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180716150
comment
byshanen
026 @12:54PM
(#65962656)
Attached to: Fourth US Wind Farm Project Blocked By Trump Allowed to Resume Construction
I think that was an attempted joke, but I never did have much of a sense of humor. I sort of agree with the premise of Epstein, Epstein, and more Epstein. If only it mattered. I'm not seeing the real world effects.
However on this story I think the important question is why is the YOB so opposed to renewable energy. The answer is pretty obviously money and some bits of the money are even visible. For example, the Saudis are so fond of selling petroleum that they gladly "entrusted" a few billion to the son in law to curry favor. But I think most of the dirty money is flowing via crypto, and one of the main selling points of crypto is the lack of traceability.
Looking backwards over my shoulder, but now I wonder if the YOB's personal crypto has any extra features to make sure the transactions are secret but can still be confirmed and traced by the recipient. We would think the YOB wants to be able to confirm the bribe comes from the right people without making any quid pro quo tracks that are visible to any investigators...
But these days there are always too many fresh distractions. What city will be invaded next? And what is Bezos going to get for his measly $75 million? (And no, I didn't watch "Unreal Housewife of the White House". (Hmm... Maybe there is an actual market for "Real Housewives of the White House" in these twisted days? But reality TV is so fundamentally creatively fake and manipulatively edited that the series should be called "Surreal Housewives of..."))
180716074
comment
byshanen
026 @12:30PM
(#65962606)
Attached to: China Executes 11 Members of Myanmar Scam Mafia
I don't get the joke, but I don't know that much about Chinese history. Care to clarify the funny? (But recently learning some stuff about the period from 1800-50.)
At first I thought it might be related to a duck dynasty. There was (or is? or might have been?) a fake reality program with such a name.
Too bad it won't be the end of the scammer dynasty. But I'm kind of against killing anyone, even scamming spammers. I think they would suffer more if their scams were all blocked, they couldn't get any money, but had to keep living. Where is the question? Given conditions in Myanmar these years, I'm not sure whether living in prison would be more problematic than being in the wrong place in Myanmar.
180709818
comment
byshanen
2026 @01:32PM
(#65961192)
Attached to: The Bill Gates-Epstein Bombshell - and What Most People Get Wrong
But I have to admit that I can only wish I could see a joke on the sordid topic.
180709802
comment
byshanen
2026 @01:25PM
(#65961180)
Attached to: There's a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address
NAK
180703042
comment
byshanen
26 @03:27PM
(#65959788)
Attached to: DuckDuckGo Users Vote Overwhelmingly Against AI Features
Going for funny on the duck theme, but the google needs to be ducked on. Or maybe a long ducking would be funnier?
Not funny how often the genAI websearch wastes my time telling me stuff that I obviously know already. I'm talking about the followup queries, but the next anecdote is a good example. So I think the Subject captures my main problem with genAI and I have a general observation and a narrow anecdote about my latest round with one I hadn't tried before.
My general observation is that the current Artificial Idiots lack comprehension of the nature of whatever problem they are being asked to help solve. I think this is intrinsic to the LLM approach, but A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins says it much better than I can. Part one of that book is still the best critique of genAIs that I've read. I frequently go to a genAI with a specific problem (or project) and they just guess wildly at "popular" solutions for "popular" problems and that is NOT why I am trying to talk to them. Verbose and imbalanced and apparently fundamentally incapable of asking short questions to prune the solution space. The nature of LLMs is that "popular" means statistically popular?
So I got to thinking that maybe "conversation" was the key. That led via AI-powered websearch to Perplexity. I gave it the short summary of the problem and it did NOT respond with a conversation, but with another long mumble, but at least it started with a number of reasonably important questions. So after some fumbling with the new interface, I answered the questions and waited without bated breath for "enlightenment". The stupid answer did not surprise me, but what offended me was the level of the response. Clearly way below the level of what I already knew--in spite of hinting that Perplexity sort of understood what a useful answer might look like. I am still convinced that there are some good answers out there--but ES (Enhanced Stupidity) is not going to help me find any of them.
New metric of AI utility: What fraction of the AI answer is actually worth reading? I usually wind up scanning about 40% trying to find the 5% or so that is helpful in any way. The other 60% is basically ignored completely, just from the section titles or the first few words of each paragraph. My bad for causing the waste of so much electricity.
And at the same time it feels so tempting to just go over to the dark side. For example, I could use the AI and tell it to jazz this post in the style of Mark Twain (as an example as I reread one of his classics) and the genAI's version of the joke would probably be much funnier than mine, and be finished almost instantly... If someone was paying me for my time, how could I resist the calls of "Join the dark side"? (Most famous quote is probably "Let the hate flow through you", which reminds me of the book about the AI not hating humans, at least for human values of the verb "hate".)
180702878
comment
byshanen
26 @03:05PM
(#65959726)
Attached to: There's a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address
ACK but close to NAK.
180689434
comment
byshanen
2026 @02:23PM
(#65957234)
Attached to: There's a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address
I wish you had included sufficient context to relate your joke to the story. (Only Funny on another high-potential topic.) However I'm still not interested enough to RTFA, so it's mostly my own fault?
However on the topic of cancellation instructions, I have an amusing anecdote to share about Rakuten Mobile, my primary phone company and formerly my primary data company. I've actually had five contracts with RM, but have now cancelled four of them. The two most recent cancellations were exceedingly painful and there may be additional pain if they have some hidden charges in there. I even made several visits to the shops involving the third cancellation, and I was able to learn enough to handle the fourth cancellation by myself (on the second or third attempt). But the way most of the attempts failed was especially infuriating. It would lead you to the final step, and then fail for no reason. That final step involved one more verification of my identity involving a six-digit one-time password, and their system fought like heck against each digit, with a countdown clock ticking towards zero. But I managed to beat the clock on my last attempt and the only question now is when to cancel my last contract. Surely there must be a better option for my basic phone service?
However mostly I'm sad by RM's incompetence. I sincerely want them to succeed. More choice is related to more freedom, and I'm a big fan of freedom. I really think RM had the potential to succeed, but they made too many bad decisions and failed to fix too many problems and I can't imagine the company succeeding from here and now.
180689286
comment
byshanen
2026 @02:10PM
(#65957216)
Attached to: There's a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address
You seem to have a thing about prisons, but it reminds me of some scammers who were operating out of a prison. Actually an immigrant detention facility in a nearby country, though I'd have to dig up the details. You can say it's a minor league prison, but they had worked out quite an interesting system of bribing the guards to overlook such trivia as burner phones smuggled into the prison for running their real business back in Japan. I remember that the crimes involved fraud, but again I'd have to dig up the details to see how far they went.
They were eventually arrested and extradited, but there are so many similar cases these months that it's hard to keep them straight. One of the most serious ones included burglary, robbery, and a murder or three, but I think that was a different gang of scammers who weren't actually operating from a joint. That case took the cops a long time to unravel, perhaps several years.
And yours was the only reply and said nothing about the money.
180680294
comment
byshanen
2026 @03:35PM
(#65955140)
Attached to: Amazon To Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores
NAK
180680274
comment
byshanen
2026 @03:32PM
(#65955132)
Attached to: Amazon To Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores
Thanks for the information though this may be a case where I would have been happier to remain ignorant. Gee, Amazon is even more evil than I thought.
At the time of my final Amazon purchase I only knew the website somehow smelled evil. Reeked worse than the big dog's m0e, as we used to joke in ancient days. No idea how bad it could get.
180680236
comment
byshanen
2026 @03:25PM
(#65955112)
Attached to: There's a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address
Rather weak FP, but at least it includes a hint of a solution. I don't know such details, but if the MS license includes any kind of cost, then it won't scale for mass scam, which is a tiny step forward.
However my negative sentiments towards Microsoft are so strong that I am not much motivated to RTFA or even click on a link for the sake of learning more. Microsoft's reputation (in my eyes, for whatever they are worth) is not being helped by Microsoft Secrets by Cusamano and Selby.
Oh yeah, the story topic. If "we" really wanted to stop the scamming spammers, then I think it could be done. The trick would be to go after the money and look at the numbers differently. The two numbers that usually get the focus are the marginal cost of email and the response rate of suckers. Both are close to zero, but as long as the scammers keep making money, they'll keep on spamming. I think the crucial numbers are different. How many people hate spam? How can the large numbers of spam haters be placed between the scammers and their suckers to shift the profits into losses? Spam haters is a gigantic number and converting any significant fraction of that number into costs against the spammers would destroy their business models. (My favorite version would involve an iterative spam analysis tool to identify the best spammer targets for the most effective countermeasures, but the way of the world (as controlled by MS, the google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, the cesspool formerly known as Twitter, and f[r]iends) is apparently "Live and let spam." Feel free to try to convince me otherwise, but...)
180666092
comment
byshanen
026 @01:11PM
(#65952734)
Attached to: Amazon To Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores
I wish you had said more in support of your Subject. As one word it might be vacuous, and you didn't really flesh out your intention in your post. Perhaps both 'problems' due to the rush to FP?
Me? I actually prefer self-service. I'm not trying to cheat the store and I'm meticulous about getting it exactly right, but I like the lower pressure. I think it's mostly the lack of an imminent feeling of someone waiting because of me. I've never visited an Amazon shop of any sort (and my second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago), but I strongly favor self-service when the option is available. The stores where it works best have lots of registers and several employees floating around so I can quickly get help from a human when something is odd. (Example from a few days ago was accidentally punching 33 when I was only buying three. (Avocados? Kiwi fruits? Something like that, but the human on the loop fixed it quickly.))
(I do want to say a bit more against Amazon. Just recently read that the main publisher of mass market paperback books has stopped publishing them. I'm a big fan of books and I blame Amazon, even though it might mostly be a technological thing driven by ebook technologies, not a specifically Amazon thing about abusing monopoly power to suck all the profits out of the publishing business and into Amazon's pockets. Or even a personal problem because I am having so much difficulty reading without a dead tree to help? (Current priority dead tree is Army of None about autonomous weapons... Lots of stuff about humans in the loop, on the loop, and locked outside of the loop. I should finish this week, but onscreen, it would be "Who knows when?"))
180661152
comment
byshanen
26 @04:18PM
(#65950892)
Attached to: Richard Stallman Was Asked: Is Software Piracy Wrong?
Most active story of the day and no Funny on today's Slashdot. Currently more than halfway to expiration. Sadness.
Funny story time about email exchanges with rms? I've had several. He actually asks helpful questions, but m conclusion is that he is fundamentally confused about what freedom is because of the overlap in English with so many other ideas that use the root "free" for various purposes. Economics is mostly bunk, but it still matters, and weak as my own understanding of money and motivations are, his are much weaker. Just my opinion, but rms provokes lots of 'em.
180654786
comment
byshanen
26 @02:26PM
(#65948334)
Attached to: AI Luminaries Clash At Davos Over How Close Human-Level Intelligence Really Is
So perhaps the AI-powered websearch didn't give that answer as some form of professional courtesy? "Houston, we have a problem with the AIs protecting each other."
180654776
comment
byshanen
26 @02:23PM
(#65948322)
Attached to: AI Luminaries Clash At Davos Over How Close Human-Level Intelligence Really Is
And not a drop to drink?
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