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Comment Limits of applied psychology? (Score 0) 19

Are you sure that you actually cancelled your Prime account? How long until you are sure that you really did it?

I think this is a sort of joke, but my guess is that you only got far enough to convince yourself that you could cancel it, but somewhere along the way you changed your mind and decided not to. Sort of like "I can quit gambling/drinking/gaming whenever I feel like it, so I'm not addicted." If you had gotten too close to actually cancelling your membership, then they would have pulled out the big psycho-weapons until you backed down.

In general I think psychology and psychiatry are full of BS, but the applied psychologists have gotten too good at pulling people's strings for the sake of selling deodorant, laundry soap, and politicians who really stink to high heaven notwithstanding any amount of deodorant and soap. The applied psychologists have an enormous advantage. They are basically behaviorists and they don't worry about the value of the human soul, the nature of evil, or collateral damage. None of that trivial stuff matters when you have widgets and snake oil to sell.

Disclaimer needed: I haven't had any direct contact with Amazon in decades. My second and final Amazon purchase was that long ago. I evaluated what Amazon was doing with my personal information and decided that I wanted no part of it. Nothing that I have seen in the years since has improved my opinion of the cancer.

Comment Measuring blood pressure indirectly (Score 1) 31

Even though you're apparently feeding a troll, I think there is a more substantive answer involving a solution approach that would involve 'light AI' technology. It's actually a topic I've been researching for some years, even though the doctors have never really convinced me I need to worry about my blood pressure.

So the fundamental problem is that most direct (external) measurements of blood pressure involve comparing the blood pressure to air pressure, so they take a substantial amount of power to pressurize some kind of balloon. Major problem for small battery devices like watches.

An alternative approach would involve timing, based on the variation in pulse timing, though maybe the approach flopped. Key term is HRV (Heart Rate Variability), which allows you to track and time individual pulses as they reach different parts of the body. Last research I read was a couple of years ago and I still don't haven't seen any products on the market. However the basic idea would be to take timing data from different locations and use it to calculate the blood pressure. You would need a couple of separate pulse detectors with stable locations, but the real problem is that the arteries are not uniform, either over distance or time. That means that you would need to train a fairly sophisticated model to figure out what blood pressures really correspond to what timing differences. Probably need to train it for each person, too.

Comment Three parrots flew into a bar (Score 1) 53

Ouch, ouch, ouch.

Okay, you got your funny mod points, but did you have to propagate the vacuous Subject, too? On the grounds of your Funny, I forgive you for getting me to look at AC's tripe, though I didn't actually try to read it. Enough to know he was too ashamed to even attach a handle to the tripe...

(Now if I was an actual humorist I would have figured out a way to work a wind turbine into my joke, but that was just a replacement/filler joke because I couldn't figure out how to create a Subject full of punctuation in response to your joke. (And my replacement joke is really due to a similar joke I saw on another website.)

Comment Re:Don't you understand yet ? (Score 1) 30

Mod parent Funny but actually too true to be funny.

However I have a new theory about moderation on Slashdot. First you have to pass a reverse CAPTCHA test. The mod points are then only given to accounts that can prove they are not human.

On the story itself, I think we are all so fscked that it doesn't even make sense to think about solution approaches. The giant corporate cancers can always find a suitable jurisdiction where they they fsck you if'n they want to.

However it would reach a new level of Funny if she has never even visited jolly ol' England.

Comment Re:I think AI is great! (Score 1) 60

All the moderators missed the joke and failed to give you a Funny?

Or perhaps all the moderators are AI? Slashdot's new (and secret) moderation policy is to only give mod points to accounts that can pass a reverse CATPCHA to prove they are NOT human?

Just asking questions? Of course not?!?

Comment Re:Russian nesting dolls of scams (Score 1) 47

Mod parent Funny, but I think the humor is at a level that will sail over the moderators' heads. Assuming they have heads and Slashdot hasn't adopted a policy of giving all the mod points to AI accounts. Slashdot could use a reverse CAPTCHA where you have to prove you're not human before you can have any mod points to bestow.

For my next failure to be funny, consider the threat of learning not to think like a machine by learning not to think about any question the machine won't answer. Combination of "Nothing to see there" and "How dare you even think of such a question?" And I predict most people won't even notice the "guidance" of their "thinking".

Comment Re:AI Moderation? (Score 1) 47

Would have been a better FP, and I can even see a derivative joke:

"But first they use the AI to decide which stuff is "confidential and important" and that stuff is not shown to the contractors, but only moderated by "politically reliable" insiders. (Yes, the double entendre is deliberate. But I bet some folks around here won't even see it.)

Comment Nothing to see here (Score 1) 47

Two counts of nothing. First the AC count. FP was just another AC brain fart. NOT a case where anonymity is justified. That would be if someone on the inside wanted to provide some interesting information on the terminations. In this case that would be someone inside cancerous google or Hitachi.

Other count of "nothing to see here" is the Japanese news. At least if it had been a featured story on NHK then I would have noticed it. Possible it will break today, and if that happens I should thank Slashdot for calling it to my attention. (Long time ago Slashdot was often a significant source of early news. Pretty sure the first I heard of one major divestiture by my employer was via Slashdot.)

So now I'm not only standing by, I may even peek at some of the news magazines searching for more... Right now I'm going with the hypothesis is that this story is sort of bad news for Japan but they (specifically NHK) haven't figured out what angle they want to use in reporting on it. Mustn't offend the YOB, you know.

Comment Sympathy for librarians loss of relevance... (Score 1) 48

Like your presentation but not your Subject--even though I had a couple of negative encounters with rule-based librarians recently.

Unfortunately I think libraries are losing there relevance and it's related to the AI reference in your FP. However I just started thinking about a more insidious version of the problem. You can say that it's a big problem that generative AIs will fabricate BS, but even when we realize an answer is BS, we may learn the wrong lesson from it. After all, many of the AI answers are pretty good (on the theory you can make sufficient allowance for your own tendency to believe what you want to believe), so there's a kind of reinforcement in favor of those questions and prompts. Most people like oracles and want to get "authoritative" answers to their questions.

Yet it's not so much that we may learn to think like machines (which is still a big problem), but rather that we may learn not to ask certain kinds of questions. We won't even be able to ask why those questions are so problematic because we already "know" the oracular AI can't handle them. (Even if the government or some greedy megalomaniac intervened to make sure the question was unanswerable.) Hallucinated books may the smallest of our future worries.

(Also a concern that reading is being crushed by cute cat videos, but out of time just now...)

Comment It's spelled PIZZA (Score 1) 117

You must be American and can't even spell "pizza". And what does it matter how well the students can eat pizzas?

Just joking and lamenting the lack of humor, even though the topic is so serious. Anyway, on Slashdot time it's time for the discussion to die. Also a bit of a complaint about your propagation of the sock puppet's almost vacuous Subject, even though you didn't feed the troll and talked about other aspects of education... (Also funny that the troll sort of raised an interesting aspect of the problem--if anyone wants to talk to a coward.)

Anyway, I did websearch the PISA test and found out it exists. Didn't bother to research why that test matters because I also have a fundamental take. Sort of a cross between "It's too late" and "We can't get there from here", both as regards solution approaches.

So let me put on my official historian's hat and go even farther away from attempted humor. I think the destruction of America's education system is a leading candidate for the Rubicon Award that will commemorate the end of Franklin's republic. If so, then it might be post dated to the early 1980s or a little after 2000... Unfortunately REAL historians only do posthumous awards so none of us will get to see the final results. (From the perspective of Fermi's Paradox, I also consider it plausible there won't be any of us around to worry about it. The oscillations are becoming too dangerous.)

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