Does that deserve quoting against censor moderation? Or does it deserve Funny moderation? Too soon for kiddy porn jokes?

As it applies to the story, does the YOB even notice when he's being manipulated by a computer? Is there a generative AI built into his private soapbox or the cesspool formerly known as Twitter?

Need to start with a typing test if the YOB uses a keyboard? How many fingers does the YOB use? Or perhaps the YOB is using voice dictation? Sloppy pronunciation could certainly explain a lot of his online gibberish...

Supposed to be the obligatory joke thread? But no citation of Betteridge?

Me? I think it's a deep and complicated philosophic topic, but the relevant starting joke is "It's the poor craftsman who blames his tools" extended to "... but it's the bankrupt craftsman who doesn't use the tools that allow him to compete in the market in the real world." ChatGPT is such a tool for certain kinds of paid work, and just ignoring the tool isn't going to make it go away. (Though I also like the extension "...but it's the worst craftsman who doesn't know and want the best tool for each job at hand.")

There should also be a joke about "Know your enemy" around here. Citation of The Art of War called for? Or the more recent book Mastering AI by Jeremy Kahn, whose answer is very much "No because of my rose-colored glasses." Rather a shallow book overall and I'd still recommend A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hancock as the best AI book I've read over the last few years.

But back to the original story... I am inclined to agree with him, which is why I'm trying to limit my use of AI tools and also trying to consider how such tools affect my approach to solving problems. There is a strong temptation to just look at the result, test it sufficiently, and not think deeply enough about why it works. But even worse, when you do ask a GenAI to explain, the explanations it offers always seem quite plausible and believable, but they do not represent any "human understanding" of why.

The human-level epistemology of Mercier and Sperber are also relevant, which got me to look at all of the links to try to find any reference. Nothing I could find, but perhaps I should have been looking for some other authors who have done more recent work on the topic? Short version: Most of the time we do not think. You could say we act (and speak) stupidly, but it doesn't really rise to that level. Rather it is more like the way GenAI responds based on patterns that fit. For humans, it is the entire situation, not just a prompt, but we respond to the situation and most of our responses "work" well enough. If we are asked "Why?", then we are pretty good at explaining ourselves, but its basically confabulation and the explanation did not exist until after the fact. The Enigma of Reason says a lot about 'my-side' bias in the explanations, but that's predicated on normal intelligence. In some cases the broken brain just spews gibberish and obvious lies...

Searching for Funny.

Not found.

At least not yet on today's Slashdot.

Only Funny comment for a story full of possibilities? Was humor your intention? Or yet another moderation failure to recognize sarcasm? Or another case of Poe's Law in action?

If the story wasn't expiring I might have gone for a testosterone joke. Hormones are all the rage.

Better of the two jokes on the story, but it was such a rich target.

I once worked for a startup with a Harvard MBA in the CFO slot. Went bankrupt. But I'm not blaming the CFO. He was actually a nice guy. I think the main source of failure was the CTO, an Apple fanboi. Or should that be fanbois or fanboy? I don't speak the lingo.

Your second link contradicts your description of the link. Minimal correction is "no criminal records", based on the content of the link. Was that your intention?

However, I'm not sure how much of a legal defense that really is. Since ICE is acting outside of the law, they can just create crimes and criminal records as needed. They don't want to bother on a wholesale level, but if a particular case becomes too problematic, then they'll do it. Of course I'm thinking of the Garcia case, where he was deported, became too visible, and so was returned to the US and charged with a bunch of trumped up crimes. But even American citizenship is no longer a defense if they can devise or fake any reason to "revoke" the target's citizenship. It's basically the same as stop and frisk. If they search long enough, the cops will find something to bust (or deport) you for.

But returning to the story, it's a matter of searching the cultures to find something objectionable. Since cultures are big and complicated, that's an easy thing to do. Especially when you despise all culture, even including your own.

Solutions? I think it's just a combination of "It's too late" and "We can't get there from here." Too late for America to claim leadership in any category except lies and "there" is any solution space better than the status quo problem space called "here". I know it won't help, but maybe I could install a retro rotary dialing app on my smartphone to remind me of "Truth, justice, and the American way" and days of yore? (But that was actually a wartime slogan, circa 1942. And everyone knows truth is the first casualty of war...) I want one with a Lily Tomlin theme, where her voice starts with "One ringy dingy" after the dialing sounds finish, and then her voice starts the conversation off with "You have reached the party to whom you are speaking."

Thanks for the Funny though it took me a few seconds to get your joke. Never saw any of the movies--but I think the dinosaurs were too fast to run away from?

I couldn't understand this the first time I saw it, but now I think I understand and concur, though I don't got that far. I can see notifications of incoming priority Gmail, but the rest of it is out of sight and mind until a daily check. And I time it at the end of the day when I'm probably going to ignore it for lack of time...

Additional thoughts on the email book since I posted that comment... Comparing other forms of intrusive communications, including the notifications from Slashdot. Also remembering how much of my working time (in most mornings) was filled with email of small importance.

New even more retro thought: How about a rotary phone dialing app? You got me to check and it turns out there are a number of them. When it says "customizable themes and sounds" I wonder if it has a Lily Tomlin mode. (Glad to see she's still alive.) So the phone would make the dialing sounds followed by "One ringy dingy, two ringy..." and then a short joke you can both hear: "You have reached the party to whom you are speaking." Of course using her voice.

Earlier I noticed two spams that had bypassed the evil google's so-called spam filters.

Relevant per The Hacker and the State by Ben Buchanan. That sort of poison file is a primary tool for state-supported hackers targeting various organizations like this nuclear weapons agency. Of course when they go after an important target they are using retail-level spear phishing rather than the wholesale-level phishing that I'm seeing. I believe the targeted spear phishing is rather more likely to bypass the spam filters.

But the key question is whether a particular poison attachment is targeting a vulnerability that is unpatched or perhaps even still unpatchable within the target's computer. Just a click away from being breached?

Every day. For ever and ever. Have a nice day and don't let the bad clicks bite.

There's a lot of variability here. The Seattle and California models are baffling to me. Totally agree that the US system is largely focused on irrelevant (or immutable) things. I have a kid in highschool now. His peer group is very, very impressive. Multiple perfect scores on the ACT every year. ~55% of the highschool is English-language learners and 60%+ is free lunch eligible (meaning poverty level or close). There's an engineering magnet program that does really, really cool stuff. The school was on lockdown 3 times last year for gang fights.

It's a tough environment, comparatively.

I have a different take! What's the point of a test that nobody ever gets a perfect score? I guarantee you that I can design a test that nobody ever aces, but it also wouldn't be worth anything. I think there needs to be a middle ground between overtesting, teaching to the test, and tests being the be all and end all of education, and the loosey goosey approach one often encounters in the US (most commonly among leftists) that thinks all testing is bad and racist and invalid and hurts kids.

You are probably assuming the wrong things given the demographics of Slashdot and those few of us who have hung on for decades at this point! I was not on the math team, but I had friends who were. I participated in both Latin and Computer Science competitions (and marching band). Our football team sucked (I know this from marching band). But yeah, I'm sure a huge amount of money was spent on the gym and fields and athletics, far beyond what was spent on supporting the best academic achievers.

You will get NO argument from me that America's obsession with sports, from the cradle to the grave, is hugely detrimental to our society and culture.

I hope that the current mess with NIL, paying college athletes (I will NOT call them "student athletes" -- what a joke) forces some or many schools to back off on their sports expenditures and focuses, but I'm not holding my breath.

Hey, I asked you your metric, I wasn't planning on nitpicking it!

Sure, just like micro-regions, individual demographic groups in the US, etc., score higher.

IMHO, US public education is amongst the very best in the world at the high end and pretty bad at the low end. The real confounding factor is that demographics are hard to escape.

I agree PISA is a reasonable standard.

So, in the context of STEM that you raised, the US scored 14 points above average, #16 in Science placement. That seems strong to me.

Math is slightly below average (-4 points), number 34. Weak.

Reading, US placed #9, seems strong again.

You mentioned immigrants being the majority of STEM students. I don't know if that is true, but, using the metric you picked of PISA scores, some of the countries that send the most immigrants to the US in STEM .... have no data available. Nothing for China, India, Pakistan, etc. India seems to have scored exceedingly poorly the last time they participated.

The chart at the bottom of the Wikipedia page that includes 2015 US State results and racial breakdowns for the Mathematics portion for the US over multiple years is fascinating, and I think, should make an impact on your thinking.

(For instance, in the 2018 math results, Asian students in the US scored 539, whites scored 503, and the US average was 478. That puts US Asian students between Hong Kong and Taiwan in position #5 and white students in between Seden and Finland at #20. Black students in the US scored 419, the level of Thailand and Uruguay, around the upper 50s in rank. Kind of changes things a bit?)

What metric would you use to compare K-12 public education systems around the world?

Both of my grandarents died from lung ailments.

One of my grandfathers worked in factories his entire life, smoked for about 20 years of his youth, and and was generally of the socioeconomic level that wasn't able to live an extremely healthy lifestyle. He developed emphysema and associated conditions, and died in his low 70s. He had been on oxygen for years at that point.

My other grandfather never smoked a day in his life, never drank, worked in academia, swam daily until sometime in his 80s, and died right around age 90--from lung cancer! One of the doctors asked him if he had any career asbestos exposure and he answered "Well I did go down into an asbestos mine in 1934..."

You never know what will get you, but dying at age 90 and being in good physical and mental shape is pretty good by me!

I would love to see the corporate cancers fight to the death--except that the surviving cancer always seems to be worse. They never manage mass suicide.

However, you've motivated me to comment on the job market. Some sort of delusional hope that someone will URL a solution at us?

The top people in productivity terms are above the money thing. They are making lots of money, but they are "top" because of their results, not their greed for more money. Basically a paradox where too much greed prevents good results. These people are not recruited by trying to force them to fit into existing holes (AKA job slots), bur rather the recruiting pitch is inverted, and the position is created to let them do what they want to do which coincides with the most valuable thing they can do. Avocation matches vocation situation. If these googlers are available to any other company, it mostly reflects on problems within the work environment and corporate culture of the google.

Below the top people there is a large pool of good people who are recruited in a kind of balanced race to the bottom. Most of the job slots are clearly defined and the corporate objective is to fill each slot with the human who is capable of doing the work for the smallest salary. This seems to be working pretty well for maximizing profits, and the mental horizon is basically limited to the current accounting period. A "future thinker" is considering the next accounting period, too. But it gets worse when AI is brought into the picture, because well-defined slots are the best targets for occupation by AIs and the AI always becomes cheaper than the humans doing the work. Especially convenient that the AIs can scale by simple copying into additional cloud resources.

So most people seem to be becoming increasingly devalued and even unemployable. You may smell another paradox brewing, but only if you are an old fashioned economist who worries about having customers. The newfangled economists are going to fund everything with cryptocurrency games!

In traditional Slashdot joke format:

1. Get best solution from best creator (possibly stolen from competing corporate cancer)
2. Copy solution as needed
3. Dispose of excess humans and their costs
4. PROFIT