Some aspects of this comment I really like to the point where I think it might have been a better and more productive FP than the actual winner of that silly contest. But in particular I think it deserve a Funny mod for the closing paragraph.

However, I disagree on the main point. If the objective is to sincerely block them (as with a whitelist approach), then it is not going to work with a "substandard" approach. The defenses will need to be stronger and even smarter than the offenses, and there as SOOOO many offenses here. In particular, you mentioned the vast cesspool formerly known as Twitter. Another joke that it is possible to search for Twitter in a meaningful way (but another joke if you seek meaning in the cesspool), but rather difficult to search for the newly rebranded one-letter version. (And this kind of thinking is supposed to worth a TRILLION dollars?)

(I want to diverge into the productive FP topic, but... I always diverge. Even more than usual, something seems to have shaken my brain loose? Too many interactions with the Claude AI? Or my new superpower of bus/subway riding? Time and space? Bah, what concepts!)

Blocks innovation. Dare I say anti-freedom? And the motivations of the "evildoers" will drive them past the safeguards.

But I do have a funny smartphone anecdote to report. Trying to find an old picture yesterday in response to a human query. The google's Photos app was not being cooperative. We could both remember this as a relatively trivial task on the webbrowser version of the app, but it seems like a case of "no can do" on the smartphone. Finally gave up and stuffed the phone back into my pocket.

A few minutes later, the phone jumps into our conversation. I had apparently triggered the Gemini monster and it had started listening in and was figuring out what we were talking about. But what added insult to the injury was the sycophantic "helpful advice" the monster contributed. None of the google's fscking business, thank you.

Happy ending? Trying to make sure the monster had been lulled back to sleep I did manage to stumble over the search place and was able to get to the photos in question. I thought they might have been deleted in my latest random memory purges. (I refuse to pay the ransom and the google doesn't see fit to offer any compromise, such as training some of my data for the recursive (but sad and probably evil) benefit of the Gemini monster. As part of the training I could even rate which data is PII safe allowing my training results to be mutually compared with other humans' work. On the declining theory that human work or intelligence still has any value.)

But what if you put the initial degree in a retrograde orbit? If the objective is to maximize the likelihood of maximum damage, then the extra launch cost would make sense. There's a fundamental advantage on the side of trying to increase the entropy.

"It was just an unfortunate accident that the bucket of ball bearings got dumped into orbit going the wrong way!" (With apologies to Joe Dimaggio, but not THAT Joe Dimaggio.)

I think you're answer is too broad and fuzzy to be "insightful", even though I hope it is accurate for the monstrosity that Meta nee Facebook has become.

However from the broader perspective, I am less sanguine. I think the economics are different if you have enough renewable energy. As in China. Then there may be almost no cost for the tokens but basically just the sunk cost of the hardware. The key question for profitability will become the value of "intelligence" and there is a key advantage in the ability to upgrade the software without limit.

Good joke and even surprised I can't recall ever seeing it before. Now I feel like doing a broader AI-powered searches for other funny names when you read them sufficiently wrongly...

I was more than halfway expecting it. Making war is the best way to get a peace prize?

So many theories of the joke for this story. My current favorite is that the REAL Iranian plan is to transfer the money to China where the YOB can't touch it and then blow up "the great deal". However they want to wait until it's closer to the election because so many American voters have attention spans like goldfish.

disappointment

disappointment

No reactions yet? My main question is which AI was used for so many attacks in such a short time.

Think of all the criminal hackers who lost their jobs!

(But I'm not actually curious enough to research which AI was used. I'd have to ask an AI, and I'm sure it would just say "It wasn't me!")

You're picking nits on an imaginary solution for a mostly imaginary, dare I say fake, problem. Even if they're large and interesting nits.

So my imaginary solution approach to the dimensional collapse on the profit dimension would be a progressive profits tax related to market share. Main area of overlap with your ideas is probably the third one, where one of the ways to detect monopoly status is the lack of freedom of employees to switch to a competing company.

Parent should have been the FP and I'm glad to see it spanned about half the discussion. But I'm just judging by the scrollbar. Mostly I only check the longer discussions on Slashdot for Funny these days. Saves vast amounts of time while producing the same amounts of disappointment.

However on the verbosity topic, I actually ran the obvious test past a number of genAIs. "Can you answer any question as briefly as possible?" Rather to my surprise, about half of them managed to answer "Yes" and then shut up.

But the genAIs are still too stupid to make good recursive jokes. At least one of them should have answered "No."

My latest AI experiments have been AI-supported programming with Claude. I'm rather sorry to report that I'm quite impressed in spite of myself. We "discuss" the problems and function points for a while, and Claude often manages to ask and answer useful questions. It doesn't spew reams of random code and wild guesses at me. After we have reached agreement on what to do and how to do it, then it takes about a minute or three to generate the next version of the system. (Currently a new front end for an ancient database. I would estimate that the PERL functionality was surpassed in about 10% of my programming time. But probably less. (However I was learning PERL at the same time, whereas Claude always codes (or at least seems to code) like a fluent native speaker of the language. Mostly JavaScript in my current project.))

Feeding the trolls never works. And you don't have to propagate a vacuous Subject.

Trust is dead in America, but it wasn't of old age or natural causes. It was murdered. I actually think Reagan may deserve the largest slice of personal blame, but by market segment, it was probably the advertisers that did it. Can you remember the last ad that you trusted?

Hey, here's a really crazy idea. Why if I could ask to see trustworthy information from trustworthy companies that are honestly selling the goods and services I want to buy without any fake needs created by marketing departments? The non-ads would help me answer my questions and decide on the best value.

Naw. It's much cheaper and vastly more profitable to produce and sell unwanted and useless garbage disguised with ads. LOTS of ads. (And of course that includes garbage politicians sold to voters on Election Day.)

The joke of the day explaining why nothing gets done is Rumplicans versus Dumbocrats. The orange-nosers can't see or smell any problems because their noses are firmly inserted and the other side is too busy running around and hunting for flying elephants.But betwixt and between the two of them the country is going to heck in the proverbial handbasket.

It's not just that America has become unable to change and solve real problems. Sometimes the Constitution needs to be amended. But now it's reached the point where the "powers that be" can't even maintain the fake solutions for the fake problems.But not to worry. The fake stock market is booming. (The stock market has also become a recursive joke where the fastest growing and biggest companies join the DOW precisely because the DOW caused them to be big and fast. Laughing all the way?)

But trust didn't die of natural causes. It was murdered. Apparently while sleeping.

What to do but laugh?

Just asking for a friend in the business. But if you ask, I insist it was just a joke and there is no such friend.

Actually, I think the corruption is the most communist aspect of the story--but we Westerners are catching up fast.

Now about the AI part of it. The best new scam I've seen recently was actually almost a year ago and involved impersonating a celebrity. But from the tone of the scam at that time I considered it most likely to be using DeepSeek or possibly ChatGPT rather than Gemini or Copilot or Claude...

The "humanized" local versions are linked to remote-control crime with disposable human part-timers. Suggestive that the third-level crook they were chasing apparently fled through China? However, they're pretty sure he quickly left China for parts still unknown.

Returning to the suggested Subject and fantasizing about solutions, I actually think it would be possible to get Xi to pass some suitable laws, though it might be harder to get them enforced.

What if the profits related to perverse content were taxed at rates above 100%? Might that reduce the perverse incentives?

Okay, so now we have to argue about "perverse", but...