And it should have a better Subject, too.

I noted the same thing, but my fuzzy recollection is that the editor Campbell was also involved in the original formulation in the '40s. Or was it earlier than that?

Don't feed sock puppets. (Not really much to say beyond the Subject, but mostly attempting to prevent vacuous Subject propagation.)

However near the end of his life Asimov started having doubts about the three laws. Remember the Zeroth Law?

Interesting comment, but I'm still tilted in favor of books. Just started AI 2041 by Kai-fu Lee and Chen Qiufan and it already seems like a good critique. Best technical critique of AI I've read so far remains A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins.

Interesting discussion off the FP. I looked at most of it. About 80% of the large discussion. Main disappointment is that it didn't appear to produce much in the way of humor, though that may be the usual moderation failures combined with my bad luck in what and who I focused on. Or maybe it's my limited sense of humor? I might have seen a hilarious post and not gotten the joke because no one modded it funny?

What I was looking for on the insight side (but couldn't find) involved situations where higher prices might be justified. Not sure I can articulate this clearly, but it has to do with the Borking of monopoly law, which is another example of implosion along a single dimension. Might also be my confusion. In the old days I could hope for an actual expert to pop up and possibly clarify some of my misperceptions, but... These days? Not so much hope.

My interpretation is that Bork murdered monopoly law by fixating on prices. If you can't prove harm from higher prices, then there's no foul (and no monopoly harm), but higher price is not the only dimension of harm. The main result of the Borking is that the monopolistic corporate cancers devised new economic models to disguise the prices. Many of them are two-sided where the actual product is data produced by suckers who get "free" services in exchange. Under Borkian thinking, if it's "free", then that makes harm impossible, even when there are gigantic and increasingly obvious harms all over the place.

But as it applies to this article, it might actually be justified and not actually harmful if higher prices made things better in other ways. Unfortunately that has no relation to how the YOB does things. The YOB's economic models are much more limited to what puts money in his pocket. I complained about the lack of Funny in the comments, but I think there are several hilarious jokes in that last sentence related to the couch-cushion change going to the YOB relative to the profits of the puppeteers who are pulling his strings and that the YOB's couch-cushion change is mostly in the form of crypto-monopoly-money with no lasting value. As in the game, not the monkey business model.

One of them is dated to 2013, which is probably before I started reading that comic. In 2013 it includes a dig at Reddit in the votey button. (I think I've read two of his books, too.)

I'm sometimes worried that his perspective seems rather bleak and I may share too much of it.

That's the joke I was looking for. Some kind of detector to make sure there aren't any humans in the chat. If you can't beat 'em yet, lock 'em out?

More sympathy than concurrence? I still the CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) idea could have worked. The CSB was imagined as a kind of crowdfunding system with project management and accountability. A new kind of meta-charity? However now I sadly conclude you just can't compete with PROFIT-driven greed as a motivation. Too often a motivation with evil side effects, but they're only looking at the PROFIT!

Going for funny, too? Or some kind of time machine joke? I actually started working on the CSB ideas before I ever heard of crowdfunding. But crowdfunding appeared to have PROFIT for a while and now appears to have mostly collapsed into scams. AI-generated at last?

Story got some coverage here. I think they said the Korean temperature records only go back to around 1910.

Still, it isn't such a good thing. Relatively nearby in Kumamoto they are also suffering from record heat, but they are also trying to deal with the devastation of a major quake last week...

Of creating more Funny comments for Slashdot. Isn't there a funny mathematician in the house?

Greatest teacher I ever had was actually a math professor. I only had him for one semester, but one class session was a topology-based magic show and he read a funny section from Life on the Mississippi in another lesson, with some mathematics inserted into Twain's story. Tried to get him for another class, but after I registered they pulled him out and substituted another teacher who could barely talk. (Of course it wasn't his fault that he had suffered a stroke, but the disappointment was so large that I withdrew from the course...)

Mod parent Funny, but America is dying from NIMBY syndrome. That and the hatred of science.

The YOB thinks he's the dictator, but he's just the king of lies. However in a country increasingly operating on anti-scientific on lies, the biggest liar should be king? "We don't need no stinkin' telescope to look for gawd!"

And then I noticed Slashdot running an ad for ZenDesk. There's the joke I was looking for.

ZenDesk is where support goes to die. Not a clean death, either, but the ugliest death possible. As soon as I detect that a company is using ZenDesk I know that company does not care about support. At all. But I've also noticed that the use of ZenDesk is usually disguised and hidden these days?

Disclaimer needed: I sincerely tried to get something useful out of ZenDesk channels for some years. Then I gave up. But is it possible ZenDesk got better after so many attempts to turn me into a newt? Maybe you want to report on your better mileage?

But there's a potentially funny anecdote here, too? I think ZenDesk is basically a trouble ticket system. LONG time ago I worked with an old engineer named Paul. He claimed he was the originator of the trouble ticket system, though he probably meant the local trouble ticket system rather than the general idea. But it was a long time ago so it is possible that his was a seminal system of yore. When I worked with him computers were still rather precious resources, and the system he created long before that time was still mostly paper based.

You're welcome, but I'm still disappointed the potentially juicy story didn't produce more Funny.

I basically agree with the comments, but I would actually cast a lot of that blame on Microsoft. It's that EULA thing again. Not just blocking liability for overt failures and incompetence, but also facilitating the shipment of incomplete software that, as you noted, needs more support. But there was a period when even Microsoft understood that there was something rotten there... Swept under the rug since then, so you can abandon all hope now.

I like the FP branch, but too bad it didn't lead deeper or at least spawn some Funny.

Mostly just sharing a couple of anecdotes, but having trouble deciding which side to focus on. I think I'll start with the provider side, since so much of my career involved providing support.

Funniest anecdote is probably from an Internet startup before the first bubble burst. They had some venture funding, but support wasn't in the business plan. I was actually hired for one role, but wound up doing most of that work on my own time in the evenings and early mornings (from home) and spent almost all of my time in the office doing customer support. But I always saw support in terms of making customers happy and finding new ways to make new customers happy, while the managers saw support as a cost to be minimized. Fortunately, since it wasn't in the business plan, they were glad to pretend it was an imaginary number. They knew how my time was being spent, but didn't actually care. In terms of office politics, I wound up mostly working for the manager who was bringing in most of the customers and generating most of the actual revenue. When she was fired I took that as the signal for me to pack up and leave and the company went down a while after that--even before the dotcom bubble burst.

On the recipient side, these days my "support" is mostly received from AIs, often in the form of remarkably useless AI chatbots. Geek that I am, I still think that might be a technical problem that can be solved. The key would be getting the chatbot to ask useful questions--but I'm remembering that was the hardest part of doing support. The typical customer didn't know what to look at, so the biggest trick was to get the customer to look at the right thing that would most quickly reduce the problem space. Once the problem was clear it usually made the best solution clear, too. So far I hain't seen a chatbot like that.