It's not real. It's not intelligent. It's a probability matrix - a very good one, but that's what it is. When people say they 'convinced it', what actually happened was they started using language recognisable in a subset of the model's training data and the model responded using probability with data from that same subset as it's statistically closer.

In this case, they used language which is the kind floating around with people negative to AI, and so the AI constructed a sentence using data in their "negative to AI" section. Nobody got convinced of anything. It's very impressive, but it's 'just' a probability matrix.

If I call tech support or the bank or whatever, I don't want, need nor expect to see the other person's face. In general, video calling isn't widely used except in multi-person meetings, or when calling a loved one overseas. The avatar is not needed.

Also, give your AI agent a phone number where I can reach it, or give it its dedicated app or whatever, but default to "handset mode" like a regular phone call. Let me put it on speaker if and when I want to. Turning the interaction into a regular phone call will go a long way towards making the conversation feel more natural. Interacting with Siri and Alexa feels unnatural; adding an animated avatar to a disembodied voice won't help, even if the conversation itself flows naturally. I know, a phone call isn't suitable for every interaction, especially when collaborating or co-creating with someone, but it covers most cases.

But I guess a simple audio call is harder to monetize.

There's also <> but I much prefer the simple symbol. But much worse than that is the lack of support for Japanese. So let me confirm that the Japanese angle for not equal also fails thusly:

Yep, nothing there. (Or in the Japanese bit down here...) There was actually a Japanese version of Slashdot for some years. Basically the same website, but with full Japanese capability.

I was listening to this on BBC news on my commute this morning (in the UK). They said it attacked a Medicare site, which is the Australian national health system. My immediate thought was "ah, so someone in the US asked it to do something with Medicare records and forgot to limit it to just the US then". So off the AI trots to do exactly what it was asked to do - "collect records on Medicare', without any regard to geography at all. Hence this 'hack'.

I mean, I'm just guessing so that opinion is worth what you just paid for it. It does sound plausible to me though.

Thanks for clarifying. I'm sorry that I never got a chance to see the entire film, though I've seen many snippets and references over the years. I'll add yours to my watch later...

There are several senses in which free beer should not be confused with freedom. The number kept changing as I thought about different angles, but I finally settled on four as "good enough".

But Slashdot in 2026 has no way to display the not equals sign. I've tried every trick I could think of. Time to ask the AI?

No, AC. No one wants you. There is such a thing as a sock puppet too stupid.

For this story "We" is Microsoft, but really it's a broader thing, and it goes back to the math. So many people hate the criminals and would even be glad to help shut down the criminals, but Microsoft doesn't want any help on that scale. That would involve training people to be wiser and more cautious, but Microsoft prefers suckers who will obey the ads and send money. In Microsoft's case, that's for software that is so buggy and horrendous that criminals LOVE it. But Gawd save Microsoft from well educated customers!

And that's why it's a broader story. Not just Microsoft getting rich off off the mass production of dunderheads. It's also how they sell scented soap, preposterous cars, and even dunderhead politicians. A few unscrupulous and extremely greedy people at the top are raking in the wealth and the LAST thing they want is for everyone else to get smarter. Oh, and oof course that's why they LOVE their vision of AI, where most people will be completely mentally crippled by dependence on AI. (But they are sure they are too smart to waste their own "vast intellects" on trivial questions that merely elicit more AI slop. (Also why they regard "benevolent" government as such a vast threat.))

Exactly. "like if startup school Y Combinator and Peter Thiel's build-a-company-instead of-college Fellowship Program had a baby" sounds like pure nightmare fuel. Like learning to swim in a shark tank.

These days I'm actually inclined to see it as running backwards, but after all that is sort of how evolution works. The "pressure" for new species is largely created when overspecialized species go extinct, thereby making available large "energy pools" that are no longer being exploited "efficiently".

I think I mostly agree with your reply, though I think vestigial features can also be useful when conditions regress. I have read a book or two recently that was going more deeply into the modular part of it.

Very productive story and this is my vote for Funniest. (Never get a mod point to bestow.)

However I'm not sure I'm getting the point of the joke on this best of all possible jokes. If it's the "L", then why not Lame Intelligence or Loser Intelligence or possibly even Lost Intelligence? Or maybe I just can't see Ludicrous anymore?

I think you're making a good point, but Subjectively focusing on the karmic impact on yourself is too meta... You're taking too much credit because so many Slashdot identities have a minor reality problem these years?

So I want to tilt it to go for Funny-not-really.

There is more to education than learning how to love money harder and longer. Education is now learning to love money longer and harder.

I think the funniest part of Libertarianism as a fake philosophy is their lack of understanding of their own worship words. At least I've yet to detect any deep understanding, but maybe it's my own confusion showing after too many decades of trying to understand such things. What it seems to come down to for Libertarians is something like "I should be free to do whatever I feel like doing to get more money and the only legitimate purpose of 'government' is to make sure the victims can't complain about any of my negative externalities."

So to completely muddle the water:

[infinity symbol] << money << time << [infinity symbol]

#1^2 Freedom == (Meaningful + Truthful - Coercion^2) Choice{~5} [not equal symbol] (Beer^4+ | Speech | Trade)

Just a couple of mnemonic games to put tags on some of the complexities, not even mathematical philosophy. No units that I can figure out, let alone the measurement errors. "You're pegging my coercion-tometer, but I still say no." (Or vice versa^3 as "I'm pegging your coercion-tometer, but you still say no?")

Actually, Ayn Rand proposed something exactly like this...

Mod parent Funny, though I think it could have been funnier if "bombs" was worked into the joke somewhere. Maybe something like "The YOB should have sent smarter bombs"?

My Subject is the joke I was looking for. Low hanging fruit. Of course. I really wish I had more of a humorous imagination rather than just minor UI improvements to tell Claude to implement...

Anyway I'm sure Peter Thiel and Elon Must lose lots of sleep over killing children. Milliseconds and milliseconds. At least every couple of years. Though it's actually the bad press coverage that is annoying them.

"there is no right or expectation of privacy in public"

I agree (UK so different laws, but the principle is the same). However I increasingly feel this needs to be revised somehow. I'll admit up front I don't have all the answers here, but just intuitively it feels to me that this principle predates the era of cheap, automated mass surveillance whether government or private.

In the UK, privacy is protected via the Human Rights Act and UK GDPR. It provides for some level of protection, but it really seems to me that specific rules to address this kind of blanket recording need to start coming in. The definition of 'commercial', for instance. Is it commercial use if I record you on my glasses and then post it to Youtube? Arguably yes, since YouTube is a company and derives revenue from that. Same for Meta. But it's very, very far from clear to me if that claim has enough weight to prevail. A specific set of rules to address what is essentially a new phenomenon needs to be brought in.

Recording is not new. Photographing is not new. But the ease and scale via which it can be achieved, manipulated, tracked...that is new.

I see plenty of people around me living a life without work, or doing only a little work on their own terms, who are not in jail or dead, and often seem pretty happy. You have options. But no one is going to hand them to you on a platter. Capitalist societies have created an utterly unprecedented standard of living, not for the ultra wealthy, but for the masses. And social democracies have taken the edge off capitalism by ensuring a minimum standard of living that is still pretty good, to those who cannot provide for themselves. But screw you if you demand others to provide you with a living, instead of working for it yourself.

With that said, things did get out of control. Regulatory oversight is a joke, and so is antitrust regulation (or the enforcement of it). Companies becoming too large for our own good, and private wealth growing so large that they can simply buy politicians, legislators and governments. That's nothing new, but one would hope that we learned from past mistakes, and taken measures against that.

Though in all of this, the machines are merely tools, none of this happened because of the machines. Social media and AI made control easier, but before that people were controlled by other means. In my own country, there is not much variety of opinion on television, and almost all of the national and regional newspapers (as well as a TV channel) have fallen in the hands of 2 wealthy families, and it shows: variety in opinion has given way to a sameness, across publications that used to span the spectrum from left to right. And it's not just the ultra rich pulling the strings; here in Europe, politicians seem to be withdrawing within a class of their own, with their own agenda. People increasingly voting for radical right parties is not because people have become more right wing, or because they have been unduly influenced by AI or social media, but because they have become disillusioned with the mainstream politicians.