In spite of the UID, you sound new around here.

But the joke I was looking for was about his/Reddit's contribution to the enshitification.

I actually started networking with audio modems and BBSes and later found usenet. Yeah, Eliza existed, but wasn't fooling anyone or passing any Turing tests. However near the end of those days one of my friends wrote a pretty impressive travesty generator, and you could argue that sort of thing was the great-granddad 10 times removed of ChatGPT and f[r]iends. (With the obligatory apologies to Rocky and Bullwinkle for the animated version. (Anyone have a URL for that bit of the cartoon? Only a few seconds long, but I can't find a short one. Boris did it, right?))

Did you read the entire story, follow the links, and also "do your own research"?

No, I'm not going to bother with so much work, but on the face of it, it seems the story just says they "captured" some of the loot. I'm pretty sure they didn't go to Cambodia and arrest anyone and don't even want to speculate how the passwords and account information were obtained. Near as I can tell, what the story means is that they were able to transfer a bunch of cryptocurrency into their control, but I don't even believe in the reported value of the Bitcoins.

Possibly related anecdote? Lots of recent warnings from the Japanese police about phone calls from fake police. However I can't even tell what's going on there. Might be reduced to personal offense because the police hate it when scammers work off of their reputation? And the international aspect may be making it difficult to prosecute?

Did you get that joke from TikTok? If not, I'm not buying the fries. (After all the levels of negation, I'm not sure whether or not I ordered the fries...)

However there must be some transmission primary source of the viral meme. My first guess was TikTok, but no mention in the discussion. Perhaps yet more evidence of the irrelevance of Slashdot? I knew I was an old fuddy duddy, but I didn't want to project to everyone around here.

Solution approach time? Confirm the deaths of some of the old UIDs and reissue them to some hip youngsters as a kind of enlistment incentive or bonus? Why would anyone "fashionable" want to join Slashdot now with a 7- or 8-digit UID? Or maybe Slashdot is up to 9 digits?

As if that's different from any other "Sponsored Item" search results?

I really look forward to more widespread adoption of AI search in listings. I hate spending hours having to manually dig through listings to see if the product listed *actually* meets my needs or building up spreadsheets to compare feature sets. This should be automatable. We have the tech to do so now.

And nary a joke to be seen? Sadness.

You're feeding the diversionary sock puppet and propagating its stupid Subject. We don't need to increase the world's supply of stupidity. We need to find a way to convert anonymous stupidity into useful work. That would be the big victory against entropy!

On the story I think the point should be the reverse-imperialism. The Chinese government could have gone with ODF, but they deliberately preferred to insist on doing it their way--and they apparently have even gone the extra kilometer to annoy the rest of the world. I wouldn't be too surprised if they decided to drop the metric system, too, replacing it in the Middle Kingdom with some new system based on traditional Chinese units...

Funny anecdote about the triumph of Microsoft in Japan. Perhaps related to a major defeat in China, too, since I've heard that vertical Chinese writing has mostly been abandoned in China... Pre-computer context in Japan is that the traditional writing system for Japanese was from top to bottom and then continuing to the next column on the left, so the columns go from right to left on the page. In the Meiji period they started experimenting with some horizontal writing, but they did it from right to left. Later on they switched horizontal writing so it goes from left to right. But all of this is kind of weird because when they write individual characters, the primary direction is mostly from left to right with top to bottom kind of mixed in... However the basic idea makes most sense as a bunch of boxes to fill in with characters, and there are standard pages for writing drafts (by hand) that are laid out that way.

When computers came along, the Japanese developed a word processor called Ichitaro that "thought about" the document in the same way. I used several versions of Ichitaro during those years. It was closely linked to an input conversion system called ATOK for entering the Chinese characters (using the monstrous Shift-JIS encodings). After several years of struggle against Microsoft, the Word approach won out, sort of, though there are still places where vertical writing is used in Japan... (Most of my Japanese reading is vertical, and I still think that makes the horizontal Japanese tests kind of unfair or unrealistic.)

(So can anyone explain why there are two Nihongo Noryoku Shiken with different English names?)

[Now has anyone written a good joke about the story?]

...China, obviously.

Looks like you didn't want to feed the troll, even though you got me to look to see if there was any connection between your comment and the coward's. However you forgot to change the sock puppet's Subject. Sometimes the bogus Subject appears to be the only objective.

Actually, I should have gone for funny, as in:

How dare you try to cancel your subscription to the fancy tea of the month club?!?

I've been hosting my open-source projects on Github for years.

Why you ask? After all, isn't every open-source and free software advocate's duty to stay clear away from Microsoft?

Here's my reason: I only use the git part of Github. I don't use any of Microsoft's proprietary crap on top of it.

Therefore, Microsoft has no vendor lock-in on me: my projects are one git-push away from being hosted elsewhere. I waste their resources by making them host my massive files for free and they have absolutely nothing to show for it - no revenue, no private data to monetize, nothing.

But the minute Microsoft starts getting annoying, my repos are gone. I'll move them to Codeberg and I will gladly pay for the hosting in the form of donations.

When you have 32 kilobytes of RAM and a 1 MHz processor, you need all the programming talent you can get to squeeze the most performances out of them.

When you have 32 gigabytes and dozens of cores, any incompetent code monkey can churn out the same application in Visual Basic or Python.

Resources don't make your computer faster. They empower incompetent and sloppy developers, who crucially are paid less than good ones, so their boss can make more money.

I remember in the last 90's / early 2000's discussing with a colleague how it was possible that X allocated 2 megabytes for an empty window, just for sitting there on the screen.

To get an SLS-equivalent payload to the lunar surface, it will take 8-16 Starship launches

You're extremely confused. SLS cannot land on the moon in the way that the (lunar variant) Starship can. It can only launch Orion to the moon. Orion is 8 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. Starship is 52 meters tall and 9 meters in diameter. These are not the same thing.

SLS/Orion missions are expected to cost approximately $4,2B each. If you fully disposed of every Starship, the cost for 8-16 launches would be $720M-$1,44B. But of course the entire point is to not dispose of them; the goal is to get it down to where, like airplanes, most of the cost is propellant. The propellant for a single launch is $900k. Even if they don't get anywhere near propellant costs, you're still looking at orders of magnitude cheaper than a single SLS/Orion mission.

By far, most of SpaceX's launches are for Starlink, which is self-funded.
Nextmost is commercial launches. SpaceX does the lion's share of global commercial launches.
Government launches are a tiny piece of the pie. They don't "subsidize" anything, they're just yet another minor revenue stream.

The best you can say is that they charge more for government launches, but everyone charges more for government launches than commercial launches. You can argue over whether that's justified or not (launch providers have to do a lot of extra work for government launches - the DoD usually has a lot of special requirements, NASA usually demands extra safety precautions, government launches in general are more likely to want special trajectories, fully expended boosters, etc), but overall, the government is a bit player in terms of launch purchases.

to serve up advertisement and privacy-invadind SaaS at lightning speed. I can't wait!

Currently reading Nexus and feeling increasingly bleak about the future...

Funny small world story. I actually walked across a Ferrari today. Yeah, the proper idiom is "ran across", but I was walking at the time. (Can't really recall if I've ever seen one before that wasn't in a dealer's showroom, though I recently spotted a second BYD in the wild.)

Out on my daily walk when I noticed an unusual looking car by the side of the street ahead, so I crossed the street to get a better look. When I got there it turned out to be a Ferrari. And the proud new owner was telling a couple of friends about the car.

Crazy and funny. No place around here where such a car can be driven at any significant speed. By here I mean the entire country.

Disclaimer needed? More than half my life since I stopped driving. Only ride in a car a few times a year, and some years get skipped.