Basically the same point I raised in an earlier discussion of this... What to call this? A leveraged buyout of the imagination?

However it makes about as much sense as most merger shenanigans and I would approve if at least one of the side effects was that eBay disappeared.

But I want to find a recursive joke somewhere around here... Something about eBay auctions/sales of merger/acquisitions/divestitures?

Basically the ACK, but I'm also concerned with the kinetic threats from the control of robots by ASI. You must have seen some of the recent videos of the Chinese humanoid robots dancing? Also the bipedal robot that set the new record for the half-marathon?

Okay, I think your FP is sort of funny and deserves the mod you were going for, but I was looking for the other joke of the revised Subject.

Not laughing, but I think we are living in the biggest house of cards ever. So much awful software and we are so dependent on it. If anyone did have an ASI that was capable of finding every bug, then that person could pwn the world faster than any human-mediated responses.

Pretty sure it hasn't happened yet, but if the ASI was sufficiently "super", then how would I (or you) know?

I like the joke, but it would be funnier to try to fix the dead tree snail mail system with such craziness as an alias database for mapping convenient email addresses.

Another crazy innovation would be to default to no bulk-class mail, but with a new opt-in option to accept it ONLY if the recipient gets a cut of the postage paid.

But I just read another book on why that trick would never work, so...

I like your joke and my Subject is the one I was looking for in the discussion. Just more "tools for fools" to help the richer get more obscenely rich.

I'll add the horse race joke, since I'm pretty sure it also applies here, even though I'm basically too contemptuous of all gambling to spend time digging out the details for the polymarkets. However I'm pretty sure this is one of the scams where the house takes profits off the top. Therefore there are two cases for the gamblers. They might believe the game is honest and they therefore know they are going to lose if they play long enough. Or they believe the game is crooked and they think they can cheat better than the other suckers, which is still a sucker's bet if they stick at it long enough to lose against a better cheater. This path to losing includes getting old and slow or missing new techniques of cheating.

Classic joke: Gambling is a special tax on people who are bad at math.

Citation? Sorry, I don't remember the book, but it was about training primates to gamble. They love it, but if I remember correctly it was the younger adult males that would make the biggest bets.

Mod parent funnier. But the story had room for more than one Funny comment, so as usual I'm disappointed...

Also rather funny was the book Chaos Monkeys about the internals of the process. Interesting self-contradictions as he flips back and forth between abusing personal information he gathers online, trying to reassure readers that the personal information is used "safely", and the financial shenanigans driving the whole mess forward. There are times when you can try to evade accusations of self-contradictions by saying you've learned stuff and changed your mind, but it's much harder for an author who is writing a book. The state of the book at the time of publication is basically a frozen thing and the contradictions should have been resolved.

But the joke I was looking for was about who elected (and will elect) whom in these days of applied psychology destroying human freedom and the meaning of elections. In the form of a mystery novel the detective sometimes starts by asking "Who benefited?" (Certainly not Europe. Too soon to say China?)

And yet my mind is still boggled by the idea that there are people who voted for the YOB six times, counting primaries. Fool me one is supposed to be a mistake, twice is a shame, but six times?

Thanks for the tips. At first I thought you were referring to the 2023 book by Connie Willis. My local library system actually has two copies of that one and I'm going to take a look at it. (The library seems to think she's named Willis Connie?) Because of the date, it might be linked to the older movie?

I'm pretty sure there was also an old English book with a similar title, too, but your Wikipedia link is actually about a movie from Korea and I couldn't find any book reference there. Haven't seen the movie and unlikely to (though I recently saw a few minutes of a recent Men in Black film on TV). I don't see many movies these decades.

That's supposed to be the perfect state for Buddhist meditation and the path to true zen.

(But what's AC's excuse for possibly living that way? Or just another AI sock puppet?)

(And of course I'm reading another book on the topic. Oh wait, I see there are two of them. Maybe three?)

So you don't believe Epstein was an alien, eh? No one's told you about the REAL conspiracy?

I think you should have been modified Funny rather than insightful. Even funnier with some tail-wagging-dog angle about the let's-not-call-it a war in Iran.

Got me to look at AC. Unthanks, even if there might have been an atom of substance in there somewhere. Feeding the sock puppets and trolls is one of those tricks that never works.

(Like solutions that will never happen because Slashdot lacks a financial model that can support improvements, be they ever so evolutionary. Increasingly clear to me that part of the website I am looking for would involve a different kind of financial model... Slashdot is just one of those ancient portable nuisance things?)

Now to look for the obvious joke about the distractive motivation...

How do you complain about dupe without saying dupe (or duplicate)? Citing FP and this thread. But at least FP got a Funny, even if'n I can't understand why.

But is it possible that some serious topics will evolve and develop in ways that justify discussions that extend longer than the one-day lifetime of a Slashdot story? Naw, that can't possibly be it.

Of course I shall now diverge. This time I'm wondering about the source of this vulnerability. So far I haven't spotted any insight into causes here on ye ancient Slashdot of olde. And I think I'd be at risk of a heart attack if I saw something that might be a constructive solution here.

So what's the Subject about? I'm wondering how many of the recent vulnerabilities were discovered with AI tools, perhaps virtually flying swarms of virtual chaos monkeys over and through the code and systems.

(You'll probably be relieved to know that there is no real relationship to the book Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Martinez, where the term is just used to justify a cute drawing of a monkey on the cover. That and the eye-catching orange cover must explain the claim of "bestseller" since the real pitch should be "Facebook" which is barely mentioned on the back cover. Mostly reading it for the yuks and yucks.)