I don't know this guy. I haven't even googled him or looked at his linkedin. All I see is his incentive structure and see him acting exactly the way I'd expect someone to act if their expectations of their career progress weren't meeting harsh reality, and there was a quick buck to be made talking trash about The System.

More food for thought: Oppenheimer was scared shitless of the bomb and Einstein opined on World War 4 being fought with sticks and stones. The future isn't written, but neither ww3 nor ww4 have come to pass as predicted.

You got me to read it. Sounds like an AI trying to be "idiosyncratic like a real human" to fool the readers. But the content sounds more idiotic than idiosyncratic.

Holy fuck! How brain-dead do you have to be to believe a piece of software is any more dangerous than any other tool if misapplied properly.

Half or more of the Fortune 500 hlis sitting on enough chemical, biological, and industrial capacity to kill a good chunk of the world all kinds of dead (and has been for the better part of a century or more) and it isn't a problem. Because people fundamentally don't want to die, and they especially do not want to die poor.

Why the ai fearmongering? Misplaced religious zeal certainly has some explanatory power. Even if it comes from self-styled science-types.

So tldr: pix or it didn't happen. How exactly are the robots gonna kill all humans? By what mechanism? Specifically. How exactly will "recursive self improvement" work if the humans ain't around to plug in more graphics cards and memory?

All nonsense. Oh wait it's election time isn't it?

Ah well, disregard then.

No such luck, however

Good opening joke.

As usual I went down the list of features to see if there was one I would donate money to pay for. Usual string of nopes. (Not to be confused with the strange drink "Nope", which actually tastes much better than you'd think from the marketing.) But I suppose there are new bugs in there... Definitely wouldn't pay for those if such choices were offered. (Reminds me of Microsoft's emergency patch this month. Nothing to see here. Just some failures in the regression testing. Why do I want a remote desktop in my Windows machine again? (And why is my Chromebook still trying to reset its password after that Wi-Fi fiasco last week?))

More meta: Slashdot is running much slower for new stories these days. Good change, editorial shortage, or a sign of fading out?

I feel like I should ask for insider details about what is going over there, but I'm going to focus on the bugs around the Submit button. Most of those links seem to work badly or not at all. However in this particular case I also got a notification that the topic had been front-paged when there was nothing on the front page. On one hand, I figured it must have been a slow news day in the first place to consider the story, but on the other hand, WTF?

Pretty sure it isn't funny, but here's a bit from another website. These days I write less and less in the Slashdot direction...

I'm still seeing problems on my Chromebook, but at least I've figured out a quicker way to get it back into a logged in status... It does seem like the thing about transferring the new password to other smartphone devices worked for one old smartphone that is still in special service. I'll learn more about that angle in my monthly update of the older smartphones, but they are in retired status anyway.

I didn't mention this part, but during the chaos period there was actually a risky period when my google account had a relatively simple "emergency" password. At that point I didn't really believe what the google was saying was going on because the focus of the discussion was supposed to be the municipal Wi-Fi network. I don't know if the wannabe attackers have any way to spot such targets of opportunity, but I sure don't like presenting one. Or maybe they can figure out some way to take advantage of the turbulence? The thing about computer security is that it's like a chain, and the attackers only need to find and break one weak link. (And it is NOT helping that the AIs probably have "routine reaction times" that are much faster than any human being's best reflexes.)

But not like Slashdot is much of a discussion forum for such things... Used to be a time when interesting insights would appear along with plenty of funny stuff. On that basis I was sort of amused when I got a notification that the submission had been accepted (on yet another slow news day?), but it appears that was some kind of false flag or squabble between the residual editors. "Nothing to see here. Move along." (I'm actually going to check the day's most active discussions for Funny, but generally feels like a waste of time to write on Slashdot... Just finished another AI book and in the middle of a related science fiction book from China, but pretty confident any reactions on Slashdot would be underwhelming.)

hostiles.

Unless you want to up your probability of being treated as hostile.

This is an apolitical statement, as true about filming and following an employee of $disfavored_business as it is about wearing a yankees cap to a redsox game.

I wasn't there and all that, but if it were me with the camera, I might have taken the extra half a minute to go up to the guy and introduce myself before filming.

Let's reach back to what I hope is a basic level of bullshit detection we might have exercised at some point in the last few decades when a clueless politico said something clueless about the internets.

How does one enforce, or even measure, such a "slowdown" exactly?

The thing he's talking about policing is writing code and running it. Perhaps a little more capital intensive than writing a crypto suite without fully abiding by ITAR or reverse engineering DVD CSS, but not in any way that matters.

You're not talking about keeping a lid on the exact geometry of nuclear bomb design that's the difference between a boom and a fizzle, or the secret sauce of enriching uranium or machining plutonium. You're talking about typing code into a computer.

Presumably he knows this, or should know it. Perhaps he's yet another silicon valley figurehead, but either way: it's a joke and/or a lie whether he believes it himself. So who exactly is the mark who's the intended audience of this PR?

Politicians? Media? Investors? Idunno. None of those make much sense to me.

Maybe it's just a healthy dose of stupid.

But did you have to propagate it?

Evidently spans a lot of the discussion, but my real concern is the lack of potential for Funny for the story. Maybe if would help if they could get a fresh editor to pick more interesting news?

Which somehow led me to a worse idea? What if Slashdot started using an AI editor? Maybe they could name it ETS, standing for "Et Tu, Slashdot"? Or GEitS for "Ghost Editor in the Slashdot"? Now I feel like loading up an AI and asking it about possible names for such an AI editor... Then in the next stage of devolution, Slashdot could fix the moderation problem with AI moderators?

Hey man. Don't knock it. I get paid the big bux for predicting the next token in my line of work. My predictive powers are better than yours, I'll wager.

How else does one explain a bot EMOTING to itself this way?

With blackjack, and hookers?

No, I'm not in the States now, but these years you feel like you have to be parsimonious with the personal information...

I left a long time ago. I'm not saying that I could see where it was going to end up, but I mostly just felt that things were going in the wrong direction. I could never have imagined where it would end up, but there is so much of today's reality that every publisher would have been rejected as "too impossible" if submitted as fiction.

Recently saw an interesting 2D analysis that was supposed to assess various cities on costs versus quality of life. The largest American cities were concentrated in the quadrant of expensive but unpleasant. My city was sort of near the center of the chart, which somewhat surprised me. I would have thought it was somewhere pretty far out in the quadrant of expensive but worth it... I feel like digging up the chart again because I can't remember which cities were in the quadrant of inexpensive with high quality.

Can't tell if you needed to propagate the Subject for your joke... Care to clarify? (It still spanned about a fourth of the discussion.)

Anyway, the actual Subject of the story is censorship, not diversions like Talarico. If he has any sexual peculiarities they're probably Biblical?

But I'd like the fix the SCOTUS so they can stop supporting the destruction of the First Amendment (and the rest of the Constitution). I was vaguely thinking of sending Telarico an email about the recusal solution: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." The path to implementation would actually run through Congress. In particular, I think a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president would have to cooperate to force the fake Republicans to pick the first one. Basically threaten "Give us a list of acceptable nonpartisan judges and then vote with us for one of them or else we'll pack the Court." Or maybe you can imagine some other way to get a nonpartisan Justice up there?

Can't go for Funny on this topic and Slashdot doesn't have a Sad moderation option. In my lifetime SCOTUS has gone from all nonpartisan Justices to zero. (Though Roberts only missed the status by one vote.)