Mod parent funny-not-really-funny.

But the SCOTUS disagreed with you by creating absolute presidential immunity out of nothing.

I know it's silly to contemplate solutions in the context of Slashdot, whatever it has devolved into, but I keep thinking about that new recusal thing: "A nonpartisan Justice may compel two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves." I think that could create the incentive to go upstream in fixing the problem, whereas every other solution proposal I've seen simply accepts the underlying problem as incurable.

Clarifications in response to polite requests, though I'd actually prefer to see a better solution approach that has a better chance of being implemented. (I think the most likely path to the recusal rule would basically require an escalation of political threats... I'm not saying "That trick never works", but it's always a dangerous path.)

burn down institutions that actually work; they are too stupid to understand how they work.

Khrushchev would love that our government is full of people who disagree with the principle of Chesterton's Fence. It's appalling that "conservatives" have become so far to the left of "The Left."

Vote conservative: vote Democrat.

c/it's writing/it's worth writing/

I suppose my main point about AI would be that people want oracles and AI is just the latest version of that. I'm saying (or trying and failing to say) that's a bad idea, but don't feel like it's writing another summary of my latest experiment with Pearl Harbor and Midway... However, the AIs are changing so rapidly and one of the main objectives is to make them appear to be better oracles.

On slashdot.jp I could sort of read most of it, especially since it was largely echoing this website, but I can't write decently in Japanese so I lost interest without the interactivity.

Brings back the memories, both for the store and my old memories of tomatoes and other fruits and vegetables.

I think you'd be better off to write more briefly and with tighter focus. I put some effort into trying to figure it out, but decided some of it doesn't make sense and some of it is just talking about evolutionary modules. Just now halfway through What is Thought? where he is taking the position that much of human intelligence is encoded in DNA in the form of modules that worked for certain kinds of evolutionary challenges.

You're so cute when you're naive and blathering. And your grammar wears funny army boots, too.

Basically the ACK, but I'm sure none of the tomatoes I've seen in the last half of my life were from Florida.

My friends had trouble believing it when I did it, especially since I was basically jumping without knowing where or how I was going to land. I remember at the little quasi-garage (no garage involved) sale where I was disposing of the last of my stuff that one of my programmer friends bought my toolbox because he thought I would want it again when I returned... Never say Dave or his partner Frank again... (But it bothers me I can't remember the name of the woman who was really the key to keeping Omega in business... After she got married and left the company...)

Too early in the discussion to hope for Funny, but usually there are some shallow comments marked as Insightful for reasons that escape my analytic vision... But I'm going for Interesting this time around, which may produce Funny as a side effect.

But I have to start by digging back to the Fermi Paradox? Maybe there are no "long-lived" evolved species out there to talk with us because all such species encounter a fundamental reproductive crisis when their technology reaches some critical threshold--and we're crossing it now. I'm not sure if sexual reproduction is crucial for evolution, but as it works for us, the outlook seems bleak. As Ma Nature sees sustainable equilibrium, each couple needs four or more descendants, but only two are allowed to survive to reproduce. Rinse the random gene-pool shuffle and repeat, ad infinitum, except that the species will still go extinct at some point in geologic time. (It's a human delusion to define that as progress?)

We have two human problems with this situation. I think the big one is that we have to love all the randomly shuffled genes equally because we can't tell the good ones from the bad ones, and even the best shuffles produce completely helpless babies who will die without LOTS of love. I have a solution approach, but I'm sure you won't like it. One of those utilitarian things.

The lesser problem (as I see it) is that women get most of their "marginal satisfaction" from the first child, but the pains of the reproductive process don't get smaller per child. I'm having trouble imagining why a sane woman would want four (or more) children, especially if the "sustainable" expectation is that only two of them will live long enough to reproduce. Then there's the distortions of modern medicine such that "bad shuffles" are "reasonably" expected to survive anyway... Some of the religious loonies have solutions, but I don't like their approaches even before the logical inconsistencies and impossibilities interfere.

I think the tomatoes are the worst (and they did get mentioned in some of the comments). They have actually bred them, including genetic manipulation, for nice even color on the outside, but the insides... You don't want to look inside today's tomatoes.

On the original banana topic, I would prefer to know when the bananas are too old. For that reason I respect the browning of bananas. Don't welcome it, but I prefer it to fake immortality.

These months I prefer to think of them as orange-nosing Rumplican cowards versus the Dumbocrats who chase flying elephants. However I left the States a long time ago. The future is always inscrutable and I can't pretend that I knew any details about what was going to happen, but I just felt the direction was wrong and it has only gotten worse and faster. Finally decided the only thing to do is to try harder to stop caring. NOT any sort of constructive solution approach.

I'll go ahead an add a little AI joke since the story is about the AI chatbots. I just had the wild idea of asking this question: "What percentage of the Japanese pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor died at Midway?" Both genAIs instantly provided their definitive answers, along with historical data and explanations of their analyses. But one said more than 90% and the other said less than 25%. But they both sounded completely confident about their answers.

What's next? If we accept this, then the next thing will be that public officials won't be allowed to sell Amway/Herbalife, heroin, or fake patents? This is viciously partisan, clearly intended to keep a certain major political party from running for office.

Thanks for clarifying. I hadn't heard it that way, but usually some form with a J, such as Jina or Jhina. Yet I could have picked up your intention from the repetition. The YOB may have an additional delusion about saying any lie three times to make it true?

I'm no longer looking forward to his disappearance. Rather I'm expecting the next version to be worse. Too many cases over the decades of "Surely the next one can't be worse..." Dan Quayle looks so quaintly harmless now.

Stop insulting the poor but honest and hard-working vultures.

(Low hanging joke I was looking for, but a pretty good FP anyway.)

Funny anecdote time. I once worked for a lawyer, at least technically. He had the degree and passed the bar, but never practiced law. He also had an MBA and had spent some years working for a major bank before taking over his father's real estate company (where I was the database programmer). Also a drinking buddy, and he really surprised me with some of the negative things he said about lawyers and real estate people, but especially about bankers.