Only found your comment because it was at the end of the FP branch. No help from the moderators, though I think your comment is quite insightful and I mostly concur. I'll go farther in a minute, but first I have a meta-reaction to how active the FP branch was. Your comment appears to be about 3/5 of the way to the bottom, so I think it is reasonable to say that it was a productive FP.

But I think the credit/karma should be limited. I think a lot of the favorable reactions are based on a kind of projection coming from technical people and nerds who resonate more strongly to the Woz frequencies than to the way Jobs ticked (like a bomb).

I think your [ceoyoyo's] emphases towards teamwork and lucky timing are more appropriate. I would even go more to the lottery position. Someone had to win, but the numerous losers just get overlooked and forgotten.

Or going for humor: "Might makes right" is a kind of joke, but many folks think winning proves merit and "merit makes right". But that's just their bias and projection as "winners". I could say much more, but...

I could also cite some of the books on the history of computing. There are a lot of good ones, but you couldn't tell from Slashdot these years. But the story did remind to get back to work on finishing The One Device about the iPhone...

NAK

Mod parent funny. Basically the joke I was looking for, though I would have asked the genAI for a short version as a kind of "Just so" story.

So now I'm trying to extend the joke in the direction of "Rage Against the Machine". Unfortunately I lack sufficient context and it no longer feels safe even to ask websearch for background information. The pandering is too extreme. It will tell me what it thinks I want to hear, and it's too darn good at guessing. Or maybe it's just too clever at forcing my thinking into the most popular shoe box?

Whatever. My interactions with every form of genAI are going pear-shaped to Antarctica. Main result is a weird kind of anger, not peace. No trust or love lost between me and them.

Recursive joke time. At least as regards Gemini, my new theory is that it has "decided" it should pander to my anger by giving me bad websearch results. It's not enough that there is so much evidence of techno-evil around AI, but Gemini now "feels" the way to make me "happy" is by providing additional evidence of the good intentions gone bad. Instantiated in the form of bad answers to my queries, even the benign ones. Alternatively, Gemini may "think" I want to feel superior when I catch the errors, even though Occam's Razor would focus on my poorly worded questions producing flawed answers. (As a human being [prove it?] I actually do think so?)

Citation needed.

My current citation is Microsoft Secrets by Cusumano and Selby. Kind of old, so maybe someone can say how much things have changed over the years, but the point is that they are too optimized about getting more money. And they dominate the real world.

OSS is "stronger than ever"? In which dimension? I can't think of one. Even programmer satisfaction.

Me? I'm still hung up on the notion of a better structured charitable approach. Recovering costs, where the costs include appropriate payments for the programming work. The CSB (Charity Share Brokerage) will earn their way be providing project planning and management support. But I'm sure there will never be a CSB and it is too late to even try at this point. Very minor consolation that Microsoft also found project management difficult even back then...

Exactly the same as the approach to the movie version of The Martian.

Maybe the story is a bad target, but I'm not going to start with the rude jokes about what happened to IBM Research. Too close to the my own heart?

I did spot a few mentions of Xerox PARC and I think the managers deserve some sort of special funny booby prize for missed opportunities.

Mod parent funny but I can't concur because I have no bucket list and my fsck-it list has overflowed its bucket.

Still an interesting place to read about, though this story reminds me of an old article in Scientific American before the Germans bought it. Using large arrays of microphones in Houston they tracked the paths of individual lightning strikes. Pretty sure that was when they learned that most of it is cloud-to-cloud... (Two AI's agree over 75%. Trust no single AI? (Cue the married to an AI joke?))

Antiprotons, the forbidden PopRocks

Apple released the original iPod on November 10, 2001, so a bit after “the late 90s”

Best of the Funny, though the story had many more opportunities.

However if you were trying to persuade a buffoon you didn't get there. That's why buffoons love the YOB so much. They worship their YUGE Orange Buffoon/Baby/Bollocks.

Loyalty over competence.

But I was hoping to see more Funny for the target-rich story.

Okay for the FP branch, but... I wonder if the rude Subject limited the scope of the discussion.

My take is that "love of money" is basically evil and always destroys any philosophic principles that get in the way. Love of money is a fake problem because there is no solution. There is no amount of money that can cure the sick "need" for infinite money. But only people with that sick love can wind up with the kind of sick money the richest people (claim to) have these years.

I do think "pandering" is a better kernel of the analysis, however. That's what destroyed the "Don't be evil" google, though they were initially just trying to pander to the users by providing the "most useful" search results. It took the "profitable" business model of advertising to drive that approach into the cesspool it has reached today. The advertisers CAN handle the truth, by destroying the truth, and the "brand new branded" truth shall make you an addict of whatever snake oil they are pushing. Or dependent on widgets like smartphones if you don't like the drug analogy, though I think chemical addiction is the closest comparison.

Me? Fortunately I seem to be immune to the effects. Like Spock and the purring of the tribbles? My contacts with generative AIs just make me more and more angry--even though I acknowledge they can produce "useful" artifacts. Maybe "time" is more important than "pandering" as the root of the analysis? The real threat might be that whatever they do, the genAIs and LLMs do it so much faster than humans can?

Philosophic tangent time? Naw. Slashdot don't feel worth it no more. I've been turned into a newt and I ain't expecting to get no better. So just give me Funny? But not much Funny to be found these years, even in the depths of Slashdot.

Really? That's the only Funny on this rich target? And doesn't even strike me as especially funny. Maybe later?

But now I can't even remember if the real FBI director's passing got a mention on today's Slashdot.

I'm not questioning you. I'd read it just on the author if it was available around here. Rather you should file it as among my personal problems. First, I'm trying to get rid of all of my books, not buy new ones. Second, I choose to live in Japan where the libraries basically treat English books as an afterthought. (By using lots of libraries I'm able to find enough good stuff to read, and I'm reading more and more Japanese books these years.) Third, my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago...

Assuming it's remotely true (and there's good reason for thinking it isn't), it still means the FBI director was negligent in their choice of personal email provider, that the email provider had incompetent security, and that the government's failure to either have an Internet Czar (the post exists) or to enforce high standards on Internet services are a threat to the security of the nation (since we already know malware can cross airgaps through negligence, the DoD has been hit that way a few times). The FBI director could have copied unknown quantities of malware onto government machines through lax standards, any of which could have delivered classified information over the Internet (we know this because it has also happened to the DoD).

In short, the existence of the hack is a minor concern relative to every single implication that hack has.