Leaving it here as a continuation of the attempted jokes, but resorting to (detested) Romaji (since Slashdot.jp with Japanese support is long gone), I have to cite Toire No Himitsu (The Secrets of Toilets) about the development of the washlet. That is Volume 22 in the Gakken Manga De Yoku Wakaru Shiri-zu (Understand deeply via manga from school research (the publisher)). Each volume in the series has a corporate sponsor and almost all of them include some corporate history, but I'm pretty sure that Volume 22 didn't say anything about the semiconductor division of this story.

I better confess that I'm not sure of some details because that was a long time ago. Currently almost finished with Volume 226 about corn starch. I've read 'em all, from Volume 1 (around 2000) about hamburgers (sponsored by McDonald's) and even including the rare Volume 13 about home delivery pizza (sponsored by a welcher?). Gakken is still cranking out about 10 volumes a year, 128 pages each.

Mod parent funny. Until it happens to all of us?

AI could certainly replace AC. Or maybe it already has?

However I was really looking for a recursive joke about the AI recruiting programmers in its own image. Or even creating them?

Whoops, I came back to the story from a different context and misattributed this one to the google. But there's plenty of evil to go around. In the case of ChatGPT it's more like the paving with good intentions?

That's the joke I was hoping to see by now, but written by someone who can write a joke. Obviously the data must have been backed up during this period, and saying that nothing can be recovered, even for a paying customer, is a lie.

Subject is just the joke I'm looking for in yet another story of the EVIL formerly known as Google.

Several good Funnies on this story, but this has my vote for funniest.

Actually reminds me of teaching basic English debate to Japanese students. Most years I used a debate proposition about smoking cigarettes and killing people off was one of the stronger affirmative arguments that got used pretty often.

Currently reading T. Rex and the Crater of Doom and it has me thinking about extinction events again. The book is about a large one provoked by a major disaster, and I actually don't believe we humans yet have that capability, even with all of our nuclear bombs. However I think we are rapidly and and basically at random for the sake of profit fantasies working hard on technologies that could lead to a minor disaster that would be big enough to exterminate our species. And that's the way the Fermi Paradox is pointing, too.

I also got to the same conclusion from an evolutionary perspective, trying to understand punctuated equilibrium. I think Stephen Jay Gould may have put the cart before the horse. But that version would run long and just get a lot of TL;DRs. (The websearch AI says SJG may have gotten to the same conclusions I reacheed on the Freudian part of it, but maybe that's just another hallucination because of how I worded the query... Give the AI an inch of hint and it will take a mile of jumping to what it thinks you might want to hear.)

I sure hope there's some good Funny on the story. But I sure ain't gonna hold my breath on it.

Thanks for the information and I'm seriously considering trying it out, but what I really want would be to know how I perform now in comparison to when I took the SAT. In my case "old SAT" means really old.

However mostly I'm surprised how little interest the story elicited. And now it's rather late to worry about it. Falling off the front page with this 12th comment (and no funny).

I just wrote a reply on the topic in a different place, so I can quickly paste and edit a bit here, but I'm sorry if it doesn't give you as much personal focus as you deserve. Sorry, but writing for Slashdot is not too motivating these years. I want to reply to be polite, but...

As regards the dinosaurs, I think it is clear that they had evolved into many niches including the same niches our primate ancestors occupied. Mammals have evolved a lot of primate species and I’m pretty sure the dinosaurs did the same. My focus was on the last few ticks of the million-year clock. I’ve heard numbers from 4 to 8 million years for the branch away from chimpanzees, but you might want to include some ticks for the earlier primates. That’s out of a total of 65 ticks since the dinosaurs were wiped out—but the dinosaurs had 150 ticks of that big clock.

I’ll just summarize my thoughts about the Fermi Paradox. First, I don’t see how we can survive a million years—one tick of the big clock—if we continue on the path we are going on. Exponential growth and geologic time do not go together. But I think we have shown the capability to create AI successors, which gives me a kind of dark hope for some sort of survival. However, if any form of machine intelligence ran amok, there would be a paperclip crisis, and do to the exponential problem, the universe would be quite full of paperclips. (One of my wilder speculations was about dark matter and energy as some form of paperclips)

Therefore my optimistic resolution of the FP is that the aliens exist, and they are intelligent, curious, and merciful. If they were only intelligent, then they would probably exterminate any potential problems, but I think they curious to watch how life evolves, even though their own evolution is probably convergent (within the laws of physics).

Feeding the trolls never works. Trusting TepCo may belong in the same category.

Don't get me wrong. I actually think nuclear power could have been a good thing. However I think the military motivations and resulting bad decisions drove the technology down the wrong road and now we've hit a dead end. "You can't get anywhere from here."

Not sure how the YOB got dragged into the story, even though he's sticking his YUGE orange buffoonish nose into everything these months, but I do have a possibly fresh thought on the religious side. Funny story starts with Sigmund Freud. The book was by Umberto Eco or Stephen Jay Gould and it described Freud's attempts to develop an evolutionary theory for mental diseases. The approach failed because evolution is not Lamarkian.

But religious development is quite Lamarkian. The acquired characteristics are deliberately acquired and then deliberately passed down to the later versions of the same religion. And the main focus is on creating lies that people want to believe more strongly than the previous lies. Popular examples include "You will never die", "Follow these rules and you will become rich", and even "Gawd loves you". The last one is especially problematic since most normal people are aware of the limitations on their lovability.

Funniest comment justifies a funnier speculation? How would it affect us if the aliens turned out to be here already?

This one is a kind of thought experiment triggered by reading T. Rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez. It's a kind of autobiography and history of science. In this case paleontology is the science. The general story might remind you of the history of plate tectonics as a major breakthrough in recent years.

He describes things using a different time scale than usual. Sometimes you get billions of years, and other times you get epochs or chronologies of specific layers, or the time periods when certain species were alive, but he is using million year increments, and it got me to thinking weirdly...

So essentially things were almost wiped out 65 million years ago. The earth started with an almost blank slate and wound up with intelligence. But the dinosaurs had 150 ticks of that million year clock. How is it that they never developed any intelligence? You can sort of extend that back to earlier dominant lifeforms, such as amphibians and even certain categories like octopuses. At the other end, you can say the human fork only required a few ticks of the million-year clock. I'd be inclined to start that clock with the fork from the chimpanzee branch of hominids, because after that we wound up with a number of species within the Homo genus, but if you want to run the clock farther back into monkey time, then it still doesn't explain where the dinosaurs missed the boat. There were a number of monkey-like species of reptiles that could have branched towards intelligence. But why didn't they?

I am going with the premise that intelligence is advantageous in an evolutionary sense. It might be premature to accept that premise, but right now we are still the top dogs and appear to be a successful species in many ways.

All of this made me want to speculate on what traces of homo sapiens and our civilizations would survive 65 million years after us. Then the question is why no dinosaurs created similar traces for us to find now. They had many more ticks of that million-year clock, and any evolutionary advantages of intelligence were still there way back when. Just never happened? Or a different kind of civilization that didn't create such artifacts? Or we humans just haven't figured out what to look for? It would be funny if there are traces of dinosaur astronauts on the moon once we start looking around more closely and more widely... Food for thought?

Only funny on the story? How to encourage more humor?

Anyway, the last time I was shopping for an external display I wound up buying a TV with HDMI instead. I wanted a 24 but the 32 was cheaper because of some sort of sale. For around the price of a 24 I could have had a 42, but where would I have put it? (Or was it a 43?) The TEES brand apparently means nothing, so I don't even know who the actual maker is.

(Now reading the manual as Japanese study. Found quite a number of interesting capabilities in there--but no cure for the vacuum of content worth watching on TV. But a nice display, even for webvideos.)

... but I'm not even certain the ASUS was the worst smartphone I ever owned. I'm sure it was a contender for worst, but a lot of competition.

So should I go for funny instead? I think the best smartphones I've owned were probably from Huawei, but the secret ingredient in the high value proposition was probably secret government subsidies. More bang for the buck in exchange for trusting the Chinese government more than the American government? But at this late date I don't even know if Huawei was forced completely out of the smartphone business or are just in hiding under some other brands... But the bottom line is that Huawei was one of the few brands that sold me two smartphones... (I made a mistake the other time, but trusting Samsung the second time was clearly my own fault. There was another brand I would have bought again, but they were acquired and disappeared before I could. Can't even remember the name now... Lost count of all the smartphones and wannabe smartphones I've owned over the years.)

They been there and done that for sufficiently low levels of consciousness, but I'd have to rummage around to figure out which books to cite. Deservedly funny as a comment?