Why hasn't anyone mentioned "bankrupt" in this entire enormous conversation? A few mentions of laundering, but mostly without the clear linkages to #PresidentTweety and his laundry receipts for dirty rubles. This is one of the few branches I could find that even mentioned what a crook Trump is.
In summary, you aren't bankrupt until your creditors are convinced you can't repay your debts. Trump's creditors reached that conclusion a long time ago, but he somehow escaped the YUGE bankruptcy.
How did Trump become "solvent" again? With dirty money, much (possibly most) of it from the KGB who recognized a golden goose opportunity when they saw one, besides having lots of dark money that badly needed to be laundered. At that time Putin was actually one of the trusted minor laundrymen, and it was only much later that he got his own dirty money.
I think the funniest part may be that this is probably NOT an impeachable offense. Combination of the statute of limitations and pre-political crimes. Mueller will easily be able to prove that "our" president is a YUGE crook, and it won't matter. (Except for Trump's show trials of his enemies after he fully subverts the Constitution. At that point you can be sure Mueller will be one of the first guys put up against the wall.)
What time does Slashdot think it is? Surely there should be a better way of seeing the latest contributions to such a huge and hairy conversation?
Yeah, I know the moderation is supposed to help, but we all know the moderation is hopelessly broken. I do suspect there are some gems here buried in mountains of professional trollage. However the evidence of my suspicions would depend on a time-based analysis of the story's comments, and Slashdot doesn't even have a way to see the last few hours of comments. (Hence my twisted search algorithm...)
Yes, and if I ever got a mod point I'd mod you back into visibility after you've been attack-modded down. It's sadly obvious that Slashdot has become a troll playground.
In terms of REAL solutions, I think EPR (Earned Public Reputation) as an improved form of simpleminded karma is needed, but the solution is complicated and would also call for improving the moderation of posts, too. I think the dimensions are fundamentally poorly selected, not orthogonal, and not symmetric with what EPR should capture (and filter against).
However, I was actually thinking today about simpler solutions that might be within the capability of Slashdot's broken financial model. This large discussion is an interesting case to consider. On one hand, I think good discussions should be encouraged, and therefore the stories that are fostering good discussions should leave the front page more slowly. From what I have seen so far, this is NOT such a discussion. Basically I'm saying that when they publish a new story and pick the story to remove, it should not always be the oldest story. Rather the story to remove should be selected on a more sophisticated basis, considering at least the time, quantity of comments, and their quality (perhaps indicated by the balance of positive mods against negative?).
On the other hand, if I had a mod point for myself, I suppose I'd have to agree that this meta-reply is off topic, except that the topic of the story is already fundamentally borken (sic).
Only mention of that key term. Consider time divided into three categories:
(1) Essential time needed to create food, clothing, shelter and similar essential goods (and services) for survival. That time has been declining for a long time now. In an advanced society the average is on the order of an hour a week averaged over the population. There aren't many hunter-gatherer societies where everyone is working every waking hour just to survive.
(2) Investment time needed to improve future productivity. That's stuff like education and new infrastructure, but as essential time declines to extremely low levels, how much investment is needed?
(3) Recreational time divided into consumption and production. That's where the rest of the time can get soaked up, and we need to rethink along those lines.
However, I'm out of time just now, so I'll save the details for polite request...
Since he's passed away I'm guessing there's no more Culture books coming, so maybe a movie would be some sort of substitute? Or has it been tried and platzed?
Naw, I'd probably miss it. I miss almost all the movies.
There should be a way to see the EARNED public reputation of identities. That should also be linked to the actual data, allowing for network-based validation. The google is supposed to be smart enough to understand how to set up a negative feedback loop. The way this one would work would be that the harder you work to create a network of fake identities, the more visible the fake network will become and the easier to trace and remove ALL of the members (thereby erasing all of their fake ratings and reviews, too).
I think there is an obvious solution: SHARE information about the financial models used by the developers with the potential victims. One way to approach this would be with a "Financial Model" or "Money" tab in Google Play. The developer would explain where the money is. Most of the time that would involve selecting from a menu of popular business models, but it should also allow the developers to explain "Other" ideas.
Below the part controlled by the developer of the app, there would be secure commentary provided by the google people. For example, they could confirm if they are paying the developer the money mentioned in one of the standard advertising-based financial models, or confirm that there is a paid version that is generating substantial income. The google should also report whatever background information they have checked, such as when the company was founded, and highlight any important information that they could NOT confirm. While the developer should be able to negotiate with the google about this part of the Financial Model tab, the google would have the last say.
This would allow US to stop a lot of the scammers just because we could know when to be more suspicious.
The story caught my attention for the large number comments, but most of them are apparently anonymous trollage. (My settings can't see AC. Happily.) The only aspect I could imagine that might have made the story legitimately interesting would be the potential conflict of interest:
Why would a profitable meat company want to destroy its own business?
Perhaps the real goal is to stop the changes, or at least slow them down, by buying up the competing technology--and then sitting on it as long as possible. These days that's become one of the main uses of patents, though it started a long time ago. Do I need to review the history of FM radio?
Good comment and you deserve the insightful moderation. However, I think the reality may be worse than you indicated if they are using behaviorist strategies.
If you reward (or punish) a behavior on a continuous basis, then it is quickly extinguished. For example, if you reward a certain behavior every time it happens but then stop the rewards, then the behavior soon stops (is "extinguished" in behaviorist lingo). Alternatively (obviously), if you punish a certain behavior every time it happens, then that behavior soon stops. (Would anyone visit Facebook if every visit was an annoying waste of time?)
With intermittent (random) reinforcement you can create behaviors that are extremely hard to extinguish. There's always the chance that a reward will be coming on the next attempt. That's how gambling works and why addicted gamblers are so hard to cure. A couple of early wins and you may be hooked for life.
As it applies on Facebook, as long as some of your visits are positive experiences, Facebook feels they can rely on your coming back. Sure, they have so much content that they could provide you with good quality stuff all the time, but they probably regard that as a stupid idea. What would happen when another bug in their buggy website started feeding you garbage? How many "members" would leave, never to return? Much better to use the random mix of good stuff and crapola.
I hate to give it away so soon, but I know most of today's Slashdot readers have rather limited attention spans. I'll say a bit more, but mostly I feel like I'm wasting my time. To a degree I might even blame Slashdot, but I think Facebook is the leader in wasting time by chewing it to pieces, and Slashdot is merely contaminated by the trend.
Remember that the "value" of Facebook is primarily linked to how much time the "members" of Facebook spend on the website. The more user time-on-site, the more user attention Facebook has to sell to advertisers, even if Facebook is doing a piss poor job of selling it. (Actually the market cap of Facebook is mostly speculative fantasy, but that describes most of today's stock market, eh? The stock price bubble is a mostly separate problem.)
The problem is that we think our time is valuable. We might value the quality of our time, but Facebook has no reason to care. Time is time as far as Facebook is concerned. Actually it might be even more evil than that. If the decision makers are behaviorists, then they know that random reinforcement is more powerful in preventing extinction...
Oh well. That's enough for now. Additional opinions available upon polite request, but politeness is another thing in short supply on today's Slashdot.
I'd like to know if Apple has any patent on this. If so, I might get a big laugh on my former employer who wasn't interested when I suggested this same idea in the official new-idea system some years ago. They didn't even publish it to prevent anyone else from patenting the approach, but I STILL think it's a good approach, and NOT just for medical information.
Good comment, but what is the "underrated" mod about? Moot to me since I never get a mod to give. However, you provoked me into reviewing the solution to the main problem you described so well:
Solution to your problem of corporate cancer: A progressive tax on profits linked market share.
Main justification: Increased freedom by encouraging meaningful choice.
Let me use Microsoft as an example. Imagine that Microsoft's taxes increased dramatically as it captured more of the market. At some point it would become better to divide the company into competing daughter companies. Each of them would start with a copy of the source code and an equal share of the employees and buildings and a mandate to compete against each other. Each of the kids would be strongly motivated to innovate, and if one baby, perhaps the one that focused on speed, lost market share to the baby that focused on security, that's okay. The customers would be speaking, and the increased innovation would drive the entire market to grow and evolve more rapidly.
No standardization is harmed by this solution, though the daughter companies would have to communicate in public about any changes to such standards as the Windows API or the file formats of documents. Actually, this would make it easier for competing companies to join the standards if they wanted to.
No shareholders were harmed by this solution. They started with equal shares in the daughter companies, and since the entire market innovates and grows faster because of it, they are going to win, even if some of their daughter shares decline against others.
No society was harmed by this solution. Actually, the society should use the extra tax revenues (before the split happens) to regulate the increasingly monopolistic company and to fund additional research into ways to break the monopoly if it seems to be a natural one. I don't think you can show me an example of a natural monopoly that was truly permanent and able to resist all changes in society and technology.
Hmm... No relation to diamonds? I still think you should have gotten a nice mod point or three, but moot to me since I never get a mod point.
Per my longer comment on types of people, I think management is only concerned with two types of people: Humanists are good for lower management and Materialists for upper management. The innovative founders are idealists and normally disposed of as soon as the corporation has become sufficiently cancerous.
Good insightful comment. I'd approach the analysis from a different perspective. Right now I think people tend to fall into three groups based on their highest priorities: (1) People who put ideas first, the idealists. (2) People who want stuff, the materialists. (3) People who put people first, the humanists.
I think innovative companies are created by idealists. They are also good in such fields as mathematics and programming and philosophy. If the company is going to succeed, the idealistic leader needs to have some strengths in other areas, but I'd be extremely interested if you can give a single example of a really innovative company without some idealism at the top.
Then the materialists (especially the MBAs) take over. The "good" ones will cause the corporate cancer to grow enormously. The "bad" ones cause bankruptcies, but that's okay because they always have lovely golden parachutes. (I think HP is the saddest story there.)
The humanists are not particularly useful to corporate cancers, except for the lowest levels of management. They are actually more successful as teachers or in direct sales.
I can't resist a bit of political commentary: What priorities do you attribute to #PresidentTweety? The answer should surprise you. Hint: None of the above?
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. Reminded me of an aspect that hasn't appeared in any part of the discussion I've read so far:
Change is going to happen. The questions are not not "if" or "how to control it", but "when" and "how much" and "does it hurt". I actually think evolutionary change is better than a revolution. The defining characteristic of a revolution is that someone gets badly hurt, and the huge problem of a revolution is that there is no assurance that the outcome will be better.
Yes, on the long-term average, things have gotten better, but the oscillations are unpredictable. Sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse. If the oscillations get too strong, you can go into the negative territory with such outcomes as death, bankruptcy, or extinction. The way things are going, I'm afraid we're heading for a no-survivors outcome.
The corporate cancers that are in control are NOT worried about survival. They are inhuman and unthinking and not worried about anything. They are only programmed to generate the largest possible profits, but infinity is NOT possible, even if the cancer could actually understand why there is no Gawd but profit.
IBM was making money by the truckload while Microsoft was bumbling around with DOS. If you wait with the innovation step until it shows up in revenue, you are too late.
I'm unable to imagine why such a shallow comment is moderated as "insightful".
The story of IBM is actually quite complicated and I've read many books trying to cover it from many perspectives. From the perspective of corporate cancer, I would summarize it thusly:
IBM was a kind of precancerous profit machine in the early days. The company actually survived through the Great Depression mostly by helping other companies automate and downsize. Then Junior (the founder's son) was positioned to gamble heavily on computers, and he won. The rest of the early gamblers on computers lost and we don't talk about the 7 dwarfs anymore. There was a period of huge monopoly profits before IBM was almost destroyed by the same kinds of problems the story discusses. The company survived by mutating into a more standard corporate cancer, which is where it is now. Maybe it will survive, but the cancers are eating each other these days, and I wouldn't bet on IBM being the last cancer standing.
Probably not the google, either. But maybe that's because I still own some shares of IBM and I never invested in the google (and never will)?
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. I never see a mod point or I'd have considered upping your moderation in spite of my propensity to comment instead.
What you reminded me of is the "follow the money" problem. Another aspect of corporate cancerism as mentioned in my longer comment about the story. I think there are actually some historical examples of companies that succeeded because their financial model was aligned with the customers in a non-adversarial way. Even within the deceased system of capitalism that was possible, though rare.
Not now. I think the top example involves fake news and the propagators of fake news. I'm convinced that the fake-news problem could best be addressed by sharing information, but the corporate cancers will NEVER share that information because it would reduce their profits, and there is no Gawd but profit!
Or is "RULZ" the better (woke?) spelling? And should I start with a titular apology to the author of Work Rules! (by the head of HR at the google)? Just one of the many books I've read about how the google fights against the problems that Mr Yegge addressed?
OF COURSE the google failed. That's the nature of corporate cancer. I used to call it the problem of #1: Once you've got to the top, the only major change is DOWN. That's actually enough to explain 3 of his 4 problems, but the deeper cause is actually the death of capitalism. What we have now is corporate cancerism, where only ONE rule counts:
There is no Gawd but profit!
Lots of ramifications. For example, the stock market used to be about raising capital for projects that were too large for anyone to fund. Now the stock market is just a casino for computerized gamblers whose ONLY shopping criterion is the faith that some bigger sucker will buy the value-detached-from-reality shares at a higher price. OF COURSE all of them think they're as smart as the googliest googler and will cash out before the bubble bursts and the market caps implode.
Funny personal story time? It all comes back to the anecdotes? I was recently recruited by a large corporate cancer. Turns out my focus on solving real world problems, helping people, and making the world better are completely misdirected. When it came down to brass tacks, I had to prove I was a square peg who would fit in one of the square holes. Tanks, but no tanks, as the joke goes.
That's just my initial reaction to the story. It seems to have provoked a quantitatively large discussion. Maybe there are some funny or insightful comments to react to? To the searches...
That frankly sounds like a rather asinine and trollish comment. Such comments drive speculations that Putin's trolls are deluded enough to hack dormant identities on Slashdot.
Let's pretend your reply was sincere or some other positive adjective. Then my reply is that I can't imagine why anyone would use private browser mode. If I wanted to see the non-personalized results, then the google claims to offer that option (though you didn't say anything to suggest you were doing anything to make your search results unbiased in any way). If I wanted something resembling privacy, there's always Tor (if I trust Tor). Higher privacy is available, but the inconvenience increases exponentially.
Of course the thing that really makes it hard to believe in your sincerity is that neither you nor I have ANY basis to think that the person you were originally attacking [Xenographic] was doing anything to prevent the original search results from being personalized. While I confirmed your result on at least one of MY computers, that says nothing about what he can see when he searches.
Upon further consideration, I have to estimate your strike count at 2-1/2.
Hmm... I'm here because I was asked to metamoderate this comment and wanted more context, but it feels like I'm mostly trying to assess the metamoderation. My legacy sentiment was that the metamoderation is even worse than the moderation, but I don't know that much about it...
First, as regards your comment, I came to see the context because you didn't mention the Subject: line. I do use Android and Mac dictation quite a bit, but not the way you do, so I don't know that part of it... I basically use the dictation for searches (on Android) and text input of email bodies (on both). Yet you seem to have skipped over the Subject: part, but I don't want to test it right now. (Yeah, now I think I should and probably will try it, but for now I'm just evaluating YOUR comment here.)
Second, as regards the metamoderation, there was no moderation to meta. After doing several prior comments, I now understand that it will display some moderation tags after I make my + or - choice, but what does that mean? I'm supposed to say whether I think it deserves an actual mod of some kind? If I pick one in the short window, then it will count in some way? (In that case, it's quite unreasonable to ask for mods without context, since context drives meaning.)
Unfortunately your report of your first result from the google is no longer meaningful. They call it customization, but I call it pandering to the users. Or in joke form, "Your mileage may differ" when you drive with the google's search.
Hmm... So the obvious next step is for me to try to confirm your result....
Okay, I got the same result, but that only proves my "personalization" matches yours to that extent. Maybe we're both on a list of google haters or censorship haters or some other secret personal characteristic that pushes that result to the top of our results? I've read that the google customization vector has around 700 dimensions for each user.
I actually think there's a better solution, but it will never happen in these days of corporate cancerism. "There is no Gawd but profit, and the google is one of Gawd's top 10 prophets!" It would be less profitable to share some of that personal information with the persons affected by it. In particular, the google will NEVER display the aggregated public reputation that people have earned, even though we could use it to filter against trolls and morons. The trolls and morons would surely sue and eat into the NEVER-YUGE-ENOUGH profits.
P.S. I actually came here from (newly? elective?) metamoderation. Even with the additional context, I cannot decide whether or not your comment deserves the + or -. My legacy sentiment was that metamoderation was even worse than moderation...
Thanks for that authoritative (5-digit) answer. When did that change happen? Makes me think the source code of Slashdot isn't as dead and orphaned as I thought it was.
I'll take a look, but unless they've also tweaked the metamoderation part of the code, I'm liable to conclude it's still pointless. My legacy opinion is that the metamoderation might be even more broken than the moderation itself.
Moderately insightful branch of the discussion. I can actually answer in terms of my longer suggestion below:
The earned public reputation should be based on several dimensions, but the dimensions should NOT be related to ideology or positions on specific issues. Or if there are some dimensions of that sort, then I think they should be discounted in the default settings and people would have to enable them if they really want to. (I'm imagining a "Trump" dimension that assesses positive or negative sentiments towards #PresidentTweety, and I admit that I would be sorely tempted to enable it and filter in favor of negative scores on that dimension...)
As regards the trolls, sock puppets, and idiots: It doesn't matter if they are sincerely stupid, proudly ignorant, mindlessly fanatical, or just paid to fake it. No sense in wasting time on them. Until an entity has EARNED a positive reputation, I don't need to see it. (And when I say earned, that includes network-based verification of the evidence of that reputation, unless you can come up with something stronger.)
As the ancient joke goes, detailed suggestions available upon polite request.
Just so, but why nothing approximating a constructive solution? If I ever saw a mod point, I wouldn't "invest" an insightful mod in such a trivial observation.
So now I should bet that my longer and more substantive comment below will never see the light of a mod point, except perhaps negative ones from some of the angry and threatened sock puppets? If my constructive suggestion were actually implemented, they would certainly be invisible and dead to me.
I think it's because the objective of Facebook is so stupid. NOT the objectives of the people who want to use Facebook. It's the mismatch between their objectives and what Facebook wants that is creating such stupidity.
Facebook just wants your time and phuck you if you care about good time versus wasted time.
The OBVIOUS (ttMCO) countermeasure to this stupid idea is to create fake news sources more quickly. It also leaves the trolls and their sock puppets in place so that they can quickly link to the new fake news sources.
It needs to work the OTHER way around. Do you want to waste YOUR time studying news sources to determine if they are crap? Me neither.
I also think it should be approached from the OTHER side, by considering the EARNED reputation of the entity that is telling me to "Look over here!" If that entity is a REAL person who has earned a REAL reputation, only then would I be willing to invest some of my precious time to look over there. If the EARNED reputation is high enough, I might even be eager to look.
If the entity in question has NO reputation or an EARNED NEGATIVE reputation, then I don't want to see the entity in the first place. You might want to adjust your filters differently. Maybe you want to see neutral reputations? If the system was that sophisticated, I actually want to see certain negative reputations if they are offset by other aspects. For example, I'd accept a certain amount of negative "politeness" if the reputation for "thought-provoking" (AKA "interesting" in Slashdot-speak) is positive.
Actually the same idea could apply on Slashdot. Details available upon polite (and sincere) request. Or you can just look over some of my old comments. Look for "public reputation" and "dual icon system". Sometimes I've described it using "avatar".
Slashdot Mirror
Why hasn't anyone mentioned "bankrupt" in this entire enormous conversation? A few mentions of laundering, but mostly without the clear linkages to #PresidentTweety and his laundry receipts for dirty rubles. This is one of the few branches I could find that even mentioned what a crook Trump is.
In summary, you aren't bankrupt until your creditors are convinced you can't repay your debts. Trump's creditors reached that conclusion a long time ago, but he somehow escaped the YUGE bankruptcy.
How did Trump become "solvent" again? With dirty money, much (possibly most) of it from the KGB who recognized a golden goose opportunity when they saw one, besides having lots of dark money that badly needed to be laundered. At that time Putin was actually one of the trusted minor laundrymen, and it was only much later that he got his own dirty money.
I think the funniest part may be that this is probably NOT an impeachable offense. Combination of the statute of limitations and pre-political crimes. Mueller will easily be able to prove that "our" president is a YUGE crook, and it won't matter. (Except for Trump's show trials of his enemies after he fully subverts the Constitution. At that point you can be sure Mueller will be one of the first guys put up against the wall.)
What time does Slashdot think it is? Surely there should be a better way of seeing the latest contributions to such a huge and hairy conversation?
Yeah, I know the moderation is supposed to help, but we all know the moderation is hopelessly broken. I do suspect there are some gems here buried in mountains of professional trollage. However the evidence of my suspicions would depend on a time-based analysis of the story's comments, and Slashdot doesn't even have a way to see the last few hours of comments. (Hence my twisted search algorithm...)
Yes, and if I ever got a mod point I'd mod you back into visibility after you've been attack-modded down. It's sadly obvious that Slashdot has become a troll playground.
In terms of REAL solutions, I think EPR (Earned Public Reputation) as an improved form of simpleminded karma is needed, but the solution is complicated and would also call for improving the moderation of posts, too. I think the dimensions are fundamentally poorly selected, not orthogonal, and not symmetric with what EPR should capture (and filter against).
However, I was actually thinking today about simpler solutions that might be within the capability of Slashdot's broken financial model. This large discussion is an interesting case to consider. On one hand, I think good discussions should be encouraged, and therefore the stories that are fostering good discussions should leave the front page more slowly. From what I have seen so far, this is NOT such a discussion. Basically I'm saying that when they publish a new story and pick the story to remove, it should not always be the oldest story. Rather the story to remove should be selected on a more sophisticated basis, considering at least the time, quantity of comments, and their quality (perhaps indicated by the balance of positive mods against negative?).
On the other hand, if I had a mod point for myself, I suppose I'd have to agree that this meta-reply is off topic, except that the topic of the story is already fundamentally borken (sic).
Only mention of that key term. Consider time divided into three categories:
(1) Essential time needed to create food, clothing, shelter and similar essential goods (and services) for survival. That time has been declining for a long time now. In an advanced society the average is on the order of an hour a week averaged over the population. There aren't many hunter-gatherer societies where everyone is working every waking hour just to survive.
(2) Investment time needed to improve future productivity. That's stuff like education and new infrastructure, but as essential time declines to extremely low levels, how much investment is needed?
(3) Recreational time divided into consumption and production. That's where the rest of the time can get soaked up, and we need to rethink along those lines.
However, I'm out of time just now, so I'll save the details for polite request...
Since he's passed away I'm guessing there's no more Culture books coming, so maybe a movie would be some sort of substitute? Or has it been tried and platzed?
Naw, I'd probably miss it. I miss almost all the movies.
There should be a way to see the EARNED public reputation of identities. That should also be linked to the actual data, allowing for network-based validation. The google is supposed to be smart enough to understand how to set up a negative feedback loop. The way this one would work would be that the harder you work to create a network of fake identities, the more visible the fake network will become and the easier to trace and remove ALL of the members (thereby erasing all of their fake ratings and reviews, too).
I think there is an obvious solution: SHARE information about the financial models used by the developers with the potential victims. One way to approach this would be with a "Financial Model" or "Money" tab in Google Play. The developer would explain where the money is. Most of the time that would involve selecting from a menu of popular business models, but it should also allow the developers to explain "Other" ideas.
Below the part controlled by the developer of the app, there would be secure commentary provided by the google people. For example, they could confirm if they are paying the developer the money mentioned in one of the standard advertising-based financial models, or confirm that there is a paid version that is generating substantial income. The google should also report whatever background information they have checked, such as when the company was founded, and highlight any important information that they could NOT confirm. While the developer should be able to negotiate with the google about this part of the Financial Model tab, the google would have the last say.
This would allow US to stop a lot of the scammers just because we could know when to be more suspicious.
The story caught my attention for the large number comments, but most of them are apparently anonymous trollage. (My settings can't see AC. Happily.) The only aspect I could imagine that might have made the story legitimately interesting would be the potential conflict of interest:
Why would a profitable meat company want to destroy its own business?
Perhaps the real goal is to stop the changes, or at least slow them down, by buying up the competing technology--and then sitting on it as long as possible. These days that's become one of the main uses of patents, though it started a long time ago. Do I need to review the history of FM radio?
Good comment and you deserve the insightful moderation. However, I think the reality may be worse than you indicated if they are using behaviorist strategies.
If you reward (or punish) a behavior on a continuous basis, then it is quickly extinguished. For example, if you reward a certain behavior every time it happens but then stop the rewards, then the behavior soon stops (is "extinguished" in behaviorist lingo). Alternatively (obviously), if you punish a certain behavior every time it happens, then that behavior soon stops. (Would anyone visit Facebook if every visit was an annoying waste of time?)
With intermittent (random) reinforcement you can create behaviors that are extremely hard to extinguish. There's always the chance that a reward will be coming on the next attempt. That's how gambling works and why addicted gamblers are so hard to cure. A couple of early wins and you may be hooked for life.
As it applies on Facebook, as long as some of your visits are positive experiences, Facebook feels they can rely on your coming back. Sure, they have so much content that they could provide you with good quality stuff all the time, but they probably regard that as a stupid idea. What would happen when another bug in their buggy website started feeding you garbage? How many "members" would leave, never to return? Much better to use the random mix of good stuff and crapola.
It's because Facebook's goals are NOT our goals.
I hate to give it away so soon, but I know most of today's Slashdot readers have rather limited attention spans. I'll say a bit more, but mostly I feel like I'm wasting my time. To a degree I might even blame Slashdot, but I think Facebook is the leader in wasting time by chewing it to pieces, and Slashdot is merely contaminated by the trend.
Remember that the "value" of Facebook is primarily linked to how much time the "members" of Facebook spend on the website. The more user time-on-site, the more user attention Facebook has to sell to advertisers, even if Facebook is doing a piss poor job of selling it. (Actually the market cap of Facebook is mostly speculative fantasy, but that describes most of today's stock market, eh? The stock price bubble is a mostly separate problem.)
The problem is that we think our time is valuable. We might value the quality of our time, but Facebook has no reason to care. Time is time as far as Facebook is concerned. Actually it might be even more evil than that. If the decision makers are behaviorists, then they know that random reinforcement is more powerful in preventing extinction...
Oh well. That's enough for now. Additional opinions available upon polite request, but politeness is another thing in short supply on today's Slashdot.
I'd like to know if Apple has any patent on this. If so, I might get a big laugh on my former employer who wasn't interested when I suggested this same idea in the official new-idea system some years ago. They didn't even publish it to prevent anyone else from patenting the approach, but I STILL think it's a good approach, and NOT just for medical information.
Possession remains 9 points of the law.
Good comment, but what is the "underrated" mod about? Moot to me since I never get a mod to give. However, you provoked me into reviewing the solution to the main problem you described so well:
Solution to your problem of corporate cancer: A progressive tax on profits linked market share.
Main justification: Increased freedom by encouraging meaningful choice.
Let me use Microsoft as an example. Imagine that Microsoft's taxes increased dramatically as it captured more of the market. At some point it would become better to divide the company into competing daughter companies. Each of them would start with a copy of the source code and an equal share of the employees and buildings and a mandate to compete against each other. Each of the kids would be strongly motivated to innovate, and if one baby, perhaps the one that focused on speed, lost market share to the baby that focused on security, that's okay. The customers would be speaking, and the increased innovation would drive the entire market to grow and evolve more rapidly.
No standardization is harmed by this solution, though the daughter companies would have to communicate in public about any changes to such standards as the Windows API or the file formats of documents. Actually, this would make it easier for competing companies to join the standards if they wanted to.
No shareholders were harmed by this solution. They started with equal shares in the daughter companies, and since the entire market innovates and grows faster because of it, they are going to win, even if some of their daughter shares decline against others.
No society was harmed by this solution. Actually, the society should use the extra tax revenues (before the split happens) to regulate the increasingly monopolistic company and to fund additional research into ways to break the monopoly if it seems to be a natural one. I don't think you can show me an example of a natural monopoly that was truly permanent and able to resist all changes in society and technology.
Hmm... No relation to diamonds? I still think you should have gotten a nice mod point or three, but moot to me since I never get a mod point.
Per my longer comment on types of people, I think management is only concerned with two types of people: Humanists are good for lower management and Materialists for upper management. The innovative founders are idealists and normally disposed of as soon as the corporation has become sufficiently cancerous.
Good insightful comment. I'd approach the analysis from a different perspective. Right now I think people tend to fall into three groups based on their highest priorities: (1) People who put ideas first, the idealists. (2) People who want stuff, the materialists. (3) People who put people first, the humanists.
I think innovative companies are created by idealists. They are also good in such fields as mathematics and programming and philosophy. If the company is going to succeed, the idealistic leader needs to have some strengths in other areas, but I'd be extremely interested if you can give a single example of a really innovative company without some idealism at the top.
Then the materialists (especially the MBAs) take over. The "good" ones will cause the corporate cancer to grow enormously. The "bad" ones cause bankruptcies, but that's okay because they always have lovely golden parachutes. (I think HP is the saddest story there.)
The humanists are not particularly useful to corporate cancers, except for the lowest levels of management. They are actually more successful as teachers or in direct sales.
I can't resist a bit of political commentary: What priorities do you attribute to #PresidentTweety? The answer should surprise you. Hint: None of the above?
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. Reminded me of an aspect that hasn't appeared in any part of the discussion I've read so far:
Change is going to happen. The questions are not not "if" or "how to control it", but "when" and "how much" and "does it hurt". I actually think evolutionary change is better than a revolution. The defining characteristic of a revolution is that someone gets badly hurt, and the huge problem of a revolution is that there is no assurance that the outcome will be better.
Yes, on the long-term average, things have gotten better, but the oscillations are unpredictable. Sometimes things get better and sometimes they get worse. If the oscillations get too strong, you can go into the negative territory with such outcomes as death, bankruptcy, or extinction. The way things are going, I'm afraid we're heading for a no-survivors outcome.
The corporate cancers that are in control are NOT worried about survival. They are inhuman and unthinking and not worried about anything. They are only programmed to generate the largest possible profits, but infinity is NOT possible, even if the cancer could actually understand why there is no Gawd but profit.
Yeah, I have a fixation.
IBM was making money by the truckload while Microsoft was bumbling around with DOS. If you wait with the innovation step until it shows up in revenue, you are too late.
I'm unable to imagine why such a shallow comment is moderated as "insightful".
The story of IBM is actually quite complicated and I've read many books trying to cover it from many perspectives. From the perspective of corporate cancer, I would summarize it thusly:
IBM was a kind of precancerous profit machine in the early days. The company actually survived through the Great Depression mostly by helping other companies automate and downsize. Then Junior (the founder's son) was positioned to gamble heavily on computers, and he won. The rest of the early gamblers on computers lost and we don't talk about the 7 dwarfs anymore. There was a period of huge monopoly profits before IBM was almost destroyed by the same kinds of problems the story discusses. The company survived by mutating into a more standard corporate cancer, which is where it is now. Maybe it will survive, but the cancers are eating each other these days, and I wouldn't bet on IBM being the last cancer standing.
Probably not the google, either. But maybe that's because I still own some shares of IBM and I never invested in the google (and never will)?
Good comment and deserved the insightful mod. I never see a mod point or I'd have considered upping your moderation in spite of my propensity to comment instead.
What you reminded me of is the "follow the money" problem. Another aspect of corporate cancerism as mentioned in my longer comment about the story. I think there are actually some historical examples of companies that succeeded because their financial model was aligned with the customers in a non-adversarial way. Even within the deceased system of capitalism that was possible, though rare.
Not now. I think the top example involves fake news and the propagators of fake news. I'm convinced that the fake-news problem could best be addressed by sharing information, but the corporate cancers will NEVER share that information because it would reduce their profits, and there is no Gawd but profit!
Or is "RULZ" the better (woke?) spelling? And should I start with a titular apology to the author of Work Rules! (by the head of HR at the google)? Just one of the many books I've read about how the google fights against the problems that Mr Yegge addressed?
OF COURSE the google failed. That's the nature of corporate cancer. I used to call it the problem of #1: Once you've got to the top, the only major change is DOWN. That's actually enough to explain 3 of his 4 problems, but the deeper cause is actually the death of capitalism. What we have now is corporate cancerism, where only ONE rule counts:
There is no Gawd but profit!
Lots of ramifications. For example, the stock market used to be about raising capital for projects that were too large for anyone to fund. Now the stock market is just a casino for computerized gamblers whose ONLY shopping criterion is the faith that some bigger sucker will buy the value-detached-from-reality shares at a higher price. OF COURSE all of them think they're as smart as the googliest googler and will cash out before the bubble bursts and the market caps implode.
Funny personal story time? It all comes back to the anecdotes? I was recently recruited by a large corporate cancer. Turns out my focus on solving real world problems, helping people, and making the world better are completely misdirected. When it came down to brass tacks, I had to prove I was a square peg who would fit in one of the square holes. Tanks, but no tanks, as the joke goes.
That's just my initial reaction to the story. It seems to have provoked a quantitatively large discussion. Maybe there are some funny or insightful comments to react to? To the searches...
That frankly sounds like a rather asinine and trollish comment. Such comments drive speculations that Putin's trolls are deluded enough to hack dormant identities on Slashdot.
Let's pretend your reply was sincere or some other positive adjective. Then my reply is that I can't imagine why anyone would use private browser mode. If I wanted to see the non-personalized results, then the google claims to offer that option (though you didn't say anything to suggest you were doing anything to make your search results unbiased in any way). If I wanted something resembling privacy, there's always Tor (if I trust Tor). Higher privacy is available, but the inconvenience increases exponentially.
Of course the thing that really makes it hard to believe in your sincerity is that neither you nor I have ANY basis to think that the person you were originally attacking [Xenographic] was doing anything to prevent the original search results from being personalized. While I confirmed your result on at least one of MY computers, that says nothing about what he can see when he searches.
Upon further consideration, I have to estimate your strike count at 2-1/2.
Hmm... I'm here because I was asked to metamoderate this comment and wanted more context, but it feels like I'm mostly trying to assess the metamoderation. My legacy sentiment was that the metamoderation is even worse than the moderation, but I don't know that much about it...
First, as regards your comment, I came to see the context because you didn't mention the Subject: line. I do use Android and Mac dictation quite a bit, but not the way you do, so I don't know that part of it... I basically use the dictation for searches (on Android) and text input of email bodies (on both). Yet you seem to have skipped over the Subject: part, but I don't want to test it right now. (Yeah, now I think I should and probably will try it, but for now I'm just evaluating YOUR comment here.)
Second, as regards the metamoderation, there was no moderation to meta. After doing several prior comments, I now understand that it will display some moderation tags after I make my + or - choice, but what does that mean? I'm supposed to say whether I think it deserves an actual mod of some kind? If I pick one in the short window, then it will count in some way? (In that case, it's quite unreasonable to ask for mods without context, since context drives meaning.)
Unfortunately your report of your first result from the google is no longer meaningful. They call it customization, but I call it pandering to the users. Or in joke form, "Your mileage may differ" when you drive with the google's search.
Hmm... So the obvious next step is for me to try to confirm your result....
Okay, I got the same result, but that only proves my "personalization" matches yours to that extent. Maybe we're both on a list of google haters or censorship haters or some other secret personal characteristic that pushes that result to the top of our results? I've read that the google customization vector has around 700 dimensions for each user.
I actually think there's a better solution, but it will never happen in these days of corporate cancerism. "There is no Gawd but profit, and the google is one of Gawd's top 10 prophets!" It would be less profitable to share some of that personal information with the persons affected by it. In particular, the google will NEVER display the aggregated public reputation that people have earned, even though we could use it to filter against trolls and morons. The trolls and morons would surely sue and eat into the NEVER-YUGE-ENOUGH profits.
P.S. I actually came here from (newly? elective?) metamoderation. Even with the additional context, I cannot decide whether or not your comment deserves the + or -. My legacy sentiment was that metamoderation was even worse than moderation...
Thanks for that authoritative (5-digit) answer. When did that change happen? Makes me think the source code of Slashdot isn't as dead and orphaned as I thought it was.
I'll take a look, but unless they've also tweaked the metamoderation part of the code, I'm liable to conclude it's still pointless. My legacy opinion is that the metamoderation might be even more broken than the moderation itself.
Moderately insightful branch of the discussion. I can actually answer in terms of my longer suggestion below:
The earned public reputation should be based on several dimensions, but the dimensions should NOT be related to ideology or positions on specific issues. Or if there are some dimensions of that sort, then I think they should be discounted in the default settings and people would have to enable them if they really want to. (I'm imagining a "Trump" dimension that assesses positive or negative sentiments towards #PresidentTweety, and I admit that I would be sorely tempted to enable it and filter in favor of negative scores on that dimension...)
As regards the trolls, sock puppets, and idiots: It doesn't matter if they are sincerely stupid, proudly ignorant, mindlessly fanatical, or just paid to fake it. No sense in wasting time on them. Until an entity has EARNED a positive reputation, I don't need to see it. (And when I say earned, that includes network-based verification of the evidence of that reputation, unless you can come up with something stronger.)
As the ancient joke goes, detailed suggestions available upon polite request.
Just so, but why nothing approximating a constructive solution? If I ever saw a mod point, I wouldn't "invest" an insightful mod in such a trivial observation.
So now I should bet that my longer and more substantive comment below will never see the light of a mod point, except perhaps negative ones from some of the angry and threatened sock puppets? If my constructive suggestion were actually implemented, they would certainly be invisible and dead to me.
I think it's because the objective of Facebook is so stupid. NOT the objectives of the people who want to use Facebook. It's the mismatch between their objectives and what Facebook wants that is creating such stupidity.
Facebook just wants your time and phuck you if you care about good time versus wasted time.
The OBVIOUS (ttMCO) countermeasure to this stupid idea is to create fake news sources more quickly. It also leaves the trolls and their sock puppets in place so that they can quickly link to the new fake news sources.
It needs to work the OTHER way around. Do you want to waste YOUR time studying news sources to determine if they are crap? Me neither.
I also think it should be approached from the OTHER side, by considering the EARNED reputation of the entity that is telling me to "Look over here!" If that entity is a REAL person who has earned a REAL reputation, only then would I be willing to invest some of my precious time to look over there. If the EARNED reputation is high enough, I might even be eager to look.
If the entity in question has NO reputation or an EARNED NEGATIVE reputation, then I don't want to see the entity in the first place. You might want to adjust your filters differently. Maybe you want to see neutral reputations? If the system was that sophisticated, I actually want to see certain negative reputations if they are offset by other aspects. For example, I'd accept a certain amount of negative "politeness" if the reputation for "thought-provoking" (AKA "interesting" in Slashdot-speak) is positive.
Actually the same idea could apply on Slashdot. Details available upon polite (and sincere) request. Or you can just look over some of my old comments. Look for "public reputation" and "dual icon system". Sometimes I've described it using "avatar".