I don't see the basis of Funny, especially since there was a Japanese version of Slashdot that apparently had Unicode a long time ago. Lost code problem? Or was it actually a Shift-JIS nightmare?

That was almost exactly my reaction to the story, but I think you should have gone for funny with it. I'm also not sure you should have called it an "agent", however. So I have supporting anecdotes to share from my AI-supported "programming" experiences...

My early experiments were mostly with ChatGPT and DeepSeek. My website was getting sick and the PERL/CGI was no longer allowed to run, so one of the many upgrade paths I explored involved moving functions, mostly statistical stuff, from PERL to JavaScript. This is when I started encountering the lost marbles problems. The first few iterations would work surprisingly well, but then it would start losing its marbles and various features would disappear, seemingly at random. Not sure I could figure out when this was going on since time seems so distorted these years, but I feel like it was around two years back.

More recently the server died completely. (Tripod's parent company Lycos was supposedly quite valuable a long time ago, though not nearly as valuable as the AI companies are supposed to be these days--but that's a fresh bubble waiting to burst.) So I wound up using the quasi-website aspect of GitHub to host my quasi-website. (Not quite trivial to modify the old JavaScript utilities for the new URLs.) I also decided to take another swing at the bigger problems, this time using Claude. Color my surprised or even amazed? Much more productive this time around. My "work" pattern this time involves short sessions, basically discussing features and data structures, followed by a minute or two of file generation by Claude, a couple of minutes of file installation, and then some testing. Pretty quickly matched and went beyond the existing PERL code, including apparently fixing a regex problem that had eluded me for a long time.

At that point I started worrying about Claude losing its marbles. The AI is quite willing to discuss the problem in terms of tokens, but it refused to give any hard limits and apparently has no way to assess if a "session" is close to reaching any of them. However it definitely described behaviors that sounded like losing marbles and was unable to suggest any good ways to detect such problems. And I think that is probably what happened in this story. Someone was updating code using an AI and at some point it passed its limits and started losing features. Who knows what else has gone missing?

Claude does have some meta-features for managing tokens, including compression, but it was not too helpful about assessing the risks. Instead it suggested starting a fresh session and prepared an interesting "transition" document that is supposed to describe the current state of the new system... But the threats of lost marbles remain and the threats sound quite similar to what seems to have happened in Outlook in this story... I feel like Claude's threats are only implicit because it won't clarify what they are or how to detect them...

(Just about finished with Microsoft Secrets about their software development processes a long time ago. Testing problems were prevalent and never really solved...)

That would have been an interesting angle, but I don't see 24/7 as the crux of the problem. The police-state/authoritarian personality is not crucially dependent on surveillance. If that were the case, then East Germany should still be going strong.

I can actually recall a stop-and-frisk scenario that convinced me the cops can find SOMETHING to make an issue of if they search carefully enough. Asking for a friend who feels lucky the police settled for a hundred bucks?

My own feelings are mixed. I'm a big believer in the truth and I don't have sufficiently negative words to capture my true feelings about liars. However I also think there are cases of "You can't handle the truth" and some of these cases might even involve police officers.

Still spanned about a quarter of the discussion...

That's why they stink?

Oh, wait. I meant "spell", but they and their "you can't blame me if you don't know who I am" ideas do stink, too.

I should include some flavor of the old joke about mud wrestling with pigs, but that would take effort and the propagation only spanned about 1/6 of the discussion (by ye olde scrollbar metric), so such effort isn't justified.

But a joke related to the story? Can AIs solve the AC slop crisis? Or a joke about prison for ACs, coming real soon if'n AC actually lives in the wrong place.

Just joking. It's already arrived in a couple of places. I just don't want to name them because I might get put on a (yet another?) list.

A coffee snob? Just the human to ask in lieu of an AI (which will just tell me whatever it thinks I want to here).

I've been wondering whatever happened to percolated coffee. I'm guessing it tastes bad, but I didn't start drinking coffee until decades after I last saw a percolator.

Okay, I think you deserve the Funny mod but I also think it was a weak FP.

Yeah, my Subject is worse, but... The thing that is going wrong is that we are all part of a mad experiment. Some of the people doing the experiment do have good intentions, but the Waymo robotaxi that tries to follow that road... Well, you know where that road goes.

But it's a much bigger problem that the humans controlling the various flavors of the experiment have only one intention: MORE MONEY. They already have more money than any human needs or can possibly use, but they need more money ASAP. I personally rate Thiel and Musk as the top poster children for that madness.

And what is the main experiment? Daily exposure to alien intelligence that too often seems smarter than we are. Not difficult to seem smarter than me in the robotaxi case since I was never a great driver. I'm even remembering a tractor accident in a construction area... Which reminded me of a truck accident involving construction stuff...

Along the lines of the response I might have written if the reply you are replying to was more substantive and cohesive. The inline response format basically lacks sincerity and is mostly used these years to break things out of context in search of cutting responses to "win" the "argument". I only noted one area of possible agreement that might have justified an attempt to respond. I think he [young? MIPSPro with an 8-digit ID] was saying "We can't get there from here", and we would probably agree that "there" is some sort of better place and "here" is the status quo, but the underlying philosophies remain completely incompatible... Dare I say incommensurable? In particular I didn't detect much comprehension of my ideas or any requests for clarification. Rather it sounded like he thought it was a chance to grind his axe and you identified the Libertarian axe.

Didn't strike me as a productive FP branch. 'Nuff said.

Back to the story. Seems like a really stupid idea. The destruction of the middle class is a long-term problem. Not going to fix it with a one-time bandage. So let's pretend Slashdot is still a place where solutions can get serious consideration, though my memories of such days are so old as to be dubious. (How many editors where there back then? Down to the last one now...)

The current tax systems seem to favor greedy monopolists. How about pro-freedom taxation in competition with pro-greedom anti-freedom taxation?

One of my (too many) fantasies would be a progressive tax on profits linked to market share and niche dominance. Determining problematic monopolies could use various metrics, but here are three examples: (1) Lack of customer choice, (2) Inability of new competitors to enter the market, and (3) Lack of freedom of employees to move to a competing company. There should be a delay before the higher rates kick in, thus rewarding innovation, but the natural path to higher retained earnings after that time should involve splitting your great company into two or more competing companies. Don't think of it as a tax on success, but rather as a mechanism to make sure the good ideas get propagated into more companies.

A few minor thoughts: One is that mergers that reduce freedom should get no delay time, but should immediately trigger tax rate escalations. Another involves the case of natural monopolies (often related to network effects), where one solution approach would be to use some of the tax revenue to regulate the natural monopoly while funding research into ways to break the natural monopoly.

Your better ideas are quite welcome. Also questions triggered by my poor writing. Unfortunately I anticipate less welcome responses, if any.

You got me to do the research. Turns out the major accomplishment of the YOB administration is reviving Sharpie manufacturing in Tennessee. Take that, you foreign adversaries and heathens!

c/I came to mind/came to mind/

Minimal edit, though I was probably thinking of writing something like "came to my mind".

Too bad the longer discussion apparently generated no Funny. At least not according to the precious moderators.

NAK

Valid points, perhaps well made, but undercut by the vacuous AC Subject that you propagated. Lazy? Or just unthinking? You undercut your own position and the main result appears (by the scrollbar metric) to be helping AC "guide" half of the discussion.

As usual, my own thoughts tend to wander into nether regions, but I wonder whether it would be possible to reach any sort of agreement about what constitutes a good discussion. It is certainly my impression that there used to be a lot of them on Slashdot, but these days? Not so much. I also noticed that Slashdot appears to be down to its final editor.

So here's my funny idea how to pollute the Slashdot conversations with AI support. The latest owners (whoever?) should recruit a couple of AIs for editorial slots. Let's go all pie in the sky. Let's include enhancing the moderation system to also evaluate the work of the human and inhuman (dare I say subhuman?) editors. Which editor picks the best stories in terms of producing those "good discussions" we somehow agreed were good? Which editor produced the best summaries that induced the most humans to actually look at the fine articles? Heck, why not even consider which editor was least attractive for AC drivel, with or without AI support for extra slop.

Not very persuasive but you have me speculating if you were one of those overclockers. I suspect the main philosophical difference is that you think hardware is more important than software and I'm in the other camp. We seem to be in an abnormal condition because the computer hardware has been changing so rapidly for a few decades now...

Anyway, at the rate things are changing these months, I am actually worried that I may live long enough to see how it all comes out in the wash.

NAK