No, that is NOT what I meant and I am no longer able to credit you for good faith. Just another builder of convenient straw men. Lot of that going around these years.

Maybe that helps explain why I've found it so hard to decide on a new host for my website?

Okay, kind of a shallow comment, though true enough, but it is an opening for one of my favorite axes. We don't know anything about the real scope of the problem. So let's put "sizing the problem" as a preliminary problem to solve and here is a solution approach:

What if there was a website that let the potential victims report the attacks? The basic idea would be to collect lots of data, figure out which attacks are most serious, and then prioritize police resources towards breaking the scammers' various business models. In the case of politically motivated threats, the assessment needs to go beyond the cash value, but the same basic approach applies. First you have to size up the mess before you can start cleaning it up.

I actually imagine it as a kind of iterative analysis. I'm using email spam as a convenient example, though the same basic approach can be extended for other categories. Each round of analysis would be bounced back to the person reporting it, and the reporter would be able to use some human intelligence to help focus on what is going on. Even where the human is failing to understand the threat, that is actually important data about how clever the attack is.

I don't think today's FBI is capable of such an effort, but my local cops are even less up to the task. Best hope would probably be a European organization? So maybe it exists and I just haven't heard about it yet? Or maybe you have a more constructive idea about the destruction of the criminals? (Or more likely on today's Slashdot any response will just be from an angry sock puppet trying to change the subject.)

But are they Russian sock puppets trying to defend their criminal turf, Chinese sock puppets trying to distract from the bad publicity, or just the usual nameless forgettable morons seeking attention?

Solution-oriented thoughts elsewhere.

But why did you propagate the BS Subject? You seemed to have a relevant alternative Subject related to an actual bone of technical contention.

Wow, small world syndrome. I think I have some interesting, fresh, and maybe even relevant anecdotes to share. These are multilingual examples involving various translation problems. Both of these examples involve DS (Deep Seek). I also sometimes use ChatGPT and an AI "support" chatbot offered by Rakuten Mobile (my terrible phone company), but in general I'm trying to limit my mental exposure to the dangerous toys...

The first query involved identifying a Japanese author. My query was mostly in English except for a few bits about the Japanese publisher. Maybe I included a few key words in Japanese? But the first response was in Chinese with embedded bits of Japanese and English. WTF? Massive interface error.

Of course DS immediately and profusely apologized for its mistake. We then pursued the issue for a while, but DS never managed to identify the author in question. I'm thinking about running the same query past ChatGPT to see if its latest version is smarter. (I've only done a few direct comparisons between the two of them but I can definitely add a note to the effect that Rakuten Mobile's AI stands for "Augmented Idiot". Even worse than Google's Gemini AI summaries, which are hard to avoid. (The evil google recently added them to Google Maps, but perhaps that is some kind of joke? Basically all of them seem to collapse to nearly the same summary. (I'm seeing most of this stuff as machine translations from Japanese reviews, by the way.)))

I also fed a more direct translation query to DS. In English, we have a scale of disagreement from "I don't mind" down to "I don't care" down to the extreme "I don't give a damn" (from the famous movie). I wanted to consider how this scale translates into Japanese. So I wrote a query for DS with the English examples and some possible Japanese expressions. For this one DS wrote a long response, but not really going much beyond my level of Japanese and definitely not providing the kind of structural overview I was looking for. In English you can see the parallel grammatical structure, but my Japanese examples lacked any grammatical unity and DS did not offer any. Actually its level of Japanese seemed to be comparable to my own, which is not a compliment.

But what I really want is still that three-level literacy development app/game. At level one, the bricks of vocabulary, it should be based on the Japanese shiritori game, but at a word level that would map to many languages. Several recent ideas about how to link that level of the game to books (with special constraints for fiction). At the second level of grammar, many new ideas, too. And meanwhile I continue to fake one of the third-level reading games using the abominable LINE app (kind of a Japanese version of WeChat).

Where is this week you are talking about? Is that the secret of when stories get archived?

I was talking about time on the top page. Some stories deserve more, some less--but as far as I can tell, every story moves down the front page at the same rate, and once it falls off, it is effectively dead.

Maybe I can come up with an example you can understand?

The financial hiccup of 2008 was large, but the government was still able to save all the "too big to fail" banks (except for the "liberal" one).

What happens when the next crash is much bigger but there is no government with sufficient credibility to save all the "too big to fail" virtual banks and whatever?

However mostly I try to see things from a geological time perspective. Fold in the Fermi Paradox, and... 'Nuff said?

NAK

Mod parent funny, even though I don't think starving children to death is funny. Some people just think people who can't afford food deserve to starve?

For propagating it's vacuous Subject, even though you were apparently trying to change the subject. Or perhaps it was some kind of wannabe joke about AC being more stupid that AI slop?

Such proud ignorance. You must be American.

I actually sort of agree with you, but only to a point. I think the long-term trend has been upward. But it's an average, and there have always been oscillations. The problem is that the oscillations are becoming bigger and more frequent and more rapid, too. One oscillation that goes big enough on the negative side can lead to the "game over" state.

I actually think some folks did read the book quite seriously. Unfortunately they were bad actors who took his suggested solutions as guidance for doing the opposite to make sure things will be capable of getting much worse. Could explain a lot of recent political news.

But it devolved to a bit of minor troll food. Does the Funny tab have anything to offer?

That got modded informative? Really?

Solution is some persistence mechanism for stories that deserve longer discussions. Or even a way to revive stories for another cycle of discussion.

But Slashdot lacks any financial model for improvements. One of those "as is" situations.

When the popular opening thread is how to get rid of the new feature... Well, I think enough has already been said.

However, I have to extend my questions on the topic. My usual question is "But is this a feature I would have donated money for?" I cannot remember the last time the answer was yes, though that feature was probably password syncing.

The new question is "Is this a feature that makes me want to continue using Firefox?" Again my memory bank is full of negative answers.

I think I would be quite interested in a browser where the main marketing pitch was "We only changed the browser five times last year. We do things right and don't have to constantly fix our mistakes?"

So... Has anyone seen a comparison of browser metrics for changes, both frequency and severity? Ceteris paribus, I should favor the browser with the fewest changes?