Story got some coverage here. I think they said the Korean temperature records only go back to around 1910.

Still, it isn't such a good thing. Relatively nearby in Kumamoto they are also suffering from record heat, but they are also trying to deal with the devastation of a major quake last week...

Of creating more Funny comments for Slashdot. Isn't there a funny mathematician in the house?

Greatest teacher I ever had was actually a math professor. I only had him for one semester, but one class session was a topology-based magic show and he read a funny section from Life on the Mississippi in another lesson, with some mathematics inserted into Twain's story. Tried to get him for another class, but after I registered they pulled him out and substituted another teacher who could barely talk. (Of course it wasn't his fault that he had suffered a stroke, but the disappointment was so large that I withdrew from the course...)

Mod parent Funny, but America is dying from NIMBY syndrome. That and the hatred of science.

The YOB thinks he's the dictator, but he's just the king of lies. However in a country increasingly operating on anti-scientific on lies, the biggest liar should be king? "We don't need no stinkin' telescope to look for gawd!"

And then I noticed Slashdot running an ad for ZenDesk. There's the joke I was looking for.

ZenDesk is where support goes to die. Not a clean death, either, but the ugliest death possible. As soon as I detect that a company is using ZenDesk I know that company does not care about support. At all. But I've also noticed that the use of ZenDesk is usually disguised and hidden these days?

Disclaimer needed: I sincerely tried to get something useful out of ZenDesk channels for some years. Then I gave up. But is it possible ZenDesk got better after so many attempts to turn me into a newt? Maybe you want to report on your better mileage?

But there's a potentially funny anecdote here, too? I think ZenDesk is basically a trouble ticket system. LONG time ago I worked with an old engineer named Paul. He claimed he was the originator of the trouble ticket system, though he probably meant the local trouble ticket system rather than the general idea. But it was a long time ago so it is possible that his was a seminal system of yore. When I worked with him computers were still rather precious resources, and the system he created long before that time was still mostly paper based.

You're welcome, but I'm still disappointed the potentially juicy story didn't produce more Funny.

I basically agree with the comments, but I would actually cast a lot of that blame on Microsoft. It's that EULA thing again. Not just blocking liability for overt failures and incompetence, but also facilitating the shipment of incomplete software that, as you noted, needs more support. But there was a period when even Microsoft understood that there was something rotten there... Swept under the rug since then, so you can abandon all hope now.

I like the FP branch, but too bad it didn't lead deeper or at least spawn some Funny.

Mostly just sharing a couple of anecdotes, but having trouble deciding which side to focus on. I think I'll start with the provider side, since so much of my career involved providing support.

Funniest anecdote is probably from an Internet startup before the first bubble burst. They had some venture funding, but support wasn't in the business plan. I was actually hired for one role, but wound up doing most of that work on my own time in the evenings and early mornings (from home) and spent almost all of my time in the office doing customer support. But I always saw support in terms of making customers happy and finding new ways to make new customers happy, while the managers saw support as a cost to be minimized. Fortunately, since it wasn't in the business plan, they were glad to pretend it was an imaginary number. They knew how my time was being spent, but didn't actually care. In terms of office politics, I wound up mostly working for the manager who was bringing in most of the customers and generating most of the actual revenue. When she was fired I took that as the signal for me to pack up and leave and the company went down a while after that--even before the dotcom bubble burst.

On the recipient side, these days my "support" is mostly received from AIs, often in the form of remarkably useless AI chatbots. Geek that I am, I still think that might be a technical problem that can be solved. The key would be getting the chatbot to ask useful questions--but I'm remembering that was the hardest part of doing support. The typical customer didn't know what to look at, so the biggest trick was to get the customer to look at the right thing that would most quickly reduce the problem space. Once the problem was clear it usually made the best solution clear, too. So far I hain't seen a chatbot like that.

Mod parent Funny, though I cannot recall any humor from Redit. Pretty sure I tried to find something funny on several of my visits, but some years since I abandoned hope of finding anything useful there. Some sort of disclaimer needed, but I never detected anything useful on Redit, even though some useless search engine (AKA goog) kept sending me there.

I do have a theory of what went wrong. It's kind of a good idea and they were able to coast on that for a while before spinning out. But the reason Reddit spun out was that the world should not be reduced to one dimension. That's essentially what the up/down vote does, even though I'm sure different people have completely different interpretations of why they are clicking thusly. Slashdot is almost as bad, even though there are several dimensions... But I think that Slashdot's main problem is the lack of resources to fix anything. Reddit seems to have some substantial resources, but maybe someone can enlighten me about something that has been fixed over there? Preferably within the last ten years or so.

Quoted against the censor trolls or baby-killer fans. Whatever.

I did spot a de-branded, de-logoed Tesla yesterday. I usually give the drivers a big thumbs down, but if he's already feeling the shame and pulled the logo, then that seems to be sufficient.

Okay, but I'm still disappointed that the intrinsically funny story didn't get any such comments.

Not really much of a coincidence because Apple news is frequent, but I just finished The One Device by Brian Merchant. I recommend it fairly strongly for folks who still enjoy reading fat books. Any left on ye olde Slashdot? Also interested in later books on the topic, but my main theoretical conclusion is that the Chinese must be putting backdoors into many or most of the iPhones built in their jurisdiction. Sort of a twisted joke, but I actually imagine that Huawei has the competence to support two versions, backdoored for domestic customers and clean for export, but I think Apple couldn't manage that trick, notwithstanding the secretive corporate culture, and as it relates to this particular story, I think the "backdoor" proof would hurt the stock price much more than 10%. (But the book also shows the limits of his technical chops... Especially in the cybersecurity sections.)

However Apple is the poster child for "opinion of value" uber reality. The book spends a chapter on how those marketing tricks work. Meanwhile, stock prices are just another opinion these years. Apple probably has more problems with the opinion leaders who are arguing Apple isn't doing enough AI yet.

Anyone hereabouts know enough about ye olde Hypercard to make an AI hypercard joke? Apple needs a house of AI hypercards to boost their stock price?

Mostly the ACK, but I feel like your point is that the wind changed from one direction to another. However I think the funny part is that each of the speculators believes he will be the one who is smart enough to know exactly when to take the money and run before the wind stops blowing at all.

The goog cancelled your well-played joke in that UPDATE announcement, but the funniest part was "We know that people uniquely trust Google..."

There was a time when the goog was a good thing, but now the googs have magic touches, and they ain't turning nuttin' into actual gold. Trust not, ye who enter there.

Another anecdote from the cesspool of YouTube. Fresh celebrity scam off the comments, but it must be working since it's been going on for some years now. All the infrastructure any criminal needs! (Please raise your hand if you've gotten any phishing spam out of YouTube?) Or how about the funniest hallucination the goog AI has thrown at you recently?

What bothers me about this sort of news is that nothing changed. Just some new opinions about what the shares are REALLY worth. Probably not even humans at this point, but more like some AI's "calculated estimated prediction" for what some future sucker will pay. (But the YOB will still claim credit for "wealth creation" out of nothing.)

Now if we had a contest based on their AIs, I think Microsoft would be in real trouble. Yes, Copilot is one of the leaders in the abject apology category, but its sycophancy is inferior and it's answers are often even worse than the google's Gemini in the categories related to truth and utility.

It would be kind of funny if it turned out that the AI that drove this change in the stock price was actually Copilot under some level of disguise. Even funnier if Copilot was making its own stock trades under another level of disguise. Talk about self-dealing.

Thanks for clarifying.

Probably not worth attempting to clarify my position, but...

I think freedom is closely tied to incomplete knowledge. That even includes knowledge of myself and how I can be manipulated to reduce my freedom. I therefore continue to advocate for MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation) as a tool that could simultaneously hold me accountable for my public behaviors while helping me improve--if I want to. How I behave in public would be reflected in how people might expect me to behave, but I think MEPR would be a complicated thing to do in a way that actually increases freedom and an easy system to abuse. For example, I think "consistency" is an important dimension and while I should be free to seek consistency, other people should be free to be inconsistent. When "society" operated on a smaller scale that's one of the things you would know about the folks in your circle (under Dunbar's number, which itself is a variable for each person).

But as it applies to this story, if children were granted too much freedom, then none of them would survive to the first anniversary of their birth. They do mature in various ways at different ages, but I dare to notice that there are some of them who should not have a gun at any age. Key dimensions there are "irritability" and "responsibility"? Also some of the dimensions lumped into the complicated concepts of "stupidity" and "dangerous"...