The slashdot moderation system is a broken-down piece of junk which gets abused ALL THE TIME, just as with this post. There is not the slightest troll-like thing about it.

A troll is someone who posts an INFLAMMATORY message with the intent of upsetting the reader. A troll is MALICIOUS.

This post is eminently reasonable. It has a moderate tone, not inflammatory in the least. It is interesting and clearly an opinion. It is sincere.

If you look at my ID, you will see that I have been a reader here for a very long time now. The quality of discussion here has always been a mixed bag, but moderation at least made it possible to quickly surface the interesting posts. Over the course of the last decade, however, moderation has been abused not to identify actually bad content, but to suppress disfavored content.

If you disagree with a post and you mod them down because of it, you are abusing your privilege. When you are a moderator, you are to judge the QUALITY of the conversation, not the CONTENT. No one elected you Chief Censor.

Slashdot desperately needs to add a feedback mechanism to report abusive moderation, and to ACT on that feedback by removing moderation privileges from abusers. Slashdot can still be interesting and worthwhile to read, but not if the site runners allow crap mods to proliferate like homeless drug abusers over-taking the sidewalks.

The interwebs are full of loons. LLMs are just vast rooms of cracked funhouse mirrors. Proceed accordingly.

I am most definitely a form-follows-function guy when it comes to tools and appliances. My impression of Dyson products has always been that they design the look and feel first, and then iterate like crazy until they can make the damn thing work at a minimal level. They find tons of ready buyers because the look and feel is truly awesome, and they sell it as a truly awe-inspiring price to match.

At an early point in the development of the Internet, I was called in as a software consultant to prepare a technical recommendation on how to stop people stealing music using the Internet. The Internet, I told them, is the world's largest digital copying machine, and the only way to stop it from being used to copy music would be to build an anti-Internet of equal size. Since that is entirely impossible and ridiculous, you need to stop trying to figure out how to constrain distribution, and instead use it to your advantage to make money *by* distribution.

I was not asked back to complete that project.

Thankfully, Google figured out how to do exactly that. It made deals with the major licensing agencies. It added a way to automatically identify content so copyright holders could be properly credited. It gave copyright holders the choice of either suppressing their content or taking the ad revenue. It took several decades, but eventually it became clear that it made much more sense -- and much more money! -- to let Google allow the content but redirect the revenue. This wasn't always perfect, but it's getting better. If you are a premium subscriber, part of your fee gets distributed to copyright holders in the same way (and that's one of the reasons the fee is so large, comparatively.) Google itself takes a rational administrative cut, similar to the cut that managers and agents have taken in the business. And, they're working on adding a content creator subscription model, so that directed subscriptions can be sent to creators, and not just ad revenue shares.

Again, this has not been an easy transition. Some copyright holders, especially music, continue to hold onto the belief that they can make more money working outside YouTube. It's still way too easy to game Google's copyright Content ID system.

But the people at Google are pretty smart. YouTube is a global phenomenon, for good reason.

I don't say that lightly. The amount of useful information I've obtained from YouTube videos is amazing, and totally unexpected. One of the most important properties on the web today.

"are *not* from another US government cut-out".

When, oh when is slashdot going to give us a damn EDIT feature?

As we've learned after watching so many international organizations come to a complete halt after USAID's funding was withdrawn, the US spends a *lot* of money on "research", and a lot of that finds its way into the EU, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia.

So the French and the Germans are launching multi-million dollar initiatives to "sponsor" researchers. I'm fine with that, as long as those millions are from yet another US government cut-out.

Frankly, we're spending way too much here. We absolutely need to get back on our financial feet. Something's got to give. We can't fund every body's pet research project. Go get your own money.

FB Marketplace works very well, as evidenced by its growing popularity. You can't argue with success. It should be no surprise that FB is trying to capture more and more of its community. Every social media network -- especially X -- wants to do the same.

This is room for much more consolidation. Personally, I think folding online media service offerings (movies, news, music, etc.) into a user's primary social media account is a great fit. How many different content services are consumers really going to pay for? Anything more than 2-3 I think is just too many, no matter the cost. Besides, you already have your circle of friends and contacts at the social media site, folding these other services into that circle just gives you all that much more to converse about.

One of Trump's "gifts" is he causes people to show their true colors through their reactions. I never really realized what a leftist bent slashdot has developed until reading the commentary on posts such as this one. It's pretty remarkable. Sadly, it also makes slashdot a whole lot less interesting. It's not like there aren't enough other communities where people all sing from the same hymn book.

+1 Stop expecting a normal experience from subpar hardware.

I've been using ChromeOS on an decently capable laptop for several years now, and I absolutely agree that a closer/more selective alignment of hardware with the OS produces a vastly better and more productive experience than the come-one-come-all approach to hardware. ChromeOS, actually, is the only OS on the market that "just works", to use Apple's famous marketing phrase from years gone by. Everything is simple, direct, and fast -- provided you don't believe the hype that you can buy cheap hardware yet still get good performance.

Apple hardware is in a class all to itself, absolutely. I purchased this year a Mac Mini M4 to form the core of a desktop music studio, and it has been absolutely outstanding. The best deal in hardware in a decade, easily.

Windows OS -- especially the desktop! -- is a nightmare to me. The desktop is full of dark UI designs, there are pop ups all over the place (even in menus, what?!), advertisements, advertisements, and more advertisements, unasked-for automatic upgrades and reboots, bloat ware everywhere. Every time I go to the store to try out the latest version, I walk away horrified within minutes. Totally unusable.

If all it took to solve the problem was money, it would have been solved long ago. The problem with the schools are the people we've hired to run them. Low performance is always, always a staffing issue.

Start by outlawing teacher's unions, then introduce merit-based pay, with "merit" defined as a baseline student academic performance metric, and then fire any teacher who cannot deliver the baseline results after a year.

Now I treasure these regular posts of nonsense for the entertainment value. If it's Tuesday, we get a Guardian cross-post. Somebody has to pay the bills around here.

Reading through these comments, it struck me that not a single critique here was specific to the software development challenges. The closest one I read made the fairly innocuous point that "large COBOL applications are complex". Why yes, that is very true.

More to the point, not a single critique here provided any alternative. No recognition that a mission-critical application with 60 million lines of code written in a dead computer language is a disaster waiting to happen. No suggestion on what should be done instead of just kicking the can down the road. Not even any recognition that we probably can't even tell IF the system is working properly. You'll find lots of people parroting the line that "SS never missed a payment", but there are 20 million people in the system listed as active who are over the age of 120. What is your definition of "working"?

What I'd like to read are some discussions about how one transforms 60 million lines of anything. What techniques are available? How well do they work? I'd like to read about COBOL, specifically. My brief forays into that language impressed me with its formality and strictness. I would imagine finding repeating patterns to not be that difficult, and patterns are the basis for all transforms.

Come on, people, stop just repeating the talking points and let's act like technologists here.