. That's mostly "60 Minutes" and CNN, but there are so many flavors, none of which can compete.

Making the situation better? I used to think solution-oriented journalism might be an angle. Basically a charity approach, trying to dodge the pressure of the big money. However my expectations have been reduced, mostly by time. Apparently my last residual purpose in life is to do my tiny bit to boost the life expectancy statistics? So have a nice day.

Mod parent funny-not-really-funny.

But the SCOTUS disagreed with you by creating absolute presidential immunity out of nothing.

I know it's silly to contemplate solutions in the context of Slashdot, whatever it has devolved into, but I keep thinking about that new recusal thing: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." I think that could create the incentive to go upstream in fixing the problem, whereas every other solution proposal I've seen simply accepts the underlying problem as incurable.

Clarifications in response to polite requests, though I'd actually prefer to see a better solution approach that has a better chance of being implemented. (I think the most likely path to the recusal rule would basically require an escalation of political threats... I'm not saying "That trick never works", but it's always a dangerous path.)

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

c/it's writing/it's worth writing/