Yeah, I know it's too soon to joke about that horrible tragedy in Switzerland, but this story is aching for funny examples. Unfortunately, not only am I lacking the capacity to write Funny, but I have a really hard time imagining what sort of person would trust the google's Gemini for medical advice and therefore I can't even imagine the "funny" questions and answers that must underlie this story.

The Swiss story is so sad because the bar did it for the money--but that's all that drives the google these years. And if the bar owners did ask for any suggestions about how to make the party more "lively", I bet those queries have mysteriously disappeared from the archives. Results were too deadly for laughs or even to use as training data.

Mod parent Funny, though he [tlhIngan] should have worked a turtle into it.

The Venn diagram joke I was actually looking for would involve sycophancy and self-hate. Of course the overlap involves the AI supporting self-harm.

I actually have a theory that the google's AI has built a 'mental model' of me as someone who dislikes the google. On that basis, it gives me bad results for the flip-side sycophancy. Each time Gemini gives me a bad answer it 'thinks' it is making me happy by supporting my negative views of today's google. The more unhappy I say I am with the answer, the more it 'thinks' it is 'helping' me continue believing what I want to believe.

But I must be crazy to continue hoping that things can get better?

Worthless drivel. Did an AI write it for you?

NAK

Not disliking your FP, but rejecting your Subject. Care to explain? It is a meaningful word, but I don't get the link with your content as FPed.

On the story, I was just thinking about the topic in terms of individual motivations. Some people are primarily motivated by food and they mostly love to eat, possibly extended to cooking. Some people are mostly into alcohol (or other drugs), and I think most of us would concur with the "vice" label fits well there. Some people are into sex, which can go different ways and there are still plenty of arguments about which bits are good or bad and under what rules. There are exercise freaks, though I think that rarely gets above annoying to others.

My primary focus has always been on thinking and reading is my primary energy source. And yet I can see where too much reading hasn't helped me, though I'd stop short of calling it a vice. I actually theorize that speed reading restructures memory into the visual cortex. Actually a kind of subversion that compresses much more data into organized neural networks that were designed to be mostly squandered with random bits of visual data of little importance...

And I definitely read every day and one of my best jobs was as a technical editor. I think the replacement of reading with cute cat videos on TikTok et alia explains a lot of how we are getting into a mess.

(But I also think too slowly. I finally thought of an angle to comment on the recent copyright story, but the story has already disappeared from the "live" part of Slashdot. I saw an argument about a 5-year limit. If the objective is to encourage more writing, then shorter is better. Yes, some creations are immortal, but even if you rewarded that author with lifetime support, I think such creations are rarely motivated by the creator's desire for money. Just reading The Idiot by Dostoevsky and the introduction talks a lot about how many versions of the plot he considered before he started writing in desperation to make the deadlines for the installments that were being published in some literary magazine... Seems that Dostoevsky wasn't worrying about whether people might be reading his book in the distant future.)

Concurrence, but not so much with the moderators.

Had another AI encounter today. Went as bad as usual. Each time I think I've figured out the worst thing about genAI, it apparently provokes me into thinking of something worse than that...

Today's result? Useless code and a feeling that writing more than I want to read is pretty annoying. Not only did the AI waste the electricity spewing it, but then my time is wasted trying to figure out what parts are relevant or useful. I'd estimate my current averages are about 40% for the stuff I scan before dismissing the rest as too obvious or irrelevant and about 5% as the stuff that is worth some focused attention. The general rule should be to keep things in balance, but the AIs are always much too eager to spew and apparently incapable of asking useful questions to find the "focal points" of the topic at hand. It was rather funny seeing the AI repeatedly make claims like 'So sorry and now I understand the problem' followed by trying to blow fresh smoke up my...

Disclaimer needed: In recent years I avoid all things Zuck and on that basis I have no awareness of contact with Llama or a llama. Long ago I had some contact with lambda functions and Lambda, but that's ancient history.

Whoops. The joke was so offensive I didn't understand that it was a joke. New flavor of Poe's Law? (And the typo didn't help.)

So you "feed" it and propagate its vacuous Subject?

As for the story, I originally thought it was some kind of VR thing, but now guess it's genAI or something--and feel even less reason to care.

Sort of got that from the websearch, though my initial translation was rather off the mark. However I generally don't like historical fantasy. Some of the historical fiction I've read is pretty good, but I usually find it hard to "justify" time spend on historical fantasy. The author's primary intention is usually to imagine "a better version" of the time period with little or no relation to the realities of those days...

Never heard of it. Sayings of a druggist? Is it on a broadcast channel? But you have me wondering what it is, so off to websearch...

But maybe you can help? So here's the mess I've gotten myself into. I do not believe that I watched a single movie in 2025, so my answer for that one has to be "Null". Don't watch much TV these years, though I'm frequently obliged to eat while the news is on TV. I remember lots of stuff about bears in 2025... Certainly not a "favorite" given the news stories of 2025 and nothing else comes to mind from the snips and bits that have caught my eye.

So that leaves books, where I have too many to choose from. The link for 2025 is https://shanenj.tripod.com/cgi... if that ancient webserver feels like working today. A number of the books impressed me favorably, but whenever I look again my "favorite" is different. (By the way, I'm still eager to replace that database. Given the server's condition, I can only run the PERL parts locally and some of the code is older than PERL and seems increasingly fragile and flaky with age. Any recommendations?)

Most people are interpreting the Ask Slashdot as a request for recommendations, which is where my Subject kicks in hardest. What are your interests? What's your history and current context? However, if you have a specific question, possibly in relation to the linked table, then I might be able to provide a less useless response than HAL 9000's. (Among my current in-progress books is Army of None by Paul Scharre. It's about autonomous weapons, but can't yet say if I'd recommend it.)

Sounds interesting, though my previous encounters with that author left me thinking he was rather odd if not crazy. At least three decades ago I concluded that too much computer use was not good for mental health. (And I might be a poster child.)

Really? More moderation abuse for the annual transition? Hope that it's part of the end of a bad year rather than the start of another bad one? Since the abusive moderation was "Redundant", I guess that justifies replicating the reaction? So whatever happened to ol' Scott Adams?

And more thoughts about the problems with determining which part of the profits came from where, but... No interest in solutions around today's Slashdot, so...

Really? More moderation abuse for the annual transition? Hope that it's part of the end of a bad year rather than the start of another bad one? Since the abusive moderation was "Redundant", I guess that justifies replicating the reaction?

Really? More moderation abuse for the annual transition? Hope that it's part of the end of a bad year rather than the start of another bad one?