180143689
submission
shanen writes:
File this under "rage against the machines"? Or as some kind of joke?
So here's the background: The google is trying to sell me cloud storage. The sales pitch is simple enough. Frequent nagging about running low on storage space. I do not even know which of my google accounts this is based on because two of my universities have foisted secondary accounts on me.
However I suspect that a lot of the data is basically garbage photos. Now I could just delete masses of stuff at random (and this is probably where I will wind up), but there are actually two potentially large categories of images that could be reduced from megabytes to a few hundred bytes each without major loss. It's an obvious AI application of pulling some text and the metadata from the images and tossing the originals.
However when I asked the (increasingly evil) google's Gemini about this, the response was NOT helpful. Gemini admits that it's an obviously useful thing to do, but also spewed a lot of BS about why google isn't going to do it. Gemini also spewed a lot of even less useful verbiage about how to implement it using the google's tools--but I do NOT want to go back to my programming days. I'm content with a few minor noddies these years... My take is that the non-evil google could offer the tool and get "payback" in the form of learning more about what the images mean, but the google obviously disagrees. Or at least that's how I'm interpreting the massive blather from Gemini.
But does some other AI offer such a tool that could be applied to my google account? The other AI company could positively justify it by learning about images or perhaps negatively justify it by depriving the google of the business.
Or maybe you want to share some hints about how you manage your file bloat in these AI days? Me? I think we are collapsing through the singularity even as I type... And the other side doesn't look so good. I did a lot of kinds of work over the years, but most of my jobs already look like they are obsolete or extinct. And I made my living at a wide spectrum of trades from low to high skills... Or perhaps you want a link to a short video of the best job in the world: "Mayor of Prairie Dog Town greeting the citizens with veggies!" That's job no AI can handle yet!
179886846
submission
shanen writes:
Just joking. At least I haven't seen a "Funny" option for reacting to AI answers, but I do have a funny anecdote to share and maybe you can top it. This one is for Google's Gemini. Apparently schizophrenic and I must have been talking with the wrong personality?
I'm not a big baseball fan, but I noticed the first game of the World Series on TV. Later on I wondered about the second game result, so I looked at a TV and there was nothing, so I guessed the game was over. My first websearch came up null, but that was the "shallow" AI so maybe it didn't know where to find latest status. On that theory I clicked the AI tab to engage the Gemini and repeated the question. Though I specified the second game in my question, it responded with the results of the first game. So I just entered a short clarification. I think I typed "SECOND game". This time it did a bit of websearching and then gave me the results for the second game. Hallucinatory results, but even including the details of the scoring and the conclusion that the Blue Jays had a commanding 2-0 lead in the Series. I got the real version the next day...
Seems pretty funny, but maybe you've seen something funnier. And yes, I sort of considered asking for examples of AI enragement [sic, not be confused with engagement], but those are too common. I think Rakuten Mobile's "support" chatbot is the leader in my experiences of getting angry over vacuous, verbose, and repetitive responses. Also considered asking for other AI award categories, such as "best apologies" or "most sycophantic". My current ratings would be Copilot for best apology and DeepSeek for most sycophantic... Most useful? That award is still pending on seeing something significantly useful (beyond a few noddies in JavaScript).
179839638
submission
shanen writes:
Not requesting a dupe, but the story died too soon for me to add the data point. I don't use the scanner often enough, eh? Not sure how to revive interest, but I actually think some stories should move down the top page more slowly, and this is one that probably deserved more than the standard one-day lifetime. Not sure when I remembered that some "USB topic" had gone past on Slashdot recently...
So I searched google and for some strange reason the google didn't return any links to the horse's mouth at Microsoft. What?
That provoked me into trying Bing and then Copilot, which produced a rather hilarious and infuriating discussion. Some of it might be amusing here, but I don't need the headache of getting sued by Microsoft if I dared to quote what their AI said. Much of the discussion involved "regression testing" and how little anyone should trust Microsoft. Confessions from the jackass's mouth?
179755732
submission
shanen writes:
Responding mostly to negative experiences with the smartphone makers Samsung and Oppo, so I wanted to find a positive and constructive way to approach this topic. Therefore I started by websearching for best customer service. The results didn't exactly surprise me. Many lists, but no smartphone companies, for sure, for sure. Actually the easiest list to understand included three luxury hotels and an insurance company that I'd heard of but I could only speculate about the rest of the words. Short reaction is "You can't handle good customer service" as a twisted joke on "You get what you pay for."
So as a Slashdot question, I feel like a more open approach may help. Maybe it's just me and I'm imagining things have gotten that bad, and perhaps Slashdot can provide a dose of reality?
I actually think there's a fundamental problem here. No simple definition for "capitalism", but it's supposed to include an adversarial element. Customers are supposed to find the best values and companies are supposed to be rewarded for creating the most customer satisfaction... But maybe you can already detect the root of the disconnection? Both "best" and "satisfaction" are intersubjective entities that can be manipulated for profit maximization... You don't need to fool all of the customers all of the time. You just need to fool the most profitable customers at the time of their shopping decisions and you can even improve your profits relative to your competitors by repelling the least profitable customers...
So let me throw in a few details of my latest smartphone shopping experiences. Samsung is definitely a "shame on me" situation. I had a Galaxy about 10 years ago and eventually grew to hate it, mostly because of the 'support' experiences, but two years ago I was fooled into giving Samsung a second try. This time the hate grew more quickly and I was eager to dump the phone within a year--but it took another year to scrape enough information out of my carrier/ISP to decide on a second Oppo. My first Oppo wasn't that bad, but it's already beginning to look like another "shame on me" situation... Several minor problems and questions and no useful support or even interest in the problems... My carrier has delegated support to a enhanced-stupidity AI chatbot, so I wasn't expecting any help there, but Oppo also proved to be as useless as Samsung.
My theory is we customers have become scum, but I wonder what we did to deserve it. But maybe it's just me? I'm sure that my bad attitude isn't helping.
179587696
submission
shanen writes:
The websearch question was actually "What are the most popular and bestselling smartphones in Africa, India, and South America?" The answers will surprise me? Especially the AI answers, but here's my short summary of what I found and I seek the wisdom of Slashdot's crowd. (Hain't seen much recent evidence it still exists, however.) I was not surprised by most of the brands mentioned, though there were a number of brands I cannot recall ever having heard of. Most of the models mentioned were quite unfamiliar to me. However the A series from Samsung appeared in various places and my recent experiences with one of those have been distinctly annoying. (Worst two problems are no magnetic compass and Talkback doesn't.) I actually decided to replace it a year ago, but Rakuten Mobile is so incompetent that I have yet to do so.
However that raises another subquestion about your experiences with using an "alien" smartphone, one not sold by or explicitly supported by your phone company. On the one hand, I'm pretty sure Rakuten Mobile doesn't have the technical competence to "go after" alien smartphones and harass such customers with worse service. (Not much room for RM's service to get worse? Your carrier or ISP?) But on the other hand, maybe the reason for the apparent security incompetence is that RM has assigned their best technical people to harass alien smartphones in the name of better network security?
One more dimension to the problem: Family plans and spouses? Benefits of coordinating with your spouse? Or just another source of household friction? I'm sure not seeing any potential for romance there...
Oh yeah, I gotta nod to Apple. However, as usual I'm nodding from a strange angle: Total cost of ownership? I actually thought I had a way to reduce this to a simple question, but RM has been quite unwilling to answer any part of it. The TCoO topic actually applies to any of the high end smartphones, not just the iPhones. It seems possible that a phone that lasts for many years could be a better value in contrast to my usual plan of replacing the phone after two years. In a really nice world (with a just gawd?) the insurance cost would be so low that the total cost with higher reliability would be lower than the apparently cheap cost of the cheap phone. (I estimate that my hardware costs have been around 180 US bucks/year, though I'm on the edge of buying a slightly cheaper Oppo (and I was somewhat surprised not to see Oppo in any of those websearch results mentioned above). My service/data costs are on the order of USD45/month. Too much info?)
I'm sure your mileage has differed. Care to share?
179189972
submission
shanen writes:
Surprised the story hasn't appeared already. Technical link is going to be the drive to insanity via the Web. Already some mention of social media websites.
My basic premise is that killing a human being is insane. Even in cases where the victim has a death wish.
And yet too many people rationalize killing. Even in extremely cold blood like this case. Real self-defense is quite rare, but claims of various forms of extended self-defense are far too abundant. Especially on today's Web.
Not much potential for Funny in this story, eh?
177706845
submission
shanen writes:
I think this is way too late as a s submission, so the story must have flown through Slashdot already. But without even leaving a top comment behind? (My schedule is basically once day, which is why I wish some stories moved more slowly...)
Insofar as America used to have a great education system, I don't see what part of destroying Harvard is part of "great". And at this point you'd have to be a rather weird foreigner to be smart enough to get into Harvard while being stupid enough to want to...
If I had seen the story in time, I did want to offer the too obvious joke: "Not fair to compare the YOB to a bull in a China shop. The bull might be smart enough to notice how much damage he's causing."
(YOB is Yuge Orange Buffoon. Excuse me, but I decline to contribute any free publicity to the YOB's brand. I don't think it would bother me if I never again saw the capitalized usage of the word...)
177660421
submission
shanen writes:
I wonder if there is some kind of weird parallel thinking going on around here. I had NOT heard about the "virtual" books recommended in the "Chicago Sun-Times" until just now, but yesterday I was thinking of various GAIvatar applications.
In particular, a GAIvatar of a living author could be used to update the author's books to reflect the latest data in the field, and the living author could evaluate the "faithfulness" of each new edition to make sure it really conforms to the author's intentions--but needing only a tiny fraction of the time that it would require to update the earlier edition "by the author's own hand". Especially handy in rapidly advancing fields such as computer science or medical genetics. If the author wants to be diligent, it would mostly require reading the new research to make sure the GAIvatar is "reacting" appropriately. Super (but due?) diligence would call for trying to confirm the GAIvatar hadn't overlooked anything important... Which reminds me that normal due diligence would require confirming that none of the new evidence referenced for the new edition wasn't a mere figment of GAI hallucination.
When you move to the dead authors, the GAIvatar possibilities become even more interesting. I'm not sure how much personalized data you'd need to create an "accurate" GAIvatar of a famous author, but I'm thinking there are a number of Roman authors who left behind substantial bodies of work. Perhaps we even have enough of Aristotle's work to create an Aristotle GAIvatar? At least one that could recreate highly plausible versions of his missing works? And how about Buddha or Confucius?
Oh yeah. I better clarify the GAIvatar thing again. I would think there should be a standard term out there, but I haven't seen one, "GAIvatar" is a portmanteau of Generative AI avatar, where a particular person is the primary model for the training. As applied to each author, the objective is not just to capture the author's style, but even something of the soul as revealed in the author's writings.
Of course it would be a funnier joke if the story is also an AI hallucination. I saw it in a number of "reputable" sources, but all of them might have been conned...
176695659
submission
shanen writes:
And even better, do you have any useful solution approaches to solve that threat?
Actually, I have two threats in mind today, so I can't even answer my own question for "most". One might be an imminent threat due to Microsoft's combination of malevolent incompetence and lack of liability, which the other threat seems more distant but more clearly on the evil side and probably less bounded. I'm not even going to claim these are serious threats that you should consider. More in the way of examples, though it would be great if someone could convince me "There's nothing to see or worry about here."
The Microsoft threat might be affecting you. My path to get there is from the Settings page for my Microsoft Account. For example, from the gear icon on outlook.live.com. Under General you can find "Privacy and data" and *boom*. You're stuck. You can't get anywhere from there. But if you go to the security basics page. Oh wait. You can't get there from that place and I can't send you the URL because of Microsoft has bastardized it... Well, what about... "Good luck, Mr Phelps."
Anyway, if you somehow find your way to the "recent activity" page you may be surprised. Mine shows an endless string of "Unsuccessful sign-in" attempts. About one an hour from all over the world. Are these related to the roughly daily fake requests for one-time authentication codes? Dictionary searches of common passwords? Harmless, or maybe they are more sinister. Is there any way I can see the fake passwords? It would certainly annoy me if the attempts are gradually converging on the actual password... (Even though I don't use the Outlook account for anything and even though I never voluntarily use any Microsoft software or websites. Only under duress, but I but most of you, too.)
The other threat that's bothering me is the GAIvatar thing. I hope we are "enlightened beings" who could not be easily copied for Generative AI avatars, but I don't feel sanguine about it. And I definitely think there are some folks I know whose responses are so predictable that I could not tell them apart from a GAIvatar... Basically I see two threats here, but you may see others. One is simple prediction, using the GAIvatar to figure out what a person is most likely to do, but the more serious threat is control, by using the GAIvatar to test various prompts until the proper buttons are discovered to manipulate the human model. Maybe you see worse possibilities?
And I don't really see any solutions anywhere. At the "social" levels where solutions are supposed to appear they appear to be a bunch of benign incompetents, malevolent incompetents, or feckless incompetents. And some of them check two or three boxes at random...
176573809
submission
shanen writes:
I'm just submitting the story to be part of the rush, but I'm actually not a bit surprised that Zelenskyy told the orange buffoon to take a flying leap. Nor that Cheeto Jesus was caught completely off guard. He wouldn't recognize an actual patriot until one bit him on the arse in his own precious office.
Mostly I just want to add another joke to the melee: How can he change the subject now? But making a new sales pitch for his vanity cryptocoin: "Buy my crypto-coins and the decryption keys for everything are included! What do you mean it doesn't work like that? Elong [sic] told me!"
176229415
submission
shanen writes:
Do you trust AI in general? What about DeepSeek in particular? Can anyone even explain what "trust" means these days? For example, I bet most of you trust Amazon and Amazon's secret AIs more than you should...
Recently I've been dabblling with a number of the GAI websites. Of course if I was a serious scientist then I'd have my own hardware and be running local tests. Or at least I'd be rooting around arXiv to see what the serious scientists are saying... All I have (as usual) are too many questions and too few jokes. Especially funny jokes. I wouldn't recognize a funny AI joke until after the AI had pwned me to pieces...
Actually the funniest joke I can think of on this topic involves DeepSeek. One of my experimental conversations on that website involved the topic of trust. DeepSeek turned out to be extremely good at explaining why I should not trust it. Every computer security problem I ever thought of or heard about and some more besides. "So what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?"
It's like the accountant who gets asked what 2 plus 2 is. After locking the doors and shading all the windows, the accountant whispers in your ear: "What do you want it to be?" And the price of tea in China is whatever Xi wants it to be! I bet you assumed the accountant was male, right? So the next questions are whether DeepSeek can do accounting or windows?
So let me start with some questions about DeepSeek in particular:
Have you run it locally and compared the responses with the website's responses? My hypothesis is that your mileage should differ...
It's well established that DeepSeek doesn't want to talk about many "political" topics. Is that based on a distorted model of the world? Or is the censorship implemented in the query interface after the model was trained? My hypothesis is that it must have been trained with lots of data because the cost of removing all of the bad stuff would have been prohibitive. Defining "bad" doesn't matter because I bet everyone agrees the Internet is chock full of bad data these years. Unless perhaps another AI filtered the data first?
What does trust mean? What sort of responses am I hoping to see? How many people still using today's Slashdot have even heard of "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? How many of the identities on today's Slashdot are just (AI-driven?) sock puppets? (Speculations on a mutual timeline building tool to verify childhood friendships?)
In closing, if you asked an AI to analyze all of the conversations on Slashdot, what sort of changes would it show over the years? My hypothesis on this question is that the interactions based on books will trend down. Maybe that's my selective memory, but I think a "sound" analysis would should a monotonic decrease. Largely based on The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt I think the downward gradient might peak after smartphones became widely adopted circa 2010...
176034177
submission
shanen writes:
What matters to you when you buy a new smartphone? But how to make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share. Quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago? Or perhaps start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient AskSlashdot discussion about the batteries?
Seems funny to ask about relevant books, even though two come to mind already. One is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, where he argues that smartphone use by preadolescents is destroying their personalities. The other is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who doesn't actually say much about them but I still think they should have been included in the the big table of examples at the end of the prologue. The "system" of smartphones is antifragile even though the earliest models were quite fragile and the essence of this question is about which current smartphone models are most robust...
Maybe I should include a list of my own criteria so far? However mostly they would just be responses to the problems with my current Samsung Galaxy and the Oppo before that. I've already determined that the main two main problems don't exist with any of the current options offered by my phone company... And the ancient battery problems are still lurking, too.
175361835
submission
shanen writes:
Or is Today's Slashdot even worth the effort?
Mostly a seasonal topic, but requires justification? Many available, but today's top one involves the idea of a "Constitutional right" to control your own data, but linked to the idea of real capitalism with real competition. An alternate wording of the question could be "AskSlashdot: Are you a prisoner of any giant corporation because of the personal data you have entrusted to it?" That form was actually triggered by a recent Slashdot article involving a new email system--and realizing that it would be quite difficult for me to escape from Gmail now...
But "capitalism" [definition/citations needed] is supposed to depend on customers who are free to shop around. Not the current trend, with more and more people locked into Microsoft or Apple or the google or Amazon or Facebook or <long list of corporate cancers>. In terms of fantasy solutions, I imagine a Constitutional right to move my data implying a different approach to monopoly law.
But no change will get past SCOTUS. Hence the link to Supreme Court reform in the original form of the question.
MUCH more can be said, and I even have two concrete proposals for reform. But surely you have some better ideas? Or at least want to sing another verse of "We can't get there from here"?
(And not sure why I am bothering except that this ridiculously close election is bothering me so much. And still wondering about my last AskSlashdot submission, which was apparently accepted and then disappeared. I sort of considered rewriting it, but now I can't even remember the topic... Also considered an AskSlashdot about Linux on a "vintage" MacBook Pro...)
175244461
submission
shanen writes:
There aren't any penalties (yet), but it is now technically illegal for a customer to be "too dissatisfied" in Japan. https://www.nippon.com/en/in-d... is an English summary of a an intermediate step to the new Japanese law. Unfortunately I couldn't find any English description of the version the LDP just passed through the Diet. The video link to NHK World is for older context. Remember when the customer was regarded as a minor gawd? ROFLMAO. Now we should brace ourselves for the next version of the law where they start introducing the penalties.
Me? Color me "guilty, guilty, guilty", especially as regards the Japanese banks, realtors, and ISP phone companies. But give me a minute and I'm sure I'll remember some more examples. Some of it might be simple racism or even justified revulsion at my poor Japanese, but some of it is probably a kind of legacy of the sokaiya, an endangered subspecies of Japanese gangster.
174565878
submission
shanen writes:
I think the SCOTUS has huge effects on technology and therefore is quite relevant to Slashdot. There seems to be strong agreement that SCOTUS is broken. So how would you reform the Supreme Court?
Let me start with the two simplistic ideas that I currently favor and then I'll consider some of the other ideas that are floating around. But mostly I'm hoping for someone to come up with better ideas, though correcting my excessive simplicity would be nice, too.
For the partisan politics thing, my suggestion is a simple recusal rule:
"A nonpartisan Justice may compel up to two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves."
That rule would make each nonpartisan Justice effectively equal to three partisans. The objective is to motivate everyone to return to the nonpartisan tradition. If you look at the record of nominations on Wikipedia, you will see that all of the Justices used to be nonpartisans confirmed by strong majorities of the Senators from BOTH parties, but now NONE of them are. In practice, I think forced recusals would be quite rare because the nonpartisan would have that extra leverage when discussing cases with partisans.
But I also think "junior" is a sneaky word in that recusal rule. I think it should be based on either date of joining the Court or on birthday. That would justify appointing a really old but nonpartisan Justice. Not long on the Court, but immediately able to talk harshly to partisans...
My second simplistic idea involves the new super-immunity power the Court just created. I think the super-lame duck Joe Biden can handle that with an executive order. Just clarify that "faithfully execute the office" includes obeying the laws without looking for immunity loopholes. Plus a promise of no presidential pardons for criminals whose defense involves "helping" the president.
Yes, I know any president can cancel any presidential executive order, but at least it will be amusing to hear the explanation of why they did it. Credit for this idea to Dubya for his "signing statements" that negated laws as he "signed" them?
There are three main proposals being discussed. I want to touch on their flaws.
One is enlarging the Court. I actually think this could be used as leverage, basically as a kind of threat, but if done then it becomes a kind of Fibonacci sequence of adding Justices each time the political winds shift. I think it would actually make the politicization worse.
Term limits is a better idea, but judging is an unusual profession. Experience really does help, and a rigid term limit would hit the best judges. Maybe some kind of competency test to make sure the judges aren't going senile, but in general an honest judge only gets better with age.
The other idea involves official ethics. The problem is with the enforcement and making sure that the enforcers don't become political hacks. I don't think there is any way to square that circle. Everyone is already saying that partisan judges are bad and it obviously isn't solving the problem... Then again, it's hard to imagine any kind of ethical bar that would be low enough for a certain Justice to get over.
