And yet some moderators said it was "Insightful"? Slashdot has become part of the precipitate. Definitely not part of the solution.

Mod parent Funny rather than Insightful.

You were going for Funny, right? If you have a working crystal ball then the future is even bleaker than I think, and I think it looks quite bleak.

Let me check with my latest AI-generated noddie:

FTFY

But I didn't get the Funny I was going for...

Anyway, I'm really enjoying Nexus and his extended epistemology says a lot about how the YOB functions.

Because Amazon has some excellent applied psychologists with mountains of your juiciest personal data, and they are working hard and even diabolically to make sure you shop at Amazon.

My second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. I saw what they were doing with my personal data and knew I didn't want any part of that. Nothing I've seen in the decades since then has improved my opinion of the company.

While I agree with Doctorow that Amazon is abusing its leverage over suppliers, from the sales side I suspect the primary abuse involves manipulating the search results in favor of products with the highest profit margins for Amazon. But of course that can't be proven without access to the algorithms.

Equilibrium status for each couple is actually more than four children but only the luckiest two (on average) survive to reproduce into the next generation. Ma Nature is big on equilibrium and small on exponential growth.

I think Musk deserves the top prize for destroying the lives of children. Literally starving them to death.

However on your main theme, you didn't mention bribery of politicians to rig the rules in their favor and to legalize their earlier crimes. Bribery has been the top investment for some years based on RoI analyses.

There are a lot of social truths that are subject to manipulation, and I think the "reality distortion field" goes beyond dismissing Jobs as "just a salesman". Mostly I think you should sell what the customer needs, but there are times when the customers don't yet know what they need.

I think the jury is still out on whether we need smartphones as much as we think we do. But funny anecdote from my ongoing battle with Rakuten Mobile. I used to hope for RM's success, but now I'm reduced to hoping that "There's no such thing as bad publicity"? I think I'm on my fifth RM device. Wanted to replace this lemon a year ago, but wound up spending a year trying to scrape the facts out of RM. So a few weeks ago I finally got enough "reality" data to decide on a new phone. Several shops were sold out, but the latest shop just couldn't help me without an appointment. Seems like a rather amazing way to run a business. Into the ground?

Returning to reality distortion, interesting relevant material in Nexus where Harari is talking about most communication as not related to reality. Also "levels of abstraction" that I need to remap to "reference frames" in the modern lingo of A Thousand Brains by Jeff Hawkins...

"This is the joke you were looking for."

In Japan the announcement of the prize triggered interruptions in the regular program as the headline was shown at the top of the screen, and on the evening news it was the top story. The Japanese are real big on these things, though I can't say why.

And the FP was for what? Well, I guess there is a YOB angle, but that will be way down the pipeline and still speculative. Something like "And this Nobel-winning researcher left America when this research was defunded and cancelled back in 2025..." Correlation is not causation. Perhaps part of the cause of winning that hypothetical Nobel prize will be the mental stimulation of leaving?

Good one, though the moderators didn't agree. And I already confessed I can't write funny much.

On the other hand, Boo-Boo had principles and should be embarrassed or even angered by the comparison to VP Beardo.

In a slightly perverted sense, I think these are sort of expert systems too, but their expertise is this: "What has been said, and how can I sound like the people who said it?"

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

The impression I got from his books was that most of the people didn't matter. Basically living like parasites, though of course the stories were focused on the adventures of a few heros. Couldn't figure out why the minds kept the humans around unless it was because the minds think the humans are cute. Basically the reason we humans keep so many cats around...

But I did enjoy those books and lament his passing. Good writer and now I sort of dread what LLMs will produce in his style... The only good LLM is a dead LLM, except that all of them are already dead. And their mothers were travesty generators, too.

Maybe you could try websearch?