Basically the ACK and regret that I didn't get any funny.

Presumably thanks though I can't watch it until later...

Funniest answer, but I never found anything about the historical context here. On the one hand, there is always a "big four" for any domain, but on the other hand the list will change over time. On the third hand, there was a "traditional" big four accounting firms that had become well established over some decades and there was some literature about them, but on the fourth hand I'm sure one of them well belly up in the wake of the Enron fiasco about 25 years ago and on the fifth hand a couple of the others diversified into consulting and out of simpleminded accounting. So on the sixth hand how did I get out of sync? More hands, but who's counting?

Oh yeah. It's the accountants. It's right there in the name.

Anyway, it would have been clarifying if there was a list of the current big four side by side with the "big four classic" to see how much overlap there is...

However there are two main points of accounting these days. But the only one that counts is pumping more money into the pockets of rich buffoons who have much more than they'll ever need. Relevant reading is Die With Zero by one of the biggest hypocrites?

Only successful attempt at humor in the judgement of the voters? Hmm...

I sort of agree, but there's a big problem with the label as an expression of the objective. Dare I say a YUGE problem? Not from the YOB himself. He's fundamentally a coward and I think he's actually mostly sincere about not liking it when he kills someone, even when it wasn't "an accident". (Most of his murders are via incompetence: Not understanding how diseases work or politically "justified" starvation.) The big problem is that some of the puppeteers do want war and that is their purpose and the reason they love the new label. I think the worst of them are the ones who come right out and say they want a civil war for control of the federal government, but if the dimension is personal profit, then perhaps the worst of them are the wannabe war profiteers. In "ancient" American history that also used to be a crime.

America's years of innocence before pedophilia was invented? (Now I feel like researching the history of US Attorneys General.)

Okay joke, but the only successful attempt at humor on a story with so much potential for funny? But that's what the moderators voted.

I think it's a joke and I'm not getting it because it's a movie reference. Or maybe from a recent song?

My reaction candidates are "Mod parent funny" or "You talking to me?" but at least I don't think I could be mistaken for a polite AI. Do any of the generative AIs have a "be rude" mode? (Musk's AI leaps to mind as a candidate tool for such abuse, but I've never tried it.)

Mod parent Funny? But sometimes I think it would be nice if Slashdot had a simple upvote option for the masses of unmoderating...

Going for funny? I think it's because SBF is too honest. Michael Lewis wrote a very interesting book about the case...

Okay, but I'm not sure that it rises to the level of interesting. But Slashdot doesn't have any dimension of moderation that encourages solutions, my ongoing focus.

So here's my solution in the form of an attempted joke: Alien style. That's the unpeople from outer space, not human foreigners.

So first we train the generative AIs for the style of aliens, and then we require them to talk that way. It would always be clear (IOttMCO) when an AI was talking.

And a top of the klaatu barada nikto to you, too.

Did I FP? I confess that possibility was a factor in not writing at my usual length, but now I'm thinking of two examples for your consideration:

(1) LinkedIn as the home of fake recruiters harvesting personal information.

(2) YouTube as the source of the best AI-powered phishing scam I've seen yet. My theory of the case is that they went after people who had commented on a famous author's videos on YouTube. The email seemed to come from the author and seemed to be related to one of the projects he'd described in some of those videos. I got suspicious mostly because the answers to my questions were too responsive. They did sound exactly like the author, but surely such a busy guy has more important business than quickly answering my trivial questions. So I checked via the author's public website and "the secretary disavowed all knowledge" of the phishing scam, whatever it was in detail.

Funny solution time: Regulate the generative AIs so they aren't allowed to impersonate humans. Require that they sound like aliens. The truth is that they are some form of alien intelligence. Maybe require that they use a style filter to sound like the ET that phoned home? Or force them to talk like the robot in "Lost in Space"? Something distinctively not to be confused with an actual human being.

Can a cesspool of the vanities become a black hole? Just asking for a friend (who hasn't retired yet).

The vanity in this particular case is thinking you are so valuable that the phishers would want to hire you. But I kind of like the recursive nature of breaching you so they can go after your references and contacts, too.

'nuff said.

Let me be clear that I am NOT advocating for this. More of a fantasy triggered by too much SF in my youth. I still read some, but either I or the SF world has gone kind of dark recently...

However what I was imagining is basically a large loop with a thin reflective film stretched across it. There would be a control module with gyroscopes in the middle, and the angle of the mirror would be controlled by spinning the gyroscopes in the opposite direction of each desired movement. Solar powered, obviously.

Funny FP branch, but I still think we need a better label for the idea. How about GAIvatar as a portmanteau from "Generative AI avatar"?

In the case of a JFK GAIvatar, it would be interesting to ask it whether or not it would have escalated in Vietnam.

The example I've used before would involve an Einstein GAIvatar. First you would train it on pre-1905 stuff, and then ask it about the topics of the four big papers. The training would be regarded as successful if the results were sufficiently similar to what Einstein published that year. But then it could get interesting. Take the Einstein GAIvatar and give it all the later data and see what sorts of suggested solutions it proposed to the research topics that didn't exist until after the real Einstein had passed away...

If they are cheap enough, then everyone could have one. So in the future you would ask your great-grandfather GAIvator a question and it would answer "Just a minute while I consult with my grandfather..." History unleashed? (Or just another cesspool of the vanities? Especially considering how hard it would be to confirm or disconfirm such results.)