I hope you get the Funny, but on your sig I currently favor Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. R is where their noses are for the orange-nosing cowardice, whereas D is for believing in various stripes of flying elephants, with or without feathers. (There's an old book by Woody Allen from back when he was funny...)

I agree with you, but I had to include the obligatory joke. The word has lost all meaning these days. Children? Graft? Socialism? Federal? Naked? Trust? Slashdot? No meaning anywhere. But let's think of the socialist children!

I've had two of each and I would say that the Oppos have outperformed the Samsungs while costing less. I know someone else who had several Samsungs but then switched to a Pixel of some sort. I could go down the list of problems with Samsung, but there are also problems with Oppo, so I would say it's mostly a matter of degree of satisfaction in this imperfect world. I've owned a bunch of other brands of smartphones over the years with various levels of satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Two Taiwan brands come to mind as near the top for dissatisfaction. There are still improvements, but I feel like most of the big improvements were a long time ago...

In terms of brand-linked satisfaction, I think I would actually have given the prize to Huawei before they were disqualified... I bought about ten Huawei devices of various sorts over the years, but I'm down to one last survivor and do not anticipate searching for or buying another Huawei in the future. In point of fact, I bought this last Huawei in a kind of fire sale and in hopes of higher compatibility with old data.

Boycotts are \the trick that does not work in this case, though you may not even have the option to boycott any more. Maybe Zuck will have to create shadow profiles for the residual humans who decline to play his game on his turf. How else can he fill in the holes in "the members' profiles" when they refer to people who aren't there in person. As if "in person" still has a meaning?

On the boycott topic, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. The products (books) and services were mostly okay, but I saw what was being done with my personal data and it stank to high heaven and I wanted no part of it. So I stopped using all things Bezos but kept an eye on the development of the new corporate cancer. Can't see that my boycott has hurt Amazon any.

(Maybe I just have to wait longer? My first corporate boycott target was Exxon. Never managed to bankrupt them as I planned so deviously, but it sure feels like Exxon has fallen far from it's glory days. Is an ugly acquisition in Exxon's future? Oh I hope it's Chinese or Brazilian!)

Back to Zuckerland and a sort of disclaimer: My identity on Facebook was assassinated a few years ago. I had already looked at WhatsApp and Instagram and decided not to use them, but I had cured my Facebook problem with a timer. Actually two of them. The first one went off at four minutes and then I had one minute to get off of Facebook before the second one buzzed. That was my daily allotment for the last few years before my Facebook identity was murdered for reasons that Facebook declined to tell me about. I declined to "prove" myself to Facebook's satisfaction, even if that was possible without knowing my hideous crime, but I did exercise the option to download Facebook's dossier on me and I spent a while searching for any reason, but never even found a candidate. I have a theory it was politically motivated, but only Zuck knows. If Zuck has his way "only Zuck knows" may become the law of the land for the entire universe. "Domination!"

Mod FP funny in the theory-practice joke genre.

However the context appears to be America, where the idea of solutions via (significant or complicated) change has become its own joke category. I still like (too much) to fantasize about solution approaches, but I'm increasingly convinced that the USA has passed the point of recovery via less violent evolutionary improvements. The "American way" into the future has been lost and it appears that only revolutionary change is possible now. I have two personal problems with revolutions. One is the extra deaths. I actually think that may be a key attribute to recognize a real revolution. The other is the uncertainty of the outcome. In some cases a revolution can produce positive improvements, but there's no guarantee that the new conditions won't be worse than the conditions that created the revolution.

I don't think alcohol is required, but the better of the only two Funny on the story that had large potential for humor.

I am beginning to think the entire AI topic is a joke. Side effect of trying to read What is Thought? by Baum? Or aftereffect of A Thousand Brains by Hawkins. We have no idea how intelligence works, but "borrowing" LOTS of "intelligent" artifacts has become the default starting point?

Me? My new ambition is to become an expert in asking questions that drive AIs crazy. Yes, I'm claiming partial credit for driving Gemini nuts. But it's probably just a personal problem because (optimistically?) the google has put me on a special enemies list to receive worthless answers.

At least not if they were wearing AI glasses imposing VR advertising for next month's improved AI glasses.

Obligatory joke for low hanging fruit.

Adam Smith's biggest mistake was stealing the invisible hand's cloak of invisibility. Mostly downhill since then, now at AI-enhanced speeds.

This morning's weird thought was that Adam Smith's great mistake was to make the invisible hand visible. It was a flawed idea in the first place, basically a claim that things would work out "for the best" without knowing the details, but it was really a justification for social Darwinism before Darwin. In a sense bankruptcy serves as the equivalent of death in evolutionary systems in the biological world.

Once the invisible hand had lost its cloak of invisibility all the scoundrels in the world leapt to the attack, and we eventually wound up with bigger and bigger messes. The controlling hands are still mostly invisible, and now enhanced with AI, but they are still (for now) human hands busily devising new scams for fresh suckers. Leading candidates for the worst actors? My latest list features advertisers, stock brokers, real estate agents, and politicians. (Stock brokers is probably too narrow, but bankers is too broad and FinTech Bros is too trendy (for my tastes).)

Needs a joke for the conclusion, but I'm out of humor these days. Everything keeps running into the "We can't get there from here" oldie.

Funny, but the Apple approach would be "Vintage Windows 10".

My cue? My latest AI project had a punch card phase. At one point the entire thing was on Hollerith cards, with the program in PL/C (a dialect of PL/I) and about a thousand cards of data. It had originally been a simple typewritten list derived from a handwritten list. Also in the early 80s it became a database for the first time, ported to bigger and better computers and operating systems later... Probably late in the 90s it got a PERL/CGI front end interface (ultimately based on some code the late James Liu gave me around 1995 before he moved to Sun). Most of the stuff after that was statistical utilities, most recently using JavaScript (which I sometimes write in a style that looks like Fortran).

The Claude project version involved a number of short chat discussions of features and data structures. The actual coding phase would take Claude about two minutes and then I needed a minute or two (depending on which modules had been updated) to install the code. Testing was more variable. Not systematic, but I have quite a bit of familiarity with the problems I've encountered over the years. Around ten of those sessions and the code had all the features of the PERL that took me a long time to write... Even more interesting was that the PERL system had an interesting bug in one of the regex calls, but the new system doesn't have it. (I spent quite a bit of time trying to can that bug, but Claude just avoided it completely.)

Or should I blame LinkedIn? Anyway, when I submitted the story it included a link to the summary on LinkedIn, but I don't see any trace here. The LinkedIn version was a short summary of four advanced Chinese AI models released in the same week. Mostly I remember a few details about the one for generating videos, but LinkedIn didn't say anything substantial about why they were free, at least as the current monetary terms appear.

So when I checked here and noticed the link was missing I went back to LinkedIn to get the link again, but LinkedIn has infinite scroll in both directions and I wasn't able to find it again. Which motivated a google websearch that failed badly (as so many of them do these days) which drove me to Bing, which actually produced some interesting results, though none of them seemed to match up with the original version from the LinkedIn source. https://news.cgtn.com/news/202... is one that seems to cover most of the same territory, but at a much lower level.

I think you should start your own research with the meaning of the word joke. Perhaps starting from the etymology?

No substantive comment on your "reply" because I saw no substance there. Blinded by the rudeness?

My next joke perhaps should be about creeping senility among low-digit IDs on Slashdot. Not all jokes are funny ha-ha. Maybe it's just an attitude problem in your case, but I'd be a fine one to talk about negative attitude. (Currently contemplating a most evil business contest. My initial list of candidates includes advertising, real estate, stock markets, and politics.)

My joke was to blame ol' Al Gore for giving them the money to develop the Internet with no strings. But does anyone remember who he was?

I heard of Notion via a scam. The website did look interesting and made a lot of powerful promises, which got me to ask some questions. The answers reeked of an AI fake-support system and I lost interest. Might be a legitimate company. Or not. (But I think ZenDesk is still the king of fake support by companies that want to pretend they care as cheaply as possible.)

However if someone around here has positive experiences with Notion, then I'd be interested. But suspicious. There was a time when I was willing to start with a position of trust in a Slashdot identity. Long time ago.

A few more words about the scam because I thought it was quite impressive. Near as I can tell, they got one of my email addresses via a kind of dictionary probe from my YouTube account. The scam package was email from a plausible sounding identity and based on YouTube videos posted by a famous author about an ongoing project. The scammer was projecting an expanded version of the project and designed the email to sound like a marketing pitch, but it didn't stop there. There was one aspect that piqued my curiosity enough to reply, and the famous author wrote back (and mentioned Notion). Or so it seemed. The tone and style and even degree of persuasion of the reply was excellent--but it seemed rather rapid and too personal for such a busy person. So I back-channeled via the publisher's website and got a "NOT the author" response. Along with the usual "Ignore it" recommendation in these days of "Live and let scam."