Only recognized joke on the rich target? It's a good joke, and well contextualized, but Slashdot still makes me sad these years.

But considering all the kids Musk starved to death, sadness is Musk's main business now and perhaps that suggests his next acquisition target will be Slashdot?

I think there are actually two paths to extreme wealth. One is pure luck. Rich parents. But Musk's parents weren't THAT rich.

The second path is crime. But today the "best" criminals fix things by bribing the cheapest politicians to change the rules of the game to legalize the money. Or sometimes they just buy pardons outright. Makes me laugh to remember how upset Martin Luther got about trivial simony...

Still, I think it would be a good start if Musk got fined heavily for at least a few of his crimes. My other hilarious idea is to stick a note under the wiper of a Tesla: "Why do you support starving children to death?"

So my main question in reaction to every Firefox upgrade remains: "Would I have paid for any change described here?"

Unable to remember the last time I answered "Yes". Perhaps never, though there are some changes that I have adapted my usage of Firefox to use after those changes were rammed down my throat. The vast majority of the changes remain ignored and simply add to the bunch of stuff that makes the browser more annoying and cumbersome. So Mozilla wonders why I don't send money?

However recently there is a new question that is competing for main status: "Will this change cause crashes or create security risks?"

My asking doesn't prevent the crashes and I suppose the security risks are already out of control. But I do have trouble regarding Firefox as safe for serious work. Fortunately I'm completely unserious now.

For context, I have to ask if English is your native language because my own language hardware accepts the syntax. I have no trouble constructing the proper parse tree, but that may be because I already know the full context. In that case the main problem is that I didn't flesh it out enough... I'm trying to be less verbose these years, but maybe this was a case where I needed more. I'm not saying the context was particularly trivial, but the present tense part was referring to a recurrent or timeless series of steps (which I have applied in reaction to many previous obituaries), while the past tense was referring to the results of having applied those steps in the current situation (of Dvorak's passing). (It might also be that your dialect of English differs from mine. In particular, I think some Brits use the perfect tenses differently whereas Yanks often blur some of those distinctions. Indian English is even more divergent.)

If English is not your first language, then the situation may be quite different. My closest approach to a second language has a completely different verbal system compared to English. Frequently noticeable when trying to deal with reported speech, but I have the impression that it would be quite difficult for me to express the sentence you asked about in that language...

But still a waste of time to feed the ACs. You might post the perfect reply that even changes the AC's so-called mind, but you'd never know.

Mod parent Funny. At least I think it's the funniest of the candidate comments and there's a lot of wannabe Funny stuff here already.

Mod parent Informative. I only found it on the search for "guilt" as in the presumption of guilt. Today's new legal standard, especially if your skin tone is off. "Warrant? We don't need no stinkin' warrant."

Or maybe the entire thread needs to be moderated as Funny in honor of government of, by, and for plausible deniers. (No Historical mod available for the devolution of "government of, by, and for the people" to "government of the corporations, by the lawyers, for the richest 0.1%" all the way down to "government of, by, and for the Donald, King of Plausible Deniability". ("War crimes? Who? Me? NOTHING to see here!"))

I also searched for innocence, but didn't find much of interest. Supreme as in the Court that isn't also found little, but I'm sure if this matter ever gets there they won't have any trouble locking him up and throwing away the key.

But that reminds me of my silly solution approach: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." Actually much more complicated than it seems, but since you aren't interested...

I still haven't checked for Funny, but not seeing any low-hanging fruit for this story.

Much as I would like to encourage solution-oriented thinking, I don't think that approach offers much hope in these days of clickbait headlines.

On the other hand, I'm not sure it matters because the problems created by AI are getting so bad that the entire notion of websearch is failing. It's like a cesspool down there (which might remind you of old Kiyo fishing out the three one-yen notes, one of the most famous scenes in Japanese literature). It's simply that the value of the "top online sites" is too low to matter anymore. The google has an infinite supply of dreck to satiate and waste an infinite amount of human time. Quite a sad outcome.

So I think we need to change the economics to produce more REAL information with higher actual value. Solution-oriented journalism, anyone? I didn't think so. Back to waiting for a better solution idea and I'm sad this wasn't one of them. I'm sure that there are lots of better ideas than mine, but simplistic solutions to complicated problems rarely work and are also usually too easy to circumvent or rebreak.

But I have a funny websearch anecdote to share:

I asked google a fairly trivial question about the recent World Cup. I wanted to know how the Golden Boot was won, and the google instantly responded with nine right, one left, and no headers. But that reminded of the famous joke:

Which worried me because Kylian Mbappe is French, so I decided I wanted a second opinion on what should be a matter of fact. The google's answers have been so bad these days that I'm driven to Bing, which is probably aggravating my medical problems. Bing's initial answer was useless AKA par for that course, but I clicked over to Copilot, which sometimes seems to give more thoughtful answers. The instant response was that the answer was unknown and that there was no "authoritative" source that answered the question. That's exactly the same question the google had just answered so definitively a few seconds earlier.

So I asked why the google had given such a definitive answer and got a LONG diatribe explaining why the form of my question would motivate an AI hallucination and how the hallucination had been constructed and why it (the Copilot) was too smart to fall into my trap. Okay, maybe I'm extending the last bit a bit, but still...

Next step was to ask Copilot how the "authoritative" answer could be found and got another long answer, but this time it was an insane hallucination about reviewing game films and checking clocks and all sorts of ridiculous efforts. "Pot, meet kettle" to the n-th degree.

Overall I thought it was my funniest encounter with AI for the week and I even submitted it as part of an Ask Slashdot for "What is the funniest AI answer you've gotten?" I also submitted a question about the economic value of cute animal videos before I started the videocide of ducklings and prairie dogs and fat fish. But the editors that be the powers of Slashdot these days disagreed, so I guess we'll never know.

Not to feed the trolls or propagate their vacuous Subjects.

But my Subject is double-headed. The relevant head involves my reaction to such a passing... I didn't remember that he wrote any books, but I hoped I might have read something he edited... Came up dry.

So my next step is to check in the local libraries for some of his stuff that I could read in memoriam, so to speak. Again came up dry.

But he was such a famous fellow that I wanted to go farther... I checked the NDL (Japan's version of the LoC) and came up worse than dry. Two other John Dvoraks with different middle initials. Apparently not even translated here?

How quickly we are forgotten.

NAK

*sigh*

Just the joke I was expecting to see. Still basically low-hanging fruit.

I'm only somewhat concerned about the public AI models. It's the secret ones that concern me greatly. And I think the fatal unleashing is rather more likely to come from an individual than from a government. However if a government does it, you know they are going to claim "self defense", whereas an individual does it, he is more likely to do it for PROFIT!

Seems to have some good references, but pretty long for reading onscreen. I mostly scanned it looking for books and authors, but... Can you reduce it to some concrete references?

Currently reading The New Empire of AI by Rachel Adams and just finished Tech Monopoly by Herbert Hovenkamp.

Oh wait. Slashdot? Solutions? ROFLMAO.

I still like the idea of solution-oriented journalism. Seriously, but it will never happen. There's an old book called Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman.

NAK