You're currently moderated as "interesting", but it looks like you've also attracted the trolls so it probably won't last. Not sure what sense of "interesting" the original moderators intended.
Usually I don't even bother with a check for "interesting" these years, but your comment came up as the only mention of "profit". I think that term is at the kernel of the deadly threat posed by AI, but 95% of the current comments disagree. Actually 100% since your comment was actually part of an ad hominem attack on Musk. (If I must, I guess I'd say that his recent support of #PresidentTweety did reduce my estimate of his intelligence--but I've always regarded him as mostly lucky, especially in his timing. Pretty much any way you slice it, agreeing with #FatNixon is just another form of feeding a troll... But I'm being drawn off topic again.)
The AIs are only dangerous if they have evil programming. It doesn't get more evil that being programmed for the single objective of profit maximization, though I admit my perspective is biased. I'm a human being and I know that my own profitability is limited. My conclusion is that a profit-first AI is going to eliminate the inefficient humans ASAP.
From that perspective, self-driving cars are just one of the key technologies towards eliminating the need for human beings to move the robots around. I'm not going to panic when I see the self-driving drones. It's the self-driving tanks that bother me. Anyone else remember Laumer and the Dinochrome Brigade?
I thought that handle sounded familiar. Primary evidence of the need for a block function on Slashdot, notwithstanding the fake historical evidence.
In EPR terms, integrity and intellectual honesty dimensions of the 25149 entity are far too negative for me to waste time with. Should be invisible to me for our mutual "happiness".
You've made several good comments on this topic, but I'll never see an insightful mod point to give you. Do you still get any to give? (You actually came into my focus this time due to the "funny" in your sig, but I still miss the days of a much wittier Slashdot.)
While I mostly agree with you, I'm not sure I would accept your characterization of the FCC as a criminal enterprise. I think it is more precise to say that the referees have been bribed and even selected by the criminal enterprises.
(I may be out of context, however. My settings hide the ACs. Too many trolls among them, and I regard playing with trolls to be a waste of time.)
The main focus of today's criminal enterprises [AKA corporate cancers] is actually the legalization of their crimes. Their "handling" of the FCC is more like offense as the best defense. Their primary concern (as regards government) is which politicians can be bribed or otherwise manipulated most cheaply, the better to maximize their profits (while socializing their (gambling) losses, of course).
(I actually think there are great similarities between the parties, but most of the loot given to Democrats is more like insurance payments (for doing nothing), while most of the loot collected by so-called Republicans [AKA Bolshevik Republicans] is more like investments (for actual actions).)
Clarifying the wording: Why should government oversee the Internet?
Because someone has to act as the honest referee. The FCC should be acting impartially to balance the interests of the public (AKA the actual human beings), for example their desire for increased freedom, against the "virtualized lusts" of the corporate cancers (AKA the inhuman corporations) for infinitely larger profits.
If the corporate cancers had their way (or rather were able to execute their programs without any constraint), they would grow and consume each other until there is only one survivor, one humongous corporation that owned everything--but which was still driven to increase its profits towards infinity. Of course the reality is that the host (AKA our society) would die.
However based on my vague memories of the handle, I think no reply can convince you of anything. I think the question was purely rhetorical, with no sincerity or intellectual honesty underneath. It would be nice if I were proven wrong, though it seems increasingly unlikely on today's Slashdot.
Most interesting of the early replies, but I'll never see a mod point to give you. I'm wondering what hideous crime I must have committed at least 10 years ago not to have seen a mod point in that long...
Anyway, though I mostly agree with you [rsilvergun], I still think you have been misled when you wrote "laissez faire idealism". They are extremely realistic about increasing their profits, and they are completely socialistic when it comes to handling the losses. Becoming "too big to fail" so you can privatize the profits while socializing the losses has no relationship to the once-great now-late capitalistic system that long ago worked to help people.
Now we live in the age of corporate cancer, and helping actual people is irrelevant. The actual human beings are to be divided and conquered. Their lives have become wage slavery (or actual incarceration and too often slow starvation) in a race to the bottom, with a few foolish exceptions (like Ajit Pai and his cronies). They are fools because it will avail them not to die with the most toys.
The corporate cancers are NOT human beings and they have no fear of death. No feelings at all, actually. No fear, no love, no concern for the human beings that get hurt or killed in the pursuit of the ever larger profits programmed into the mindless machines. After the fools are dead, the cancerous machines will continue with fresh fools in place (until AI eliminates any need for actual human fools).
Solutions? See my earlier comment for one possibility, but even better if you [any reader] has a better idea than mine.
It's not money per se that causes the evil, but the excessive love of money, the dream of infinite profits to solve the unsolvable problem of not having enough money. Pursuit of happiness is a good thing, but when the boundless greed of a corporate cancer hurts or even kills actual human beings, then it has crossed the line into sociopathic behavior.
I'm SO tired of problems, even including the defense of the free and open Internet. Now I want solutions.
My first suggestion is taxation based on increasing freedom, NOT growing the largest possible corporate cancers. The taxes on corporate profits should be progressive based on market share. Detailed ideas about that suggestion (and others) available upon polite (and sincere) request.
Even better if you have a better idea. Vicious criticism is too easy, too mindless, and in a better crafted Slashdot, ought to kill your karma (AKA EPR).
In conclusion, I think Ajit Pai is a typical worshiper at today's economic church. Not capitalism or communism or socialism. How passe. He worships at the church of corporate cancerism, where the main creed is:
I agree that there is a lot of recycling of related themes these days, but I suspect the cause is staffing shortages or priority "issues" among the current editors of Slashdot. Paid staff or volunteers? Either way the financial model appears to be continuing to work poorly.
As regards this story, I think that credibility should be an important dimension of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), but credibility is a hard one to define clearly and uniformly, so I think it should probably be broken down into several other dimensions. However the obvious effect of propagating garbage should be a reduction in the EPR of the propagator. This should still be part of system that is biased in favor of good behaviors, but if someone thinks some identity is propagating lies or fake news, then the evidence should be presented. (Getting more wrinkled, but I actually think there should be an appeals mechanism,too. NOT modeled after the fiasco that is YouTube.)
By the way, this EPR approach would work especially well where a significant number of the identities have been verified. Not yet clear if that is where Twitter is heading, but Twitter has even more room for improvement than Slashdot.
If mod points were so plentiful that I ever got one to give, I'd be hard pressed to decide between funny and some form of negative understanding...
It does remind me of a job I once had operating and maintaining an email system of similar provenance. The boss had actually created the system and thought that he could still support it after I left. I tried to make the reality clear and also tried to train a replacement, but the boss thought he knew better... Suffice it to say that after I left the system could only be pronounced dead. (The rest of the company went down some months later. (Now I'm reminded of a certain fat tweeter-in-chief.))
Anyway, if your boss actually needs that system then he better be planning beyond you. That might include replacing the old system with a "smarter" system that benefits from AI technology. You're only human and you can't underbid forever.
Kind of predictable line of defense, but it's already been thoroughly breached. Creating a special-purpose AI to solve a specific problem better than any human being is old news. You might draw the line differently, but I'd say the chess-playing computer will suffice, and they've just been adding one after the other since then. I firmly believe that if your job can be defined sufficiently clearly, then a special-purpose AI can be built to do your job better and cheaper. There are a few jobs that are hard to define, but I don't believe yours is one of them. I've only met a few candidates who might qualify in my entire lifetime.
Now about the general-purpose AI that can replace any human... Maybe that's what Alexa is laughing at?
We need to rethink economics in terms of keeping humans involved when they aren't needed. From an ekronomics (time-centric economics) perspective, that means finding a new balance between recreation time and investment time and structuring the economy to keep the money flowing even though there's no essentially reason for most people to do any essential work. (The advanced societies are much closer to this crisis point, obviously.)
Perhaps the real threat is that the economies are so imbalanced in favor of insane concentrations of wealth and that is also driving the best and the brightest people towards propping up the status quo instead of creating the new solutions that we need. Real innovation could be part of the solution, or part of making the problems much worse. In the limiting case, where we can't solve the problems, then the obvious resolution of the Fermi Paradox will be our extinction. Possibly abruptly.
As flawed and broken as modern economics is, you [gurps_npc] need to start with a basic economics course. One of the first things you need to learn about is elastic versus inelastic demands. That's why the time-based perspective comes to such different conclusions (and associated different priorities) compared to conventional economics. Even human greed is limited by the time available for being greedy.
Spent a long time trying to find funny or actually insightful comments on this topic. Yours [duckintheface's] was the closest I could find, but it falls rather short on both counts. Does not appear to be intended as a joke, though it's funny how little you understand how corporate cancers actually work. The "insightful" mods are obviously knee-jerk reactions from Linux lovers and the only "insight" is that they love Linux. Not so much as insights go.
I was also looking for a specific example of how Microsoft applied the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. I think the best example was the PDA, where Palm's ideas and eventually the entire market were destroyed. The funny part is that Microsoft never actually delivered on their promises for PDA products, and the idea survived after all. The smartphone has largely evolved into a kind of network-enhanced PDA without the label, and the key idea of syncing has largely been replaced by cloud-based storage.
What goes around comes around, eh?
While I searched for other examples (mostly around the keyword "example"), I couldn't find any of the other good ones. I still regard the PDA "victory" as one of Microsoft's "greatest hits".
Time for today's meta-comment: How could we elevate the caliber of discussion on Slashdot? Or is it time to surrender, Dorothy?
While you make some interesting points, I think you need to back up and consider your priorities. If you think freedom is sufficiently good, then you would naturally reduce your concerns with maximizing efficiency and profits. In particular, I regard profit seeking as insane, because it is a problem with no solution. There is no maximum value of profit that could possibly solve "the problem" of needing a maximum value of profit.
After many years of consideration, I have reached a number of conclusions about freedom and its value. My sig summarizes most of my conclusions (though the Slashdot version is a bit dated). For one thing, later versions usually have something like "{3-5}" after the word "Choice".
Not sure if that qualifies as a request for additional details on the suggestion, but I admit that it's a touchy point. I don't think it would be good to use such dimensions as conservative versus progressive or gun friendly versus anti-gun. Basically a can of worms, but it also reflects my philosophy that I want to be open to differing perspectives as long as they aren't coming from a intellectually dishonest Sophist, a crooked salesperson, or some other flavor of liar.
I tend to think that Slashdot should have a block function for personally annoying nuisances, perhaps as an option on the Foe status. However I generally think that a moderate bias in favor of positive EPR would be sufficient to block most of the noise, and I might want to bump it up higher. For example, I favor funny people, though I think that dimension should be adjusted to a broader label, something like "makes me happy" versus "makes me sad". In general the group aspects of Slashdot are weak, but I sort of count that in Slashdot's favor...
Two other areas of interest... The first might be called contagious or predictive filtering. If some identity resembles identities that I've already reacted against, then that's a reason to reduce their visibility. (If you're a friendly guy who likes newbies or a masochist who likes feeding the trolls, then you could adjust your settings that way to make them more visible.)
The second would be the idea of "self-discreditation". For example, that could be done with a visibility check when someone starts a reply. If the person who wants to write the reply has a relatively low EPR such that the reply will not be seen by the OP, then there would be a warning and suggestion to comment somewhere else (such as the top level of the discussion), but if the low-EPR person insists on replying anyway, then it would get a self-discrediting prefix on the reply, something like "Not a sincere reply and not seen by the OP."
I didn't know that, but I'll try to find the link you didn't include...
Now I have mixed feelings about my suggestion. Yes, the Chinese are smart and clever enough, but I have some serious ethical concerns about how they use the technologies. The technologies themselves remain morally neutral.
Just because the Chinese don't worship the gawd of profit the way they do, doesn't insure they have a better idea.
I basically believe that real competition would drive real innovation. As it applies specifically to OSes, that would actually justify BUYING a new OS from a competing company. I'm also believing that some of the competing companies would make better decisions than others, thus causing their profits and stock prices to increase, and offsetting decreases in the profits and share prices of other companies. (The shareholders would of course also receive equal shares when the company was divided, so they would only suffer if they decided to sell their shares in the new company that did best (and of course some of them would make such bad decisions).)
I don't think the variations of Windows need be fully binary compatible, but any changes in the Windows API standards would require public communications about the proposed extensions or new features. Unless everyone can actually agree that something needs to be part of the OS, then it probably shouldn't be. Right now Microsoft just makes arbitrary decisions on what they think they can push down the makers' throats, and what the end users actually want is almost a joke.
The same EPR (Earned Public Reputation) that could improve Slashdot could be used to improve Twitter. I even wrote up a proposal in their weird system. However I'm not holding my breath waiting for Twitter to become useful.
Does anyone think it will be better for us if Amazon ultimately crushes the google? Or if the google crushes Amazon? Or if Apple swallows both of them?
I think they should adjust the tax system in favor of increased choice and more freedom. The corporate taxes on profits should be progressive based on market share. You can even divide it up based on each part of the business, but the basic idea that any company that becomes too dominant would find it advantageous and effectively MORE profitable to divide itself into smaller pieces that are REALLY competing with each other. Division is easier to do with IP-based companies that can start with identical copies of the IP and equally divided ownership of such assets as licensing fees from the patents.
Don't think of it as a penalty for success. Think of it as a strong encouragement to reproduce the good ideas so they can grow and evolve in new directions.
I actually prefer to use the old example of MS as an easy way to explain how it could work. Let's say you want at least 5 real competitors in the notebook OS market, but the market only has 3 effective competitors (Windows, MacOS, and lumped Linux), with Windows on top. Imagine that Microsoft was divided into three companies, each with a copy of the OS and 1/3 of the assets. Now there are 5 competitors and the three Windows-based companies are free to evolve in any directions they favor, with real choice and freedom for the customers. The main difference is that the Windows standard would also become truly open. (Shareholders would come out ahead, too, since the real competition would actually encourage the pie to become bigger.)
Me? If I had to buy Windows, I'd buy the most secure flavor.
I've spent several years trying to figure out what anyone likes about Reddit. I've long since lost interest in Digg and Fark, and I regard any time spent on Facebook as a waste--but sometimes I sort of want to waste a bit of time.
One of the features I'd like to see would be logarithmic scaling of the moderation. Base e, naturally.
Another feature would be symmetric dimensions that are all more clearly orthogonal to each other. Much of the problem with Slashdot is that some of the dimensions are too subjective. One man's troll is another's provocateur of thought, but it would be easier to agree on negative politeness (and then let the people decide how important that dimension is to them).
(No, I am NOT saying that politeness is the only dimension of such behavior, but I might value politeness too greatly after so many years of living among polite people...)
A third high priority feature I'd like would be EPR (Earned Public Reputation) as a multidimensional replacement for excessively simplistic karma. I actually think EPR should be symmetric in the sense that public reactions to your comments should be directly reflected into the same dimensions of your reputation...
Many other improvements, but we come back to the question of paying for such... Would you be willing to put down $10 at a time towards each of the features you really want? Then the feature would only be implemented AFTER enough people had agreed to put a bit of money where their mouths (or typing fingers?) are. (Ongoing costs to be handled on a similar basis...)
AtAJG, DSAuPR.
That financial model I suggested would avert such
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Slashdot Outage Update
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· Score: 1
Part of that cost-recovery-based financial model that I recommended Slashdot consider (a couple of years ago) would help minimize the impact of whatever the problems were. Because the ongoing costs of features would be divided up on a per-feature basis, the system would be naturally designed to lose functionality in a gradual way. Unfunded features would always need to be ready to be turned off...
So for I haven't found any details about the apparently ongoing problems, or I missed such a story, but it appears that there is basically a binary switch. The offline mode appears to offer a quite low level of functionality, but that's the only step down that Slashdot seems to have.
Anyway, I can hope the latest problem has been correctly diagnosed and repaired now.
Try thinking about it this way: As productivity rises, how much work do we actually need to do?
Analytic approach to an answer:
Focusing on the traditional essentials, if you are lucky enough to live in an advanced society, then all your essentials for survival are created by a small number of people. Do you even know a full-time farmer? More likely you know some tailors or builders, but how much of their work is really required? For example, do you really need new clothing whenever fashion changes? In contrast, if you live in a poor society, then you and everyone you know is working long and hard just to stay alive (and you have no computer or time to read Slashdot).
Of course it is nice if AI helps shift things in the poor countries, but it's more illuminating to consider what happens as AI improves productivity in advanced nations. We already have a surplus, so what are we going to do with more and more?
I think it makes sense to divide the surplus into two basic classes. Investment work that further boosts productivity (which includes creating smarter AI systems) and recreational time. The funny thing about recreation is that it's bottomless. We've already passed the point where we don't have enough time to enjoy all the movies, songs, and, dare I say, books that have already been created, to say nothing of the flood of new stuff that is created every year.
We need to dump economics and rethink things in terms of time and how we want to spend it and how we want to structure the economy so we can spend our time well...
I could say much more, but this is Slashdot, after all. They can't even handle the error messages properly. The recent 503 Service Offline message (due to offline mode) describes itself as a 404 File Not Found message.
There was no substance to your comment. Not even an educational or theoretical reference. Not much room for any substantive response, eh?
I actually believe, though you didn't ask for any clarification, that conventional economics is horribly broken. I even have a theoretical basis for that position. It has to do with the real value of time versus the fake value of money. Including cryptocurrency. Perhaps asking some question would reveal more than you care to about your attention span or your reading comprehension?
In conclusion, if you have nothing to say, then why not say nothing?
Slashdot Mirror
You're currently moderated as "interesting", but it looks like you've also attracted the trolls so it probably won't last. Not sure what sense of "interesting" the original moderators intended.
Usually I don't even bother with a check for "interesting" these years, but your comment came up as the only mention of "profit". I think that term is at the kernel of the deadly threat posed by AI, but 95% of the current comments disagree. Actually 100% since your comment was actually part of an ad hominem attack on Musk. (If I must, I guess I'd say that his recent support of #PresidentTweety did reduce my estimate of his intelligence--but I've always regarded him as mostly lucky, especially in his timing. Pretty much any way you slice it, agreeing with #FatNixon is just another form of feeding a troll... But I'm being drawn off topic again.)
The AIs are only dangerous if they have evil programming. It doesn't get more evil that being programmed for the single objective of profit maximization, though I admit my perspective is biased. I'm a human being and I know that my own profitability is limited. My conclusion is that a profit-first AI is going to eliminate the inefficient humans ASAP.
From that perspective, self-driving cars are just one of the key technologies towards eliminating the need for human beings to move the robots around. I'm not going to panic when I see the self-driving drones. It's the self-driving tanks that bother me. Anyone else remember Laumer and the Dinochrome Brigade?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I thought that handle sounded familiar. Primary evidence of the need for a block function on Slashdot, notwithstanding the fake historical evidence.
In EPR terms, integrity and intellectual honesty dimensions of the 25149 entity are far too negative for me to waste time with. Should be invisible to me for our mutual "happiness".
You've made several good comments on this topic, but I'll never see an insightful mod point to give you. Do you still get any to give? (You actually came into my focus this time due to the "funny" in your sig, but I still miss the days of a much wittier Slashdot.)
While I mostly agree with you, I'm not sure I would accept your characterization of the FCC as a criminal enterprise. I think it is more precise to say that the referees have been bribed and even selected by the criminal enterprises.
(I may be out of context, however. My settings hide the ACs. Too many trolls among them, and I regard playing with trolls to be a waste of time.)
The main focus of today's criminal enterprises [AKA corporate cancers] is actually the legalization of their crimes. Their "handling" of the FCC is more like offense as the best defense. Their primary concern (as regards government) is which politicians can be bribed or otherwise manipulated most cheaply, the better to maximize their profits (while socializing their (gambling) losses, of course).
(I actually think there are great similarities between the parties, but most of the loot given to Democrats is more like insurance payments (for doing nothing), while most of the loot collected by so-called Republicans [AKA Bolshevik Republicans] is more like investments (for actual actions).)
Clarifying the wording: Why should government oversee the Internet?
Because someone has to act as the honest referee. The FCC should be acting impartially to balance the interests of the public (AKA the actual human beings), for example their desire for increased freedom, against the "virtualized lusts" of the corporate cancers (AKA the inhuman corporations) for infinitely larger profits.
If the corporate cancers had their way (or rather were able to execute their programs without any constraint), they would grow and consume each other until there is only one survivor, one humongous corporation that owned everything--but which was still driven to increase its profits towards infinity. Of course the reality is that the host (AKA our society) would die.
However based on my vague memories of the handle, I think no reply can convince you of anything. I think the question was purely rhetorical, with no sincerity or intellectual honesty underneath. It would be nice if I were proven wrong, though it seems increasingly unlikely on today's Slashdot.
Most interesting of the early replies, but I'll never see a mod point to give you. I'm wondering what hideous crime I must have committed at least 10 years ago not to have seen a mod point in that long...
Anyway, though I mostly agree with you [rsilvergun], I still think you have been misled when you wrote "laissez faire idealism". They are extremely realistic about increasing their profits, and they are completely socialistic when it comes to handling the losses. Becoming "too big to fail" so you can privatize the profits while socializing the losses has no relationship to the once-great now-late capitalistic system that long ago worked to help people.
Now we live in the age of corporate cancer, and helping actual people is irrelevant. The actual human beings are to be divided and conquered. Their lives have become wage slavery (or actual incarceration and too often slow starvation) in a race to the bottom, with a few foolish exceptions (like Ajit Pai and his cronies). They are fools because it will avail them not to die with the most toys.
The corporate cancers are NOT human beings and they have no fear of death. No feelings at all, actually. No fear, no love, no concern for the human beings that get hurt or killed in the pursuit of the ever larger profits programmed into the mindless machines. After the fools are dead, the cancerous machines will continue with fresh fools in place (until AI eliminates any need for actual human fools).
Solutions? See my earlier comment for one possibility, but even better if you [any reader] has a better idea than mine.
It's not money per se that causes the evil, but the excessive love of money, the dream of infinite profits to solve the unsolvable problem of not having enough money. Pursuit of happiness is a good thing, but when the boundless greed of a corporate cancer hurts or even kills actual human beings, then it has crossed the line into sociopathic behavior.
I'm SO tired of problems, even including the defense of the free and open Internet. Now I want solutions.
My first suggestion is taxation based on increasing freedom, NOT growing the largest possible corporate cancers. The taxes on corporate profits should be progressive based on market share. Detailed ideas about that suggestion (and others) available upon polite (and sincere) request.
Even better if you have a better idea. Vicious criticism is too easy, too mindless, and in a better crafted Slashdot, ought to kill your karma (AKA EPR).
In conclusion, I think Ajit Pai is a typical worshiper at today's economic church. Not capitalism or communism or socialism. How passe. He worships at the church of corporate cancerism, where the main creed is:
"There is no Gawd but Profit, and ..."
Wasn't that Samuel Clemens?
I agree that there is a lot of recycling of related themes these days, but I suspect the cause is staffing shortages or priority "issues" among the current editors of Slashdot. Paid staff or volunteers? Either way the financial model appears to be continuing to work poorly.
As regards this story, I think that credibility should be an important dimension of EPR (Earned Public Reputation), but credibility is a hard one to define clearly and uniformly, so I think it should probably be broken down into several other dimensions. However the obvious effect of propagating garbage should be a reduction in the EPR of the propagator. This should still be part of system that is biased in favor of good behaviors, but if someone thinks some identity is propagating lies or fake news, then the evidence should be presented. (Getting more wrinkled, but I actually think there should be an appeals mechanism,too. NOT modeled after the fiasco that is YouTube.)
By the way, this EPR approach would work especially well where a significant number of the identities have been verified. Not yet clear if that is where Twitter is heading, but Twitter has even more room for improvement than Slashdot.
If mod points were so plentiful that I ever got one to give, I'd be hard pressed to decide between funny and some form of negative understanding...
It does remind me of a job I once had operating and maintaining an email system of similar provenance. The boss had actually created the system and thought that he could still support it after I left. I tried to make the reality clear and also tried to train a replacement, but the boss thought he knew better... Suffice it to say that after I left the system could only be pronounced dead. (The rest of the company went down some months later. (Now I'm reminded of a certain fat tweeter-in-chief.))
Anyway, if your boss actually needs that system then he better be planning beyond you. That might include replacing the old system with a "smarter" system that benefits from AI technology. You're only human and you can't underbid forever.
Kind of predictable line of defense, but it's already been thoroughly breached. Creating a special-purpose AI to solve a specific problem better than any human being is old news. You might draw the line differently, but I'd say the chess-playing computer will suffice, and they've just been adding one after the other since then. I firmly believe that if your job can be defined sufficiently clearly, then a special-purpose AI can be built to do your job better and cheaper. There are a few jobs that are hard to define, but I don't believe yours is one of them. I've only met a few candidates who might qualify in my entire lifetime.
Now about the general-purpose AI that can replace any human... Maybe that's what Alexa is laughing at?
We need to rethink economics in terms of keeping humans involved when they aren't needed. From an ekronomics (time-centric economics) perspective, that means finding a new balance between recreation time and investment time and structuring the economy to keep the money flowing even though there's no essentially reason for most people to do any essential work. (The advanced societies are much closer to this crisis point, obviously.)
Perhaps the real threat is that the economies are so imbalanced in favor of insane concentrations of wealth and that is also driving the best and the brightest people towards propping up the status quo instead of creating the new solutions that we need. Real innovation could be part of the solution, or part of making the problems much worse. In the limiting case, where we can't solve the problems, then the obvious resolution of the Fermi Paradox will be our extinction. Possibly abruptly.
As flawed and broken as modern economics is, you [gurps_npc] need to start with a basic economics course. One of the first things you need to learn about is elastic versus inelastic demands. That's why the time-based perspective comes to such different conclusions (and associated different priorities) compared to conventional economics. Even human greed is limited by the time available for being greedy.
Spent a long time trying to find funny or actually insightful comments on this topic. Yours [duckintheface's] was the closest I could find, but it falls rather short on both counts. Does not appear to be intended as a joke, though it's funny how little you understand how corporate cancers actually work. The "insightful" mods are obviously knee-jerk reactions from Linux lovers and the only "insight" is that they love Linux. Not so much as insights go.
I was also looking for a specific example of how Microsoft applied the "embrace, extend, and extinguish" strategy. I think the best example was the PDA, where Palm's ideas and eventually the entire market were destroyed. The funny part is that Microsoft never actually delivered on their promises for PDA products, and the idea survived after all. The smartphone has largely evolved into a kind of network-enhanced PDA without the label, and the key idea of syncing has largely been replaced by cloud-based storage.
What goes around comes around, eh?
While I searched for other examples (mostly around the keyword "example"), I couldn't find any of the other good ones. I still regard the PDA "victory" as one of Microsoft's "greatest hits".
Time for today's meta-comment: How could we elevate the caliber of discussion on Slashdot? Or is it time to surrender, Dorothy?
While you make some interesting points, I think you need to back up and consider your priorities. If you think freedom is sufficiently good, then you would naturally reduce your concerns with maximizing efficiency and profits. In particular, I regard profit seeking as insane, because it is a problem with no solution. There is no maximum value of profit that could possibly solve "the problem" of needing a maximum value of profit.
After many years of consideration, I have reached a number of conclusions about freedom and its value. My sig summarizes most of my conclusions (though the Slashdot version is a bit dated). For one thing, later versions usually have something like "{3-5}" after the word "Choice".
Not sure if that qualifies as a request for additional details on the suggestion, but I admit that it's a touchy point. I don't think it would be good to use such dimensions as conservative versus progressive or gun friendly versus anti-gun. Basically a can of worms, but it also reflects my philosophy that I want to be open to differing perspectives as long as they aren't coming from a intellectually dishonest Sophist, a crooked salesperson, or some other flavor of liar.
I tend to think that Slashdot should have a block function for personally annoying nuisances, perhaps as an option on the Foe status. However I generally think that a moderate bias in favor of positive EPR would be sufficient to block most of the noise, and I might want to bump it up higher. For example, I favor funny people, though I think that dimension should be adjusted to a broader label, something like "makes me happy" versus "makes me sad". In general the group aspects of Slashdot are weak, but I sort of count that in Slashdot's favor...
Two other areas of interest... The first might be called contagious or predictive filtering. If some identity resembles identities that I've already reacted against, then that's a reason to reduce their visibility. (If you're a friendly guy who likes newbies or a masochist who likes feeding the trolls, then you could adjust your settings that way to make them more visible.)
The second would be the idea of "self-discreditation". For example, that could be done with a visibility check when someone starts a reply. If the person who wants to write the reply has a relatively low EPR such that the reply will not be seen by the OP, then there would be a warning and suggestion to comment somewhere else (such as the top level of the discussion), but if the low-EPR person insists on replying anyway, then it would get a self-discrediting prefix on the reply, something like "Not a sincere reply and not seen by the OP."
Is this what you were talking about: https://www.wired.com/story/ag...
If so, it is quite far from what I am recommending with EPR, though such a metric could be one of the relevant dimensions in certain contexts.
I didn't know that, but I'll try to find the link you didn't include...
Now I have mixed feelings about my suggestion. Yes, the Chinese are smart and clever enough, but I have some serious ethical concerns about how they use the technologies. The technologies themselves remain morally neutral.
Just because the Chinese don't worship the gawd of profit the way they do, doesn't insure they have a better idea.
I basically believe that real competition would drive real innovation. As it applies specifically to OSes, that would actually justify BUYING a new OS from a competing company. I'm also believing that some of the competing companies would make better decisions than others, thus causing their profits and stock prices to increase, and offsetting decreases in the profits and share prices of other companies. (The shareholders would of course also receive equal shares when the company was divided, so they would only suffer if they decided to sell their shares in the new company that did best (and of course some of them would make such bad decisions).)
I don't think the variations of Windows need be fully binary compatible, but any changes in the Windows API standards would require public communications about the proposed extensions or new features. Unless everyone can actually agree that something needs to be part of the OS, then it probably shouldn't be. Right now Microsoft just makes arbitrary decisions on what they think they can push down the makers' throats, and what the end users actually want is almost a joke.
The same EPR (Earned Public Reputation) that could improve Slashdot could be used to improve Twitter. I even wrote up a proposal in their weird system. However I'm not holding my breath waiting for Twitter to become useful.
AtAJG, DSAuPR.
Does anyone think it will be better for us if Amazon ultimately crushes the google? Or if the google crushes Amazon? Or if Apple swallows both of them?
I think they should adjust the tax system in favor of increased choice and more freedom. The corporate taxes on profits should be progressive based on market share. You can even divide it up based on each part of the business, but the basic idea that any company that becomes too dominant would find it advantageous and effectively MORE profitable to divide itself into smaller pieces that are REALLY competing with each other. Division is easier to do with IP-based companies that can start with identical copies of the IP and equally divided ownership of such assets as licensing fees from the patents.
Don't think of it as a penalty for success. Think of it as a strong encouragement to reproduce the good ideas so they can grow and evolve in new directions.
I actually prefer to use the old example of MS as an easy way to explain how it could work. Let's say you want at least 5 real competitors in the notebook OS market, but the market only has 3 effective competitors (Windows, MacOS, and lumped Linux), with Windows on top. Imagine that Microsoft was divided into three companies, each with a copy of the OS and 1/3 of the assets. Now there are 5 competitors and the three Windows-based companies are free to evolve in any directions they favor, with real choice and freedom for the customers. The main difference is that the Windows standard would also become truly open. (Shareholders would come out ahead, too, since the real competition would actually encourage the pie to become bigger.)
Me? If I had to buy Windows, I'd buy the most secure flavor.
I'd give you the funny mod if I ever saw a mod point to give... Maybe someone else can help you out?
I've spent several years trying to figure out what anyone likes about Reddit. I've long since lost interest in Digg and Fark, and I regard any time spent on Facebook as a waste--but sometimes I sort of want to waste a bit of time.
One of the features I'd like to see would be logarithmic scaling of the moderation. Base e, naturally.
Another feature would be symmetric dimensions that are all more clearly orthogonal to each other. Much of the problem with Slashdot is that some of the dimensions are too subjective. One man's troll is another's provocateur of thought, but it would be easier to agree on negative politeness (and then let the people decide how important that dimension is to them).
(No, I am NOT saying that politeness is the only dimension of such behavior, but I might value politeness too greatly after so many years of living among polite people...)
A third high priority feature I'd like would be EPR (Earned Public Reputation) as a multidimensional replacement for excessively simplistic karma. I actually think EPR should be symmetric in the sense that public reactions to your comments should be directly reflected into the same dimensions of your reputation...
Many other improvements, but we come back to the question of paying for such... Would you be willing to put down $10 at a time towards each of the features you really want? Then the feature would only be implemented AFTER enough people had agreed to put a bit of money where their mouths (or typing fingers?) are. (Ongoing costs to be handled on a similar basis...)
AtAJG, DSAuPR.
Part of that cost-recovery-based financial model that I recommended Slashdot consider (a couple of years ago) would help minimize the impact of whatever the problems were. Because the ongoing costs of features would be divided up on a per-feature basis, the system would be naturally designed to lose functionality in a gradual way. Unfunded features would always need to be ready to be turned off...
So for I haven't found any details about the apparently ongoing problems, or I missed such a story, but it appears that there is basically a binary switch. The offline mode appears to offer a quite low level of functionality, but that's the only step down that Slashdot seems to have.
Anyway, I can hope the latest problem has been correctly diagnosed and repaired now.
Try thinking about it this way: As productivity rises, how much work do we actually need to do?
Analytic approach to an answer:
Focusing on the traditional essentials, if you are lucky enough to live in an advanced society, then all your essentials for survival are created by a small number of people. Do you even know a full-time farmer? More likely you know some tailors or builders, but how much of their work is really required? For example, do you really need new clothing whenever fashion changes? In contrast, if you live in a poor society, then you and everyone you know is working long and hard just to stay alive (and you have no computer or time to read Slashdot).
Of course it is nice if AI helps shift things in the poor countries, but it's more illuminating to consider what happens as AI improves productivity in advanced nations. We already have a surplus, so what are we going to do with more and more?
I think it makes sense to divide the surplus into two basic classes. Investment work that further boosts productivity (which includes creating smarter AI systems) and recreational time. The funny thing about recreation is that it's bottomless. We've already passed the point where we don't have enough time to enjoy all the movies, songs, and, dare I say, books that have already been created, to say nothing of the flood of new stuff that is created every year.
We need to dump economics and rethink things in terms of time and how we want to spend it and how we want to structure the economy so we can spend our time well...
I could say much more, but this is Slashdot, after all. They can't even handle the error messages properly. The recent 503 Service Offline message (due to offline mode) describes itself as a 404 File Not Found message.
There was no substance to your comment. Not even an educational or theoretical reference. Not much room for any substantive response, eh?
I actually believe, though you didn't ask for any clarification, that conventional economics is horribly broken. I even have a theoretical basis for that position. It has to do with the real value of time versus the fake value of money. Including cryptocurrency. Perhaps asking some question would reveal more than you care to about your attention span or your reading comprehension?
In conclusion, if you have nothing to say, then why not say nothing?