Hmm... Well as a correction I don't feel like it goes far enough. It's not to personalize your feeds. It's to addict you and waste as much of your time as possible. The drug dealers are always after fresh victims, along the lines of my mutated Subject.

Many of those books talked about the free data services Facebook pushed in places like Myanmar. If you're tracking the news you already know what can go wrong.

That's the 'black' joke I was looking for along the same lines as FP.

But getting more serious, at risk of dipping my toe into insight, if we were technically ahead of the Chinese companies, then we would be able to figure out the security threats. So I see this sort of thing as mostly surrendering and admitting the Chinese are too dangerous and we have to "run away, run away" (with the usual apology to Monty Python for the abuse of the killer rabbit joke).

Not sure how my next joke works, but there was a time I felt I could trust the Chinese companies more than the American ones because everyone was looking carefully at what the Chinese were doing. Even Huawei quaked before our technical expertise? Now I feel like we can look but we can't see.

Why wear clothes at all?

Mod parent Funny (and basically the expected joke), but based on recent books about Facebook, I'm not understanding what part of this story is supposed to be news in the sense of "new".

The thing about "opt-out" is that almost no one will bother, but Zuck can always say "It's your own fault for not figuring it out."

If this were really a personal attack, then I'd use his real nickname, but I don't know Zuck from Adam. And if I were an "effective" writer, then I'd be better at coining memes. (Latest idea along such lines versus Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. Cowardly orange-nosers versus believers in flying elephants.)

It costs next to nothing to bring on a new customer since there's no widget to make and ship.

Growing marketshare is *the* priority. Give it away for free. Pay people to use it if you must.

Then once they're hooked, start charging licensing fees. Just a little. More for bigger customers. Maybe keep a free tier for personal use. A little times a huge userbase is enormous cashflow for a little bit of nre.

It's great cuz the customer supplies his own platform, pays for training his own people, and even pays for the electricity to run your product on premises.

Now about this building full of expensive and power-hungry silicon needed to deliver the ai hotness...

That's the joke I was looking for, but Slashdot failed again. Either at the comment level or the moderation level, and I don't even care enough to search to find out which.

Tracking license plates is nothing compared to tracking the MAC identifiers.

That's the joke I was looking for, but considering the current state of today's Slashdot, I wonder how many of today's visitors to the website even know that that own smartphone keeps a list of all the MAC IDs for the Wi-Fi networks it has connected to at some point in the past.

Oh, wait. I only learned about this recently.

But I suspect there are some places like China and the US of Surveillance where they are logging LOTS of MAC data. And now developing the AI systems to analyze it. Why aren't you laughing yet? You think you have a solution approach?

Hmm... Only "insightful" comment in the FP branch? Maybe the moderators have been replaced with genAIs?

(And no Funny anywhere, as expected.)

As regards the story I'm remembering a recent MIT video. Long section about how to make AI work with the course. On the negative side, it recommended an anthropomorphic approach, basically treating the AI as though it were a human collaborator, but with "usage limits" to keep it in a subordinate status. On the positive side, I forgot. Maybe I should ask an AI for help?

I'm feeling increasingly bleak about the future of humanity. We definitely need to change the reference frames of our thinking, but we humans have never been that quick on our wits. In theory I think we could learn how to think about problems at new levels of abstraction that would make the AI tools useful, but in practice the tools are changing faster and faster all the time and we are already past the point where we humans can keep up with them. They have become almighty black boxes, spewing words that appear meaningful while we have no clear idea how the words are being created.

The YOB just wants to get his own beak wet and Bernie is worried about people getting hurt. The motivations matter.

Sam Altman's use of the same words may be more troublesome. He sometimes sounds like he understands the risks there.

Too bad there's no funny here. And the FP branch was disappointing, too. Didn't lead anywhere interesting before I lost interest in following it... Both par scores for Slashdot these years. Almost enough to make a nerd want to invite comments from a genAI: "What is the best joke for this story?"

Because he's a communist. He never saw a business or asset he didn't want to pocket "for the people."

If I ran any kind of business, I'd have my money in various kinds of places that balanced risk, return, and liquidity against my perceived need for keeping the lights on, paying vendors, and and anticipated revenue. Same as everyone.

I wouldn't operate like I had a fountain of money nor do I believe I would be perceived as having one.

Hospitals don't have a fountain of money. They purchase malpractice insurance on behalf of their providers and the premiums for that insurance pay for these jury awards.

Insurance companies don't print their own money either. They redistribute the costs of these payouts over their risk pool. And those premium hikes is one of several reasons why your emergency room visit costs 10k if you had to pay for it out of pocket.

The other reason it costs 10k is that enough of these lawsuits and jury awards have forced hospitals into doing medically unnecessary (but expensive) tests for everyone, rather than coming up with some kind of cost-conscious criteria, to cover their bases and their asses so they don't get sued.

Say it with me now: tort reform. The lawyers don't like it, which is how you can tell it's a good idea.

This thread is supposed to be about wrongs that aren't necessary?

Or perhaps some sarren of the horde of sarrens intended "necessarily"?

Symptoms of something. Would that it would be funny something? Just on my way out the door, but an even less amusing visit than average. Am I diverging from Slashdot or is that just necessary? Necessity was the mother of a better website I hope to find somewhere?

(Irrelevant failed joke of the day, since I always feel the need to go a bit tangential and I already used the on Bluesky: Is it necessary to vote for Rumplicans or Dumbocrats? R where their noses are or D for belief in flying elephants? ROFLMAO. Not.)

But why is the traffic so bad and why does stuff cost so much?