Mod parent Funny, but I hain't got my own Funny as of this replyin'.

Okay, so that was a weak joke, but there actually is a feature I want and the wizards of Slashdot must know where it's hiding, right?

I want to clean up the wasted storage. I know there are are (at least) two classes of photos that could be mined for text and the original images could be tossed. Mostly save the most prominent phone numbers, and the geodata, and perhaps some of the larger words, but rest is not worth saving. Save it to a spreadsheet or portable database? Not sure how many such images there are, but the savings would be at least 99% in my data.

More difficult and a real challenge for AI would be figuring out what's least interesting in the remaining stuff and either tossing it or moving it somewhere else, perhaps with lower accessibility. Obviously this side should focus on the largest stuff.

Oh yeah. About the original story summarized for Slashdot: What I REALLY want for Christmas is less AI slop, not more ways to make it. But the increasingly EVIL google has to show the shareholders bigger profits from more, More, MORE AI, how and NOW.

*sigh*

s/quite machine/quite mature/

Reminds me of another theory: Maybe they (the company selling whatever) get some kind of free insurance on payment if you use a credit card?

Sounds interesting but I doubt it's available here and also sounds like it has gaming elements to repel me.

No checking accounts here. It displays the Visa logo and I just use it in exactly the same way as I used my old "local" credit card. That was from a different network than Mastercard or Visa and I think I may have once or twice had some trouble with international purchases, but pretty sure I encountered no problems with the "Visa-branded" debit card, even for international stuff. Until last month, when I hit the "credit card only" wall. I had also received a couple of "free" credit cards over the years, at least one under the MasterCard brand, but I never used them and just cancelled them because of the risk of changes with new charges.

I forgot to mention regarding the grocery store games that I rarely use a fifth grocery store, which is actually the closest one, because I don't like their loyalty card game. Also, I might have implied that I was using the cards of all four stores, but actually I'm only playing with three of their cards. However I buy more stuff from that fourth store than the closest fifth one... The store I use most is the one that seems to be most consistent with the best prices--and the fewest weird sales.

YAC for "Yet Another Cryptocoin" but the real joke is with DIY iris scanning for the masses. Were this thing to catch on, where would it end?

"First they came for proving your identity for international currency transfers that might be money laundering, then they came for iris scanning before you can get a soft drink out of the vending machine..."

Oh, yes. Almost forgot to say fsck the cryptocoin. EVERY cryptocoin. OF course it's already too late because the cryptocurrency has already fscked us.

By the way I've abandoned the solution space of trying to prove any identity is actually human. My last failed fantasy involved interactive timelines created with personalized trivia quizzes exchanged between the human participants in the events of the shared timelines. The idea was to create networks of identities with anchor points on real human beings. Can't recall detecting any interest or comprehension or even any questions. But after the usual pondering I see two fatal problems. One is that AIs will be able to break into the networks by stealing the identities of actual human beings, either by captured the identities of deceased people or by working between networks. For example, I am no longer on Facebook or in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter (and it is even possible that my personal information was deleted as promised), but if I became validated on some other network, perhaps the new social website Jimmy Wales is working on (currently called "Trust Cafe"), then that information could be tapped and used to create fake identities on the websites I don't use, and then those fake identities could be used to validate any number of fake identities.

However the bigger problem is that there are plenty of people who are already more stupid than the current AIs. The human beings are not getting any smarter (and actually I've seen too much evidence they are getting more stupid over time) while the AIs are rapidly seeming more and more intelligent.

"Any test you can pass, AI can pass better" with apologies to "Anything you can do, AI can do better" with apologies to the ancient musical and derivative movie with "Anything you can do, I can do better". AI can do anything better than me?

And just think how much funnier this joke could have been if I asked an AI to "help polish" it. But I'm standing on my human fingers and I type again fsck the AIs even as I contemplate my next succumbence to the the temptations. And there it was! I had to websearch the spelling of the (rare) noun form and the AI jumped in to "help".

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)

"Woke" simply means "I'm conservative, and the thing I'm calling 'Woke' is something that I hate". It has no well-defined meaning beyond that. I've heard things as diverse as "the concept of the Metaverse" and "removing copyrighted content so you don't get sued" described as "woke".

No call by push value or P vs NP or complexity theory etc.

So a different set of things that are also useless to the vast majority of people?

Even when Chrome adds support, we'll have to wait ages before we can actually reliably use the format without having to implement fallback logic and fallback formats for legacy browsers.

AVIF is also painfully slow. And if I recall correctly, is outperformed by JPEG XL at moderate and low compression (but - again, if I recall correctly - AVIF wins at highly compressed images). Also, AVIF faces some patent threats. And misses a lot of JPEG XL's interesting features.

A practical issue with a circle is that it is not a circle until it is finished,

That's not the reason at all, AFAIK. The reasoning is, okay, we want people to be able to move from one place to some distance place in the city at the maximum comfortable speed, which is limited by G-forces. You have some guaranteed G-forces from first accelerating and then decelerating. But if it's linear, that's your only G forces. If it's curved, however, you also have radial G-forces.

The Line's train going from one end to the other (170km) nonstop is supposed to do it in 20 minutes, aka with a mean speed of ~510 kph. Let's say a peak of 800 kph. Now if we shape that 170km into a circle, that's 54km diameter, 27km radius. From the centripetal force formula a=v^2/r, that's 222,22...^2 / 27000 ~= 1,83 m/s^2, or a constant ~0,2g to the side. This is on top of the G-forces from your acceleration and deceleration. You can probably deal with ~0,2g in a train if everyone is seated without much discomfort, though it's double what's acceptable for standing passengers. But you can eliminate that if the city is linear (at the cost of increasing the mean distance that the average person has to travel to go from one arbitrary point in the city to another)

That's not to defend this concept. Because the city doesn't need to be 170km long; you can just made it more 2d and have the distances be vastly shorter (at the cost of just needing some extra lateral travel within the city). Honestly, if I were building a "designer" city from the ground up, I'd use a PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) system rather than trying to make it super-elongated.

What got me is that I don't see why this isn't readily resolved by active damping, the same systems that many tall towers now use to resist earthquakes or resonant wind forces. Big heavy weight at the top (or in this case the bottom) hooked up to actuators that make it move in an inverse direction to the sway.

Again, this is not to defend this colossal waste of money. I just don't see why there aren't ready solutions for this specific problem.

Agreed - but that said, there are space elevator alternatives, like the Lofstrom Loop / Launch Loop, which at least theoretically can be built with modern materials (and have far better properties anyway - not latitude-constrained, provides dV, vastly higher throughput, far more efficient, stores energy / can add cheap energy at off-peak times, etc). One could always "waste" money on them trying something new :)