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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 259 declined, 47 accepted (306 total, 15.36% accepted)

Submission + - Is there a doctor from a little school in Boston in the house? (bbc.com)

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: I think this is way too late as a s submission, so the story must have flown through Slashdot already. But without even leaving a top comment behind? (My schedule is basically once day, which is why I wish some stories moved more slowly...)

Insofar as America used to have a great education system, I don't see what part of destroying Harvard is part of "great". And at this point you'd have to be a rather weird foreigner to be smart enough to get into Harvard while being stupid enough to want to...

If I had seen the story in time, I did want to offer the too obvious joke: "Not fair to compare the YOB to a bull in a China shop. The bull might be smart enough to notice how much damage he's causing."

(YOB is Yuge Orange Buffoon. Excuse me, but I decline to contribute any free publicity to the YOB's brand. I don't think it would bother me if I never again saw the capitalized usage of the word...)

Submission + - What book would you like to read? (lithub.com)

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: I wonder if there is some kind of weird parallel thinking going on around here. I had NOT heard about the "virtual" books recommended in the "Chicago Sun-Times" until just now, but yesterday I was thinking of various GAIvatar applications.

In particular, a GAIvatar of a living author could be used to update the author's books to reflect the latest data in the field, and the living author could evaluate the "faithfulness" of each new edition to make sure it really conforms to the author's intentions--but needing only a tiny fraction of the time that it would require to update the earlier edition "by the author's own hand". Especially handy in rapidly advancing fields such as computer science or medical genetics. If the author wants to be diligent, it would mostly require reading the new research to make sure the GAIvatar is "reacting" appropriately. Super (but due?) diligence would call for trying to confirm the GAIvatar hadn't overlooked anything important... Which reminds me that normal due diligence would require confirming that none of the new evidence referenced for the new edition wasn't a mere figment of GAI hallucination.

When you move to the dead authors, the GAIvatar possibilities become even more interesting. I'm not sure how much personalized data you'd need to create an "accurate" GAIvatar of a famous author, but I'm thinking there are a number of Roman authors who left behind substantial bodies of work. Perhaps we even have enough of Aristotle's work to create an Aristotle GAIvatar? At least one that could recreate highly plausible versions of his missing works? And how about Buddha or Confucius?

Oh yeah. I better clarify the GAIvatar thing again. I would think there should be a standard term out there, but I haven't seen one, "GAIvatar" is a portmanteau of Generative AI avatar, where a particular person is the primary model for the training. As applied to each author, the objective is not just to capture the author's style, but even something of the soul as revealed in the author's writings.

Of course it would be a funnier joke if the story is also an AI hallucination. I saw it in a number of "reputable" sources, but all of them might have been conned...

Submission + - AskSlashdot: Which computer security threat scares you the most? (microsoft.com) 2

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: And even better, do you have any useful solution approaches to solve that threat?

Actually, I have two threats in mind today, so I can't even answer my own question for "most". One might be an imminent threat due to Microsoft's combination of malevolent incompetence and lack of liability, which the other threat seems more distant but more clearly on the evil side and probably less bounded. I'm not even going to claim these are serious threats that you should consider. More in the way of examples, though it would be great if someone could convince me "There's nothing to see or worry about here."

The Microsoft threat might be affecting you. My path to get there is from the Settings page for my Microsoft Account. For example, from the gear icon on outlook.live.com. Under General you can find "Privacy and data" and *boom*. You're stuck. You can't get anywhere from there. But if you go to the security basics page. Oh wait. You can't get there from that place and I can't send you the URL because of Microsoft has bastardized it... Well, what about... "Good luck, Mr Phelps."

Anyway, if you somehow find your way to the "recent activity" page you may be surprised. Mine shows an endless string of "Unsuccessful sign-in" attempts. About one an hour from all over the world. Are these related to the roughly daily fake requests for one-time authentication codes? Dictionary searches of common passwords? Harmless, or maybe they are more sinister. Is there any way I can see the fake passwords? It would certainly annoy me if the attempts are gradually converging on the actual password... (Even though I don't use the Outlook account for anything and even though I never voluntarily use any Microsoft software or websites. Only under duress, but I but most of you, too.)

The other threat that's bothering me is the GAIvatar thing. I hope we are "enlightened beings" who could not be easily copied for Generative AI avatars, but I don't feel sanguine about it. And I definitely think there are some folks I know whose responses are so predictable that I could not tell them apart from a GAIvatar... Basically I see two threats here, but you may see others. One is simple prediction, using the GAIvatar to figure out what a person is most likely to do, but the more serious threat is control, by using the GAIvatar to test various prompts until the proper buttons are discovered to manipulate the human model. Maybe you see worse possibilities?

And I don't really see any solutions anywhere. At the "social" levels where solutions are supposed to appear they appear to be a bunch of benign incompetents, malevolent incompetents, or feckless incompetents. And some of them check two or three boxes at random...

Submission + - How much schadenfreude is bad for me? (bbc.com)

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: I'm just submitting the story to be part of the rush, but I'm actually not a bit surprised that Zelenskyy told the orange buffoon to take a flying leap. Nor that Cheeto Jesus was caught completely off guard. He wouldn't recognize an actual patriot until one bit him on the arse in his own precious office.

Mostly I just want to add another joke to the melee: How can he change the subject now? But making a new sales pitch for his vanity cryptocoin: "Buy my crypto-coins and the decryption keys for everything are included! What do you mean it doesn't work like that? Elong [sic] told me!"

Submission + - AskSlashdot: What would it require for you to trust an AI? (win.tue.nl) 2

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Do you trust AI in general? What about DeepSeek in particular? Can anyone even explain what "trust" means these days? For example, I bet most of you trust Amazon and Amazon's secret AIs more than you should...

Recently I've been dabblling with a number of the GAI websites. Of course if I was a serious scientist then I'd have my own hardware and be running local tests. Or at least I'd be rooting around arXiv to see what the serious scientists are saying... All I have (as usual) are too many questions and too few jokes. Especially funny jokes. I wouldn't recognize a funny AI joke until after the AI had pwned me to pieces...

Actually the funniest joke I can think of on this topic involves DeepSeek. One of my experimental conversations on that website involved the topic of trust. DeepSeek turned out to be extremely good at explaining why I should not trust it. Every computer security problem I ever thought of or heard about and some more besides. "So what's that got to do with the price of tea in China?"

It's like the accountant who gets asked what 2 plus 2 is. After locking the doors and shading all the windows, the accountant whispers in your ear: "What do you want it to be?" And the price of tea in China is whatever Xi wants it to be! I bet you assumed the accountant was male, right? So the next questions are whether DeepSeek can do accounting or windows?

So let me start with some questions about DeepSeek in particular:

Have you run it locally and compared the responses with the website's responses? My hypothesis is that your mileage should differ...

It's well established that DeepSeek doesn't want to talk about many "political" topics. Is that based on a distorted model of the world? Or is the censorship implemented in the query interface after the model was trained? My hypothesis is that it must have been trained with lots of data because the cost of removing all of the bad stuff would have been prohibitive. Defining "bad" doesn't matter because I bet everyone agrees the Internet is chock full of bad data these years. Unless perhaps another AI filtered the data first?

What does trust mean? What sort of responses am I hoping to see? How many people still using today's Slashdot have even heard of "Reflections on Trusting Trust"? How many of the identities on today's Slashdot are just (AI-driven?) sock puppets? (Speculations on a mutual timeline building tool to verify childhood friendships?)

In closing, if you asked an AI to analyze all of the conversations on Slashdot, what sort of changes would it show over the years? My hypothesis on this question is that the interactions based on books will trend down. Maybe that's my selective memory, but I think a "sound" analysis would should a monotonic decrease. Largely based on The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt I think the downward gradient might peak after smartphones became widely adopted circa 2010...

Submission + - AskSlashdot: What are your selection criteria for a new smartphone? 2

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: What matters to you when you buy a new smartphone? But how to make the recurring topic relevant without more SCREAMS about "dupe"? I do have a bit of recent research I could share. Quite a bit of fresh data since my latest search started a couple of months ago? Or perhaps start with a summary of the useful bits from an ancient AskSlashdot discussion about the batteries?

Seems funny to ask about relevant books, even though two come to mind already. One is The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt, where he argues that smartphone use by preadolescents is destroying their personalities. The other is Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who doesn't actually say much about them but I still think they should have been included in the the big table of examples at the end of the prologue. The "system" of smartphones is antifragile even though the earliest models were quite fragile and the essence of this question is about which current smartphone models are most robust...

Maybe I should include a list of my own criteria so far? However mostly they would just be responses to the problems with my current Samsung Galaxy and the Oppo before that. I've already determined that the main two main problems don't exist with any of the current options offered by my phone company... And the ancient battery problems are still lurking, too.

Submission + - AskSlashdot: How would you reform the Supreme Court to get a right to your data? (missouriindependent.com) 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Or is Today's Slashdot even worth the effort?

Mostly a seasonal topic, but requires justification? Many available, but today's top one involves the idea of a "Constitutional right" to control your own data, but linked to the idea of real capitalism with real competition. An alternate wording of the question could be "AskSlashdot: Are you a prisoner of any giant corporation because of the personal data you have entrusted to it?" That form was actually triggered by a recent Slashdot article involving a new email system--and realizing that it would be quite difficult for me to escape from Gmail now...

But "capitalism" [definition/citations needed] is supposed to depend on customers who are free to shop around. Not the current trend, with more and more people locked into Microsoft or Apple or the google or Amazon or Facebook or <long list of corporate cancers>. In terms of fantasy solutions, I imagine a Constitutional right to move my data implying a different approach to monopoly law.

But no change will get past SCOTUS. Hence the link to Supreme Court reform in the original form of the question.

MUCH more can be said, and I even have two concrete proposals for reform. But surely you have some better ideas? Or at least want to sing another verse of "We can't get there from here"?

(And not sure why I am bothering except that this ridiculously close election is bothering me so much. And still wondering about my last AskSlashdot submission, which was apparently accepted and then disappeared. I sort of considered rewriting it, but now I can't even remember the topic... Also considered an AskSlashdot about Linux on a "vintage" MacBook Pro...)

Submission + - How DARE you be an unhappy customer! (nhk.or.jp) 8

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: There aren't any penalties (yet), but it is now technically illegal for a customer to be "too dissatisfied" in Japan. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nippon.com%2Fen%2Fin-d... is an English summary of a an intermediate step to the new Japanese law. Unfortunately I couldn't find any English description of the version the LDP just passed through the Diet. The video link to NHK World is for older context. Remember when the customer was regarded as a minor gawd? ROFLMAO. Now we should brace ourselves for the next version of the law where they start introducing the penalties.

Me? Color me "guilty, guilty, guilty", especially as regards the Japanese banks, realtors, and ISP phone companies. But give me a minute and I'm sure I'll remember some more examples. Some of it might be simple racism or even justified revulsion at my poor Japanese, but some of it is probably a kind of legacy of the sokaiya, an endangered subspecies of Japanese gangster.

Submission + - Does the Supreme Court matter to tech? (wikipedia.org)

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: I think the SCOTUS has huge effects on technology and therefore is quite relevant to Slashdot. There seems to be strong agreement that SCOTUS is broken. So how would you reform the Supreme Court?

Let me start with the two simplistic ideas that I currently favor and then I'll consider some of the other ideas that are floating around. But mostly I'm hoping for someone to come up with better ideas, though correcting my excessive simplicity would be nice, too.

For the partisan politics thing, my suggestion is a simple recusal rule:

"A nonpartisan Justice may compel up to two junior partisan Justices to recuse themselves."

That rule would make each nonpartisan Justice effectively equal to three partisans. The objective is to motivate everyone to return to the nonpartisan tradition. If you look at the record of nominations on Wikipedia, you will see that all of the Justices used to be nonpartisans confirmed by strong majorities of the Senators from BOTH parties, but now NONE of them are. In practice, I think forced recusals would be quite rare because the nonpartisan would have that extra leverage when discussing cases with partisans.

But I also think "junior" is a sneaky word in that recusal rule. I think it should be based on either date of joining the Court or on birthday. That would justify appointing a really old but nonpartisan Justice. Not long on the Court, but immediately able to talk harshly to partisans...

My second simplistic idea involves the new super-immunity power the Court just created. I think the super-lame duck Joe Biden can handle that with an executive order. Just clarify that "faithfully execute the office" includes obeying the laws without looking for immunity loopholes. Plus a promise of no presidential pardons for criminals whose defense involves "helping" the president.

Yes, I know any president can cancel any presidential executive order, but at least it will be amusing to hear the explanation of why they did it. Credit for this idea to Dubya for his "signing statements" that negated laws as he "signed" them?

There are three main proposals being discussed. I want to touch on their flaws.

One is enlarging the Court. I actually think this could be used as leverage, basically as a kind of threat, but if done then it becomes a kind of Fibonacci sequence of adding Justices each time the political winds shift. I think it would actually make the politicization worse.

Term limits is a better idea, but judging is an unusual profession. Experience really does help, and a rigid term limit would hit the best judges. Maybe some kind of competency test to make sure the judges aren't going senile, but in general an honest judge only gets better with age.

The other idea involves official ethics. The problem is with the enforcement and making sure that the enforcers don't become political hacks. I don't think there is any way to square that circle. Everyone is already saying that partisan judges are bad and it obviously isn't solving the problem... Then again, it's hard to imagine any kind of ethical bar that would be low enough for a certain Justice to get over.

Submission + - Smartphone batteries considered harmful? 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: This is offered as a possible AskSlashdot submission, but... I am not motivated to make the effort to do the full rewrite for that format, even though it is probably referring to Slashdot as the source of the advice. So you're the editor and you know the format, so here's the raw input you can work with:

Smartphone batteries considered harmful?

Because of the expressions of interest in a kind of random personal comment I wrote about the smartphone battery thing, I'll go ahead and try to describe the newest Samsung Galaxy situation as I understand it.

Starting with the background, my main smartphone problem has been with battery swelling, even with phones that had replaceable batteries. My daily usage has rarely been a problem, though my experiments with external battery packs have never gone well. Rather I have apparently overused my phones so badly that they always swell. That overuse is mostly tethering, though some of my phones swelled without being used that way.

Two phones ago I was using an Oppo that had swelled quite quickly, probably within a few months of buying it. By the time I was replacing it the phone was about two years old and still holding an adequate charge for most days' travels. Sometimes needed a recharge on the road, however. Never got any help from Oppo. Of course...

The brand I have had the most satisfaction with is actually Huawei, but I can't continue that way because of the software war. Not that I fully trust any Chinese (or American) company, but my interpretation of the war is that the Americans are surrendering and admitting that Huawei has become too clever for the non-Chinese security experts and the Huawei equipment can no longer be sufficiently well understood to know if it is safe. Ergo, a sad bye-bye to Huawei.

As my research for a new phone continued, someone told me that Samsung Galaxy smartphones included a restrictive charging option that would protect the battery from swelling. No confirmation from Samsung, which only confirmed my negative opinions about Samsung support from about 10 years earlier, but I trusted the source enough to buy one anyway and sure enough, I managed to find the option.

The way this battery protection option worked was to stop charging the phone at 85%. That left me enough charge for my normal daily travels, which rarely took the phone below 50%, and the battery remained unswollen after a year, which included a month of quite heavy tethering, too.

Unfortunately (though an upgrade is not supposed to be unfortunate) Samsung has thrown a monkey wrench into the works. After a recent upgrade, now my Galaxy has three options for the battery where it had two. The 85% option is still there, but it has been lowered to 80%. I've been using that for now and it still seems good enough. However my main concern is with the best option to maximize the overall lifespan of the smartphone and that's what I'm trying to research now.

The other old option says something about using AI to control the battery charging, but I don't trust it and think it is just the old approach that causes phones to die quickly. Part of my evidence is that it's the default when you buy a Galaxy and I think Samsung would actually prefer the phones die more quickly than last longer. Of course I can't prove it, and even worse of course is that Samsung can reply "You should have used this other battery setting and you can use it if you buy a new Galaxy now."

The new third option is the one that is interesting me. This seems to be a kind of flutter charge where the phone will charge to 100% and then stop until it has dropped to 95% before charging again, even it remains plugged in. This sounds attractive and would give me more battery insurance when I'm traveling, but maybe it reduces the overall lifetime of the phone?

By the way, I did try (yet again) to get answers from Samsung, but now I think I have been flagged as a low-profit customer and all the top corporate cancers don't like such customers these days. Apple is the poster child for catering to fanatics who are willing to pay big premium prices, which is why I haven't bought any Apple product since a MacBook Pro some years ago. I strongly suspect that Apple has solved the battery swelling problems. At least I was unable to find any reports of iPhones swelling, but I am not willing to deal with Apple on their terms. I remain one of those old-fashioned kind of adversarial shoppers, eh? I could add various sad details, but that seems to be enough for now...

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Ready to buy your final computer? 6

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: ... before crossing that final frontier...

But seriously folks, my main machine is dying and needs to be replaced. Considering how many years it's lasted and adding that number to my own age, I wouldn't want to bet on who will outlast which. Reflecting on my memories, I've purchased at least 15 personal computers over the decades. Might be more like 20 and couldn't even count how many company computers I've used for various classes and work. Then there were the computer labs filled with my students... Insofar as I don't to go through this too many more times, I have two subquestions:

(1) What was the brand of your longest-lived PC?

(2) What is the brand of your latest PC and how long do you expect it to last?

I've actually run the main question past a few friends and the answers surprised me. I'll probably summarize them in a reply if this question gets posted...

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Can you use an unsafe computer safely?

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: I think the answer is no, but there are some clever people around here, so... Is there any firewall or router or some other device that can adequately protect an old and no longer supported computer? I have at least two of those that come to mind, and I might use them more often if there was a safe way to connect them to the Internet.

The specifics probably matter, though that's like opening a can of worms, but... One is a little old machine running an old and no longer supported version of Linux. Another is a Windows XP box that is too customized at a low level to run Linux. But the big concern involves a couple of old boxes that are only alive now because Windows 10 saved them from the end-of-service of Windows 7. Right now it looks like they might outlive Windows 10, too, but two of them are not suitable for Windows 11. Plus my spouse has an old Windows 8 box now running under 10...

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What makes a decent "social" website? (cbsnews.com) 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes:

You can measure a programmer's perspective by noting his attitude on the continuing viability of FORTRAN. — Alan Perlis

Amusingly relevant fortune cookie on Slashdot just now, but what I want to measure is the goodness of a "social media" website BEFORE it bites me in the nether parts by wasting a bunch of my limited and (to me) precious time. If you don't like the original form of the Subjective question, how about something like "What is the best social website you know of?" or "What criteria would you use to recognize a good website?" or even "How could a good social media website even survive in this fine mess we've gotten ourselves into?"

My own thinking around this topic has involved three major areas. One is time efficiency, which I've already referenced. Another area involves the size and permeability of the filter bubbles formed by the people using the website. My third major area would involve the educational value, perhaps measured by questions like "How frequently has this website justified changing my mind about something?" And I strongly suspect some of these higher level metrics need to be built on lower level metrics of individual behaviors, which would lead to a completely different perspective on the topic. But I suspect you have different priorities and different questions. Care to share?

Even better if you can hurl a URL for the website I have been searching for. The story of the URL I hurled listed five possible responses to Musk's Twitter acquisition: CounterSocial, Discord, LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Reddit. Except for CounterSocial (which I'm about to investigate) I know all of them pretty well. LinkedIn has some utility for certain purposes, I have found Discord and Reddit distinctly off-putting, and I've mostly been unable to figure out what Mastodon is about. Now I'm wondering why the linked story doesn't mention Facebook at all, though I understand why Twitter is only referenced negatively or as a kind of reference point. (No wonder that today's Slashdot didn't make the cut.)

Musk's Twitter as a bastion of Free Speech? We'll see how well that works out as soon as #HeilElon starts trending.

Submission + - Crypto idiocy strikes again (arstechnica.com) 1

Submitted by shanen
shanen writes: Don't see the story yet on Slashdot, but I think it's hilarious and might even produce some Funny comments. But if the criminals were half as smart as they are greedy, then they would have demanded competitive advantage: Special chips just for themselves.

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I'd rather just believe that it's done by little elves running around.

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