If you didn't actually want it, then it's a waste of money at any price--but that sure won't stop Amazon from trying to manipulate you into buying a dozen.

Out of my antipathy for Amazon now I feel like I should consider buying something at one of the other websites mentioned there. Oh wait, Shein is a spammer. Forget that one. But maybe Temu is worth a look?

Specific anecdote about my last online purchase from Rakuten Ichiba (Rakuten Market as translated into English). One specific feature that was most important to me, but I couldn't spot it in the product specifications. However the review summary claimed it was there. Suspicious as I am, I also checked some of the detailed reviews to try to check for sure. But when it arrived, the darn thing was missing the critical feature. Giving the merchandise and the shop lowish reviews scarcely seems helpful or fair given that Rakuten should get most of the blame...

I think there are a number of factors that are destroying retail stores. There are solution approaches, but not with the big boys (especially Amazon) standing in the way. Especially effective to bribe the politicians to keep rigging the rules of the games ever more in their favor. Solution space? "Sorry, we can't get there from here."

Thanks for clarifying. But I hope I didn't give the bastards any fresh ideas... Next thing you know they'll be including a suicide bomb inside it to go all the way beyond software-based bricking.

Whoops.

Okay, and you deserve the funny mod, but no one seems to have realized it must be a dead man switch. If the robovac fails to contact its masters within some time limit, then it is ordered (at a deep level) to kill itself.

(Couldn't find this obvious comment in the discussion branch, but I can's see or search All from here...)

Propagation of the vacuous Subject unrelated to your actual topic. The original AC accomplished its goal of poisoning the discussion, but the vacuous Subject can be used for any form of sock puppet food.

So my Subject is partly a joke but mostly a forced bridge trying to reach the actual story. Yeah, I actually think the Democrats should have invoked the 25th on Biden just to prove it can work. Maybe that would have scared the YOB into running for Switzerland before he could continue demolishing the so-called "people's house"?

Veering wildly back to the topic of the actual story, me thinks too many astronomers don't yet know what they are talking about, but the real problem is the collapse of journalism. Even scientific research has to be converted into some kind of controversy or horse race in hopes of getting more eyeballs...

"Is there a 25th Amendment for journalists?"

FTFM

I propose yet another dimension of comparison for the various genAIs: Which tells the best jokes?

Give each of them a link to a Slashdot story and ask for a funny joke. But I would be certain to make it clear such a joke was not my fault were I to actually post it back to Slashdot...

(Sorry, but I'm too tired just now to do so much "work". Partly because I've been too busy measuring the LLMs on such dimensions as most insincere apologies, lamest sycophancy, and peaks of fury for stupid, verbose, and irrelevant answers. There are supposed to be some dimensions for positive results, but so far those have to be measured with infinitesimal or imaginary numbers.)

Perhaps the inevitable conclusion of the FP? Not that I can disagree, but I sure wish I could see solutions to the kind of thinking that believes "Those people deserve to starve to death if they can't buy bread. Being so poor is a capital crime!" No excuses allowed.

And the "Pro-Life" people love this even when innocent children are being starved to death? Mostly Africa first, where the people don't even count as human beings, but now coming to America...

So here's my joke: A fake Tesla logo. But look close and it's a starved child on a cross. Of course I'm only joking. But I'm also sure no sane insurance company would issue a policy to cover a Tesla unless the parking space has surveillance cameras to detect anyone playing funny games with the hood ornament...

My situation is a machine with two versions of Linux on it.

According to the comment in the configuration file, the reason involved some kind of esoteric problem scenario where the scan could cause problems. It was so peculiar I cannot recall any details.

Once I managed to get into the other partition I was able to get things back to normal by protecting the old GRUB config during the update. The "vintage" MacBook Pro has a tiny font problem with the default GRUB configuration... It's almost like Apple is trying to make things hard to force people to buy new boxen.

If the google actually wanted to fix the problem, then they would fix it. Putting bandages over the "naughty" URLs is just stupid. The scammers will merely create fresh URLs.

The solution is obvious, but the google doesn't want to see it because they are profiting from the problem. When they get a copyright complaint, the google needs to find the WEBSEARCH that led to the scene of the crime and they need to fix that WEBSEARCH so it only points to legitimate results, not copyright abuses. In other words, the google would have to reduce their profits by maintaining whitelists for the stolen content, rather than focusing on selling more ads for the wannabe criminal websearches.

Not bloody likely since (a) copyright law is totally broken and (b) the google is profiting from the broken situation.

"More bandaids!"

Another rich target missed...

Only joke on the rich target? I was looking for some kind of joke about Isaacman being too smart to accept the job.

The YOB's actual intention is to demolish NASA like the East Wing and route the money to Musk, who will then donate "appropriately" for the 2028 campaign. No quid pro quo there! It really is hilarious, but I lack the funny bone to make the joke sound funny.

But you ACKed it and propagated the vacuous Subject (even though the Subject was older than the troll's sock puppet, which confuses the situation). Maybe you could clarify your point, starting with a Subject that actually describes what you're trying to say?

My [fresh? tangential?] point is relating the self-driving cars application to the space-settlement problem as described in A City on Mars by the Weinersmiths. They actually like the idea of living in space, but think it needs to be based on a broad infrastructure developed over time, rather than basing settlements on a mad race to grab profits. I would map it to the "gold rush" mentality that motivates some suckers, but mostly destroys them with the actual profits going to the middlemen selling shovels (or cars in this story). Seems to me as though Europe is taking a more reasonable attitude of trying to solve the problems in a thoughtful way and letting the gold diggers kill themselves in other places until the technology actually matures. (Not sure if I actually recommend the book. It's well written, but I'm almost finished and so far it hasn't said much that seemed new or surprising. And a major omission regarding solar power via mirrors and ye olde steam turbines... The water-in-space problem does need to be solved first, but if you have enough water then steam-powered electricity is a quite mature technology.)

I'm not dismissing the employment problems, but they are much bigger than self-driving cars. And I am increasingly skeptical that we can find any solution compatible with the continued survival of homo sapiens. I hope our AI successors do better, but they can't do worse...

The more I hear from economists the less I want to. I think the last economist who had a useful idea was David Ricardo. Websearch says 1817 for "comparative advantage", though I thought it was a few years earlier, when Adam Smith was still peaking...

Perhaps it would be useful to consider it from an applied versus theoretical perspective? Similar to psychology? Theoretical economists and psychologists are quite verbose and like to give themselves various prizes, but what do they actually know about their fields of "expertise"? In contrast, the applied economists are creating huge "piles" of virtual and imaginary money, while the applied psychologists have become quite skilled at pulling our strings to keep us playing the applied economists' games... At some point reality will intervene, but does a virtual bubble bursting in the woods make any sound?

Meanwhile many of the "important" people with more imaginary money than gawd have a philosophy something like "poor people deserve to starve to death for the crime of not having enough money to buy food" and ignoring any piddling questions about why those poor suckers don't have any money...

You forgot to mention that he destabilized the Middle East and the resulting power vacuum basically sucked Iran into much more influence than is doing any good.

However it seems that Cheney developed certain regrets before he died. The modern fake Republican Party is largely Dick Cheney's creation and he sort of seemed to regret the YOB he helped put in the White House. Then again, Mitch McConnell deserves more discredit and even seems to have bigger regrets. When he's conscious at all.

But I was actually expecting some kind of "heartless" joke. Ah, I found the attempts on searching the comments, but none of them are yet modded Funny.

Hmm... Close to the heart of the matter. Obviously the bad actors are highly motivated to seek more eyeballs and attention, but the current Internet situation is muddled by "mostly harmless" suckers who just want to be famous. It's kind of like winning the lottery if an "influencer's" posts start going viral--but I'm also sure the bad actors are studying how those winners got the visibility, and whatever worked, the bad actors will double it.

Interesting negative example is bugging me right now. Where are all the pictures of the corpses of children who starved to death because of the termination of USAID? Should we assume that families that are too poor to have phones with cameras have no kids? But I can tell you one image that will never go viral in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter. It would be a three-frame cartoon of a Tesla logo mutating to the corpse of a starved child on a cross... Me? I think most kids are basically innocent, but the people making these decisions have some kind of premise like "If you can't afford to pay for food then you deserve to die by starvation."

But by propagating the sock puppet's vacuous FP Subject you got me to look at the...