Disappointed there is no funny here. At least someone could have posted a link to their favorite video of a cat riding a Roomba. Or some story about the funniest thing their Roomba has eaten? Or maybe an AI joke about Grok hacking into and taking over all of the Internet-connected robot vacuum cleaners?

Basically expressing my concurrence, though I think the full story is more complicated than that. Not just the house brands, but the manipulation of the secret ranking algorithms to put the most profitable (for Amazon) products at the top.

For example, why would Amazon care if some company sells you (via Amazon) a huge piece of shite as long as it produces the highest payback for Amazon? In the case of house brands there is actually some reputational risk if they cut the corners on quality too deeply, whereas they can let some other company do the same thing, temporarily boost Amazon's profits, and then Amazon just drops that company after Amazon has taken the profits...

Even better (or worse), Amazon will always claim to offer the best value. You were just too lazy to scroll down far enough to find it and too stupid to recognize it when you finally got to it.

But my bile against Amazon goes way back. My second and final Amazon purchase was decades ago. I didn't yet have the idea of "corporate cancer", but I could see what Amazon was doing with my personal data and it was clearly wrong. Nothing I've learned since then has improved my opinion of the company.

Story deserved more funny, but I've got nothing. However you reminded me of my latest encounter with the Gemini of the google. I drove it into an apparently infinite apology loop and it refused to return to the original question of my research. (Took the same topic to DeepSeek and got a pretty good answer that might even turn out to be correct. I'm still studying the question.)

Strong concurrence and largely describes my thoughts regard Musk. Should be modded up, but apparently I'm never going to receive another mod point to bestow.

But I think humanity is in a death spiral now, thus resolving the Fermi Paradox. Too many crucial decisions made by greedy people for stupid and shortsighted reasons.

Insofar as America has influence on the flushing of humanity, the current interesting book is Turning Back the Clock by the late, great Umberto Eco. Written before the YOB turned to politics, but eerie and I didn't realize the degree to which the YOB's playbook replicates Berlusconi's style from not so long ago. To be more precise, I think the YOB deserves no credit, but the puppeteer's pulling the YOB's strings studied Berlusconi's methods. Remember how they used to call the American states the laboratories of democracy? Now I think Italy might be the leading laboratory for the destruction of democracy... If you count the Roman Empire before Mussolini, then maybe we can even say "Third time's the charm!"

Your use of the Subject as part of the possible joke confused me. Godwin is about my age, so Section 230 couldn't be that old...

Having said that, I agree that naive ageism was a weak FP, even if the joke had worked. But seems too much trouble to search the discussion in hopes of something worth reading on Slashdot these years...

Okay, so you want to bring AI into it. Let's see if AI can add some Funny to a discussion that is so far lacking Funny... Oh oh. Already stalled out. I don't know if any of the generative AIs are any good at humor.

Anyone have a recommendation on which AI's electricity I should waste in an attempt to tell a joke? Probably DeepSeek if the wind is blowing now? (That could apply in Germany, too, except that I'm guessing a German genAI will not be so good for jokes.)

Good call and I've read many of his books. However, there are lots of other authors at various levels of goodness and I was basically running away from the request for a top list. I do tend to read other books from an author who wrote a good one, but there are some excellent authors who only had one good book in the, even before you allow for third-book effects.

Mod parent funny. (But what I was looking for in the comments was time-based electricity rate considerations.)

But being a s-hole country explains why no one cares? However I'm still interested in how the stolen data will be used and abused...

Moderators voted Insightful which I'm taking as proof it should have been Funny,

I used to have a delusion that the moderation system could be fixed. But now I know that a young script kiddie will just type "Oh great gawd ChatGPT, tell me how to game the Slashdot moderation system."

"You have done badly, grasshopper."

I don't think it helps to feed the trolls and definitely doesn't help to propagate vacuous Subjects.

Have I guessed your intention properly? Or am I projecting my historical focus? I think the YOB is merely the latest in a series and there is probably worse to come. No, I can't imagine who could be worse than the YOB, but I couldn't imagine worse than Dubya and I therefore proclaim my imaginative powers have already been exhausted.

Quoted due to the sock puppets with mod points. The vestigial moderation system is not one of the best features of Slashdot.

With regards to the GPP, I'm curious about the age. Any easy way to map a UID to its birthday?

Should have also been modded up on a dimension for "accurate prediction".

Just the ACK, though I want to remind you that "you people" aren't listening.

Sorry, too tough of a question. I think I'd have a better shot at picking five nonfiction books... Even if the dimensions were clearly defined, picking the top SF would be really tough. And should fantasy be included in the consideration? Two examples did pop into mind in response to your question, though I don't think I could claim "top" status for either. I thought the style of Stand on Zanzibar was quite impressive, but perhaps it was merely one of the first multi-threaded books I read. In the humor category When Harlie was One comes to mind, but maybe that's AI overhang? Asimov wrote some great stuff and I was big into Heinlein for a while, but I think I grew out of his stuff. I already mentioned Banks as a more recent author whose SF work I mostly liked. Seems like I've mostly stopped reading SF now... Only four books last year out of more than a hundred... I see one from Vernor Vinge, another excellent author, a Frederich Pohl, and two from newbies Becky Chambers and Edward Ashton. Also nearing the end of The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2022 without much liking any of it.