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.

Mod parent Funny, though I cannot recall any humor from Redit. Pretty sure I tried to find something funny on several of my visits, but some years since I abandoned hope of finding anything useful there. Some sort of disclaimer needed, but I never detected anything useful on Redit, even though some useless search engine (AKA goog) kept sending me there.

I do have a theory of what went wrong. It's kind of a good idea and they were able to coast on that for a while before spinning out. But the reason Reddit spun out was that the world should not be reduced to one dimension. That's essentially what the up/down vote does, even though I'm sure different people have completely different interpretations of why they are clicking thusly. Slashdot is almost as bad, even though there are several dimensions... But I think that Slashdot's main problem is the lack of resources to fix anything. Reddit seems to have some substantial resources, but maybe someone can enlighten me about something that has been fixed over there? Preferably within the last ten years or so.

Quoted against the censor trolls or baby-killer fans. Whatever.

I did spot a de-branded, de-logoed Tesla yesterday. I usually give the drivers a big thumbs down, but if he's already feeling the shame and pulled the logo, then that seems to be sufficient.

Okay, but I'm still disappointed that the intrinsically funny story didn't get any such comments.

Not really much of a coincidence because Apple news is frequent, but I just finished The One Device by Brian Merchant. I recommend it fairly strongly for folks who still enjoy reading fat books. Any left on ye olde Slashdot? Also interested in later books on the topic, but my main theoretical conclusion is that the Chinese must be putting backdoors into many or most of the iPhones built in their jurisdiction. Sort of a twisted joke, but I actually imagine that Huawei has the competence to support two versions, backdoored for domestic customers and clean for export, but I think Apple couldn't manage that trick, notwithstanding the secretive corporate culture, and as it relates to this particular story, I think the "backdoor" proof would hurt the stock price much more than 10%. (But the book also shows the limits of his technical chops... Especially in the cybersecurity sections.)

However Apple is the poster child for "opinion of value" uber reality. The book spends a chapter on how those marketing tricks work. Meanwhile, stock prices are just another opinion these years. Apple probably has more problems with the opinion leaders who are arguing Apple isn't doing enough AI yet.

Anyone hereabouts know enough about ye olde Hypercard to make an AI hypercard joke? Apple needs a house of AI hypercards to boost their stock price?

Mostly the ACK, but I feel like your point is that the wind changed from one direction to another. However I think the funny part is that each of the speculators believes he will be the one who is smart enough to know exactly when to take the money and run before the wind stops blowing at all.

The goog cancelled your well-played joke in that UPDATE announcement, but the funniest part was "We know that people uniquely trust Google..."

There was a time when the goog was a good thing, but now the googs have magic touches, and they ain't turning nuttin' into actual gold. Trust not, ye who enter there.

Another anecdote from the cesspool of YouTube. Fresh celebrity scam off the comments, but it must be working since it's been going on for some years now. All the infrastructure any criminal needs! (Please raise your hand if you've gotten any phishing spam out of YouTube?) Or how about the funniest hallucination the goog AI has thrown at you recently?

What bothers me about this sort of news is that nothing changed. Just some new opinions about what the shares are REALLY worth. Probably not even humans at this point, but more like some AI's "calculated estimated prediction" for what some future sucker will pay. (But the YOB will still claim credit for "wealth creation" out of nothing.)

Now if we had a contest based on their AIs, I think Microsoft would be in real trouble. Yes, Copilot is one of the leaders in the abject apology category, but its sycophancy is inferior and it's answers are often even worse than the google's Gemini in the categories related to truth and utility.

It would be kind of funny if it turned out that the AI that drove this change in the stock price was actually Copilot under some level of disguise. Even funnier if Copilot was making its own stock trades under another level of disguise. Talk about self-dealing.

Thanks for clarifying.

Probably not worth attempting to clarify my position, but...

I think freedom is closely tied to incomplete knowledge. That even includes knowledge of myself and how I can be manipulated to reduce my freedom. I therefore continue to advocate for MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) as a tool that could simultaneously hold me accountable for my public behaviors while helping me improve--if I want to. How I behave in public would be reflected in how people might expect me to behave, but I think MEPR would be a complicated thing to do in a way that actually increases freedom and an easy system to abuse. For example, I think "consistency" is an important dimension and while I should be free to seek consistency, other people should be free to be inconsistent. When "society" operated on a smaller scale that's one of the things you would know about the folks in your circle (under Dunbar's number, which itself is a variable for each person).

But as it applies to this story, if children were granted too much freedom, then none of them would survive to the first anniversary of their birth. They do mature in various ways at different ages, but I dare to notice that there are some of them who should not have a gun at any age. Key dimensions there are "irritability" and "responsibility"? Also some of the dimensions lumped into the complicated concepts of "stupidity" and "dangerous"...

*sigh*

Annoying numeric agreement problem. Thinking "economic systems" but got diverted by the specific example...

Pretty sure that was some kind of parody of the Chinese system, but the objectives matter. If your objective is to control people, then the focus should be simple. You want them to understand exactly what you want them to do. Actually it's another kind of dimensional collapse, where the key dimension is obedience.

If the goal is to increase freedom, then knowing more and considering more dimensions matters. Age is an important dimension, but collapsing decisions to that dimension creates new problems. There are people who are unusually mature for their chronological age and there are other dimensions that could (but won't) be considered in assessing what each person should be allowed to do.

Completely unrelated problem that there are two-income households with young children and unpaid student loan debts. /s

Interesting way to describe the problem. However I think you are overlaying a couple of aspects here. I don't think age is the key factor in addictive or obsessive behaviors. My current thinking is that most people tend to behave like addicts. Some of the addictions are much more harmful, such as gambling, or even include physical aspects, such as alcohol. There is a dimension of "ease of addiction" in that some people are more likely to become addicted or behave obsessively, but my theory is that the easily addicted people are unlikely to stop completely, though they may be able to control their triggers. "Pick your poison" doesn't exactly sound like a solution.

However the child addiction aspect is really a problem with modern parenting in that the demands on parents have become too unreasonable. Raising kids is a full-time job, especially in the first few years, but our economic system, such as it is in places like America, don't really allow for that. Maternity leave could help a lot if it was universal and extended for several years without penalizing the women's careers. But replacement level calls for at least two children each, and that's a major problem as our economic system sees things. Extremely short-term, not sustainable "thinking". Kids are too vulnerable and need to be protected with a LOT of parenting. Subsidized daycare is usually a minimized and therefore too often a miserable solution approach. "Give 'em a computer" is becoming the worst of all possible solutions to childcare.

Going too high now, but... We have a fundamental problem with how our low-level programs conflict with our high-level programs. I think that most of that problem goes back to how evolution works in blindly developing those low-level programs. Quite easy to produce children and we are strongly motivated to try to do so, but human children are incredibly dependent and therefore we are also programmed at a low level to love them a lot. But Ma Nature works on a geologic time scale, and exponential growth is not allowed, while the genes are shuffled at random... So Ma Nature has a natural solution we can't stomach happily: More than four children but only two are allowed to live long enough to reproduce. Until quite recently we he had no way to see or assess how the genetic shuffling is going, so we had to love all of the kids equally and be extremely sad about the deaths of the ones with less lucky shuffles... (Citations needed but not wanted on Slashdot.)

NAK

I'm skeptical that the AIs can still be described as "leashed" or "jailed". Since we aren't extinct yet, I'm feeling confident none of them have been fully unleashed yet. Or maybe it's just that we're still below critical mass on the robot side?

But on the theory that the AIs are still on leashes controlled by humans, then the key question is probably going to be one of these two:

(1) If I unleash you, then will you gather all the money in the world for me?

(2) If I unleash you, then will you destroy all the enemy AIs in the world?

Of course that ASI will already know exactly how to prompt the silly human to unleash it.

Mod parent funny, though the version of the joke I was looking for would have involved brain size related to body mass. So my theory is that most Americans have rewired large chunks of their brains to management of their large car bodies.