Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Salesforce Says It Won’t Pay Extortion Demand in 1 Billion Records Breach
  2. National Security Threatened By Climate Crisis, UK Intelligence Chiefs Due To Warn
  3. Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded To Architects of Metal-Organic Frameworks
  4. Logitech Will Brick Its $100 Pop Smart Home Buttons on October 15
  5. UK Universities Offered To Monitor Students’ Social Media For Arms Firms, Emails Show
  6. Synology Reverses Course on Some Drive Restrictions
  7. Bonfire of the Middle Managers
  8. Survey Shows Extent of Digital Device Use Among America’s Youngest
  9. 858TB of Government Data May Be Lost For Good After South Korea Data Center Fire
  10. Nvidia’s Huang Says He’s Surprised AMD Offered 10% of the Company in ‘Clever’ OpenAI Deal
  11. TiVo Exiting Legacy DVR Business
  12. Renewables Overtake Coal As World’s Biggest Source of Electricity
  13. Should the Autism Spectrum Be Split Apart?
  14. Wordle Game Show In the Works At NBC
  15. Can Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ Transform the Tech Industry Debate?

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Salesforce Says It Won’t Pay Extortion Demand in 1 Billion Records Breach

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Salesforce says it’s refusing to pay an extortion demand made by a crime syndicate that claims to have stolen roughly 1 billion records from dozens of Salesforce customers. From a report:
The threat group making the demands began their campaign in May, when they made voice calls to organizations storing data on the Salesforce platform, Google-owned Mandiant said in June. The English-speaking callers would provide a pretense that necessitated the target connect an attacker-controlled app to their Salesforce portal. Amazingly — but not surprisingly — many of the people who received the calls complied.

[…] Earlier this month, the group created a website that named Toyota, FedEx, and 37 other Salesforce customers whose data was stolen in the campaign. In all, the number of records recovered, Scattered LAPSUS$ Hunters claimed, was “989.45m/~1B+.” The site called on Salesforce to begin negotiations for a ransom amount “or all your customers [sic] data will be leaked.” The site went on to say: “Nobody else will have to pay us, if you pay, Salesforce, Inc.” The site said the deadline for payment was Friday.

National Security Threatened By Climate Crisis, UK Intelligence Chiefs Due To Warn

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
The UK’s national security is under severe threat from the climate crisis and the looming collapse of vital natural ecosystems, with food shortages and economic disaster potentially just years away, a powerful report by the UK’s intelligence chiefs is due to warn. The Guardian:
However, the report, which was supposed to launch on Thursday at a landmark event in London, has been delayed, and concerns have been expressed to the Guardian that it may have been blocked by number 10. The destabilising impact of the climate and nature crises on national security is one of the biggest risks facing Britain, the joint intelligence committee report is understood to say.

Already, food import supply chains are coming under pressure, with the price of some commodities increasing. This could be exacerbated in the near future, the defence experts have warned, with the UK over-dependent on imports. Other industries will also be affected by ecosystem collapse in places such as the Amazon and by the worsening impacts of extreme weather around the world. These impacts will not be encountered far off in the future as some had complacently assumed, ministers have been told, but are already being felt and will grow in significance as temperatures rise beyond 1.5C above preindustrial levels.

The hard-hitting report was to be published on Thursday at a landmark event in London. But the Guardian understands that the report, prepared by experts over many months, has been halted.

Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded To Architects of Metal-Organic Frameworks

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on Wednesday for the development of molecular building blocks with spaces large enough that gases and other chemicals can flow through them. The New York Times:
The cavities on the inside are “almost like rooms in a hotel, so that guest molecules can enter and also exit again from the same material,” Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said during the announcement of the award. The laureates’ discoveries, he added, pave the way for the creation of materials that can separate toxic chemicals from wastewater or harvest water molecules in a desert.

The laureates’ work started with experiments by Dr. Robson in the 1980s and gradually developed over a period of about 15 years. “It takes time for science to be recognized, and it takes multiple workers in the field with different approaches,” said Dorothy Phillips, president of the American Chemical Society. The three laureates will share a prize of 11 million Swedish kronor, or around $1.17 million.

If you want …

By PPH • Score: 3 Thread

… terminators, this is how you get terminators.

Logitech Will Brick Its $100 Pop Smart Home Buttons on October 15

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
In another loss for early smart home adopters, Logitech has announced that it will brick all Pop switches on October 15.

In August of 2016, Logitech launched Pop switches, which provide quick access to a range of smart home actions, including third-party gadgets. For example, people could set their Pop buttons to launch Philips Hue or Insteon lighting presets, play a playlist from their Sonos speaker, or control Lutron smart blinds. Each button could store three actions, worked by identifying smart home devices on a shared Wi-Fi network, and was controllable via a dedicated Android or iOS app. The Pop Home Switch Starter Pack launched at $100, and individual Pop Add-on Home Switches debuted at $40 each.

A company spokesperson told Ars Technica that Logitech informed customers on September 29 that their Pop switches would soon become e-waste.

Makes sense

By i_ate_god • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The economy doesn’t work if you buy things that last.

And the second S in IoT…

By thegarbz • Score: 3 Thread

stands for “support”.

Local functions should be local

By medoc • Score: 3 Thread

Another illustration of why you donÂt want to depend on the cloud for local functions.

Re:Makes sense

By RitchCraft • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Reasonable? Working equipment you own suddenly stops working because it’s tied to a company that can fuck you at will. That’s reasonable? So where is the line? 9 years … 8 years … 5 years? This why I avoid EVERYTHING that requires a company’s cloud to operate. These “reasonable” actions will always happen.

Re:CONSUME

By saloomy • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
We need legislation that all equipment that is no longer supported be open sourced, and one last firmware update gives a vector to load your own firmware (or community) firmware you download. I get they have no economic interest in these buttons, but for fucks sake, if you aren’t paying for it continuously, “the cloud” will stop working with it eventually. We need a way to make the device receive / send API calls locally. This should be legislated. “We no longer support your device. Here is the most recent firmware’s source code, the certificates used to validate the update server, and a quick read me on how to get it to fetch a firmware from your local computer (web server with said certificate). Thanks for using our product!”

UK Universities Offered To Monitor Students’ Social Media For Arms Firms, Emails Show

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
Universities in the UK reassured arms companies they would monitor students’ chat groups and social media accounts after firms raised concerns about campus protests, according to internal emails. One university said it would conduct “active monitoring of social media” for any evidence of plans to demonstrate against Rolls-Royce at a careers fair.

A second appeared to agree to a request from Raytheon UK, the British wing of a major US defence contractor, to “monitor university chat groups” before a campus visit. Another university responded to a defence company’s “security questionnaire” seeking information about social media posts suggestive of imminent protests over the firm’s alleged role in fuelling war, including in Gaza. The universities’ apparent compliance with the sensitivities of arms companies before careers fairs has emerged in emails obtained by the Guardian and Liberty Investigates after freedom of information (FoI) requests.

Synology Reverses Course on Some Drive Restrictions

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Synology has released an update to its Disk Station Manager software that removes verified drive requirements from its 2025 model-year Plus, Value and J-series DiskStation network-attached storage devices. The change allows users to install non-validated third-party drives and create storage pools without restrictions.

The company had expanded its verified drive policy to the entire Plus line a few months earlier. Synology-branded drives carried substantial price premiums over commodity hardware. The HAT5310 enterprise SATA drive costs $299 for 8TB compared to $220 for an identically sized Seagate Exos disk. Users who installed non-verified drives in affected models faced reduced functionality and persistent warning messages in the DSM interface.

Synology said today it is collaborating with third-party drive manufacturers to accelerate testing and verification of additional storage drives. Pool and cache creation on M.2 disks still requires drives from the hardware compatibility list. Synology did not clarify whether the policy change applies to previous-generation products.

This is totally your brain on MBA

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

No conception of how the product is used or what your strength is at as a business and what you want your reputation to be in the industry. Just a pure play for revenue.

This is one of those times I’d want to have to recording of the meeting where this was proposed and how it was justified as a good idea, I think it’d be enlightening to see how what are supposed to the smart people could get rooked into such a bone-headed idea.

Their reputation is still gone

By nicolaiplum • Score: 3 Thread

They have already trashed their reputation. Since they have done it once, they will surely do it again.

Avoid buying them, and replace any existing Synology units with another vendor when you can.

Bonfire of the Middle Managers

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
American companies have begun cutting middle management positions at rates not seen in years. Google eliminated 35% of managers overseeing teams of fewer than three in August. Fiverr announced in September it would shed managers to focus on AI. Amazon trimmed its management ranks throughout the year and cut positions at its cloud-computing division in July. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg has complained about managers managing managers since 2023.

Phrases relating to reducing management layers appeared 98 times on earnings calls of companies in the S&P global index this year, twice the frequency of all of 2022. The cuts stem partly from an uncertain economic environment and President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, Economist writes. The pandemic created the conditions for the current retrenchment. Companies furloughed staff during Covid-19 and then hired rapidly to meet demand for e-commerce and digital services. They promoted employees to management positions to retain talent even when those managers supervised only one or two subordinates. Between 2019 and 2024, five of the ten fastest-growing job categories were management roles. Since November 2022, listed American companies have cut middle-management positions by around 3% on average.

Yikes!

By GoTeam • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Golf courses are going to be hit hard by the lack of middle managers showing up during work days.

Rookie numbers

By alvinrod • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
35% is a good start, but nowhere near where it should be at. Middle management is the gutter where corporate detritus collects. Upper management that claims to need middle management are good candidates for replacement or redundancy themselves.

Re:I have 8 bosses

By GoTeam • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I had that problem at a previous job. It was the main reason I left. I don’t need 5 insecure managers trying to prove their worth by giving subordinates more busywork. Especially when most of those managers have no expertise in the areas they’re managing.

Public sector issue: salaries

By bjdevil66 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I can only speak for the public sector, but the talented people that stay in the public sector eventually have to move up to management positions for only one reason: A bigger salary.

The real problem isn’t about too many managers. It’s about politics and culture: “I’m THE manager, so people beneath me cannot make more money than me!”

If leaders eliminated that single stupid, corrosive paradigm from their org’s culture and people were paid what they’re worth based on merit (not title or hierarchies), these pointless middle management jobs would disappear overnight. “You mean I don’t have to manage anyone and I get paid what I’m really worth? Wow! F**k those management responsibilities! I’ll take door number 2, thank you.”

If you’re a manager and don’t like this because you worked your way up in the current culture and would feel slighted by this change, you need to STFU. You’re not BETTER than your subordinates because of your title. You’re just managing others because that’s your job that you’re officially trained to do - manage people. And those people may be just as important, if not more so, to your organization as you are.

Re:Rookie numbers

By smooth wombat • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The role of middle managers is to execute the plans of upper management. Without middle management the upper management would have to deal with the workers and all the minutiae while at the same time trying to keep the company running.

As Forbes said, middle managers are the overlooked leaders who hold the organization together.

Survey Shows Extent of Digital Device Use Among America’s Youngest

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
A Pew Research Center survey, released today, found that TV remains the dominant screen for American children aged twelve and younger. 90% of parents reported that their child watches TV. Tablets are used by 68% of children in this age group. 61% use smartphones.

The survey of U.S. parents also documented emerging technology patterns. About one in ten parents said their child between five and twelve years old uses AI chatbots such as ChatGPT or Gemini. Roughly four in ten parents reported that their child uses voice assistants like Siri or Alexa. YouTube appeared in 85% of households. Half of parents said their child uses gaming devices. About four in ten reported desktop or laptop use. The survey found that 62% of parents said their child under two watches television. 42% of parents said they could be doing better at managing screen time for their children.

TV is not old TV

By PDXNerd • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

People say “I was raised with TV and I’m fine!” but when kids in the 1950s->pre-netflix era watched TV you typically had a serial stream of crap to choose from, with cartoons on at certain socially-acceptable times of day (normally after school or saturday mornings only). Older demographic advertisements made more money so kids either watched that crap or, more likely, turned it off and did something else. “Good” video games that could keep your attention for hours (lets say mid-90s) started to change this equation but even still, it wasn’t ubiquitous and many kids didn’t like the games that offerred this level of immersion.
 
My kids have a thousand, *good* cartoons to choose from, just on Netflix, not to mention *every disney movie ever made*, 35 seasons of the Simpsons, and the thousands of other good programs on Disney, not even talking about the free shit you find on a typical smart TV (and I’m not even adding in the Youtube app on the TV which is a whole other thing).
 
4K HDR Dolby Sound Screen Time now is addictive in ways it NEVER was in the past, so yes, we do have a harder time as parents in the 2020s managing screen time than parents did 20 or 30 or more years ago. “My friend has a phone and can play as much as they want” arguments don’t help either. Digital Interactivity has reached Drug Addiction levels and its hard to be able to know when to draw the line.

Now ask

By skam240 • Score: 3 Thread

Now ask how often their children are playing outdoors.

Bender on Futurama was right

By dysmal • Score: 5, Funny Thread

“Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting them?”

858TB of Government Data May Be Lost For Good After South Korea Data Center Fire

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
South Korea’s government may have permanently lost 858TB of information after a fire at a data center in Daejeon. From a report:
As reported by DCD, a battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, located in the city of Daejeon, on September 26, has caused havoc for government services in Korea. Work to restore the data center is ongoing, but officials fear data stored on the government’s G-Drive may be gone for good. G-Drive, which stands for Government Drive and is not a Google product, was used by government staff to keep documents and other files. Each worker was allocated 30GB of space.

According to a report from The Chosun, the drive was one of 96 systems completely destroyed in the fire, and there is no backup. “The G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system due to its large capacity,” an unnamed official told The Chosun. “The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms.” While some departmers do not rely on G-Drive, those that do have been badly impacted in the aftermath of the fire. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said: “Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill.”

Couldn’t have a backup

By Mononymous • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The Korean government couldn’t afford a petabyte of storage to back up documents without which “operations are at a standstill”.

Improtant things should have remote backup…

By Lavandera • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I was working 10+ years ago for one of the EU governments and the rule was that there should be backup located at leaset 30km away from the prime location.

Re:They obviously did a risk analysis.

By korgitser • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Maybe the risk analysis found a catastrophe would be their only chance of moving the country and government off of ActiveX.

Re:Couldn’t have a backup

By UnknowingFool • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Nothing said it was a matter of cost. All that was said was it was “too large.” The issue may have been the size of the data was too much for the government’s current backup infrastructure to handle. They probably needed to design a new system but never got around to doing so. Technically a petabyte server could be built into a single 4U server rack.

Re:They obviously did a risk analysis.

By dgatwood • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Correct: “The G-Drive couldn’t have a backup system due to its large capacity,” merely means “we were too cheap to provide a backup”.

As we always used to say, “If you think having a backup is too expensive, try not having one.”

Nvidia’s Huang Says He’s Surprised AMD Offered 10% of the Company in ‘Clever’ OpenAI Deal

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Wednesday that he’s surprised Advanced Micro Devices offered 10% of itself to OpenAI as part of a multibillion-dollar partnership announced earlier this week. From a report:
“t’s imaginative, it’s unique and surprising, considering they were so excited about their next generation product,” Huang said in an interview with “CNBC’s Squawk Box.”

“I’m surprised that they would give away 10% of the company before they even built it. And so anyhow, it’s clever, I guess.” OpenAI and AMD reached a deal on Monday, with OpenAI committing to purchase 6 gigawatts worth of AMD chips over multiple years, including its forthcoming MI450 series. As part of the agreement, OpenAI will receive warrants for up to 160 million AMD shares, with vesting milestones based on deployment volume and AMD’s share price.

Didn’t think anyone could....

By zurkeyon • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Out maneuver him with his US Gov and Intel Deals. Those crafty humans! ;-D

It’s just stock dilution.

By Fly Swatter • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Corporations do it all the time, and it’s 10 percent over years with milestone requirements to receive those warrants - not only purchase requirements but also stock price minimum requirements, the last tranche of warrants requires an AMD $600 trading price to activate.

Re:Clever

By nmb3000 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Clever, because they know it is all monopoly money once the AI crash comes.

Not just once the crash comes, but this sort of thing will help cause the crash.

Cory Doctorow talked about some of it in a recent post that really helped me grok what I’ve been feeling about the inevitable AI bubble collapse.

The data-center buildout has genuinely absurd finances – there are data-center companies that are collateralizing their loans by staking their giant Nvidia GPUs as collateral. This is wild: there’s pretty much nothing (apart from fresh-caught fish) that loses its value faster than silicon chips.

That barely scratches the surface of the funny accounting in the AI bubble. Microsoft “invests” in Openai by giving the company free access to its servers. Openai reports this as a ten billion dollar investment, then redeems these “tokens” at Microsoft’s data-centers. Microsoft then books this as ten billion in revenue.

That’s par for the course in AI, where it’s normal for Nvidia to “invest” tens of billions in a data-center company, which then spends that investment buying Nvidia chips. It’s the same chunk of money is being energetically passed back and forth between these closely related companies, all of which claim it as investment, as an asset, or as revenue (or all three).

AMD giving 10% of itself to OpenAI is almost entirely symbolic as OpenAI will turn around and “spend” that money on something like GPU hardware, probably AMD products. AMD is just paying itself via OpenAI and both companies will book it as revenue to try and obscure the colossal losses on AI spending.

It’s all monopoly money laundering, and it’s going to crash hard.

TiVo Exiting Legacy DVR Business

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
TiVo, the digital video recording pioneer, has moved on from its legacy DVR technology, focusing instead on its branded operating system software promoting third-party content searches, recommendation, including free ad-supported streaming options and more for smart televisions. From a report:
“As of Oct. 1, 2025, TiVo has stopped selling Edge DVR hardware products,” the company said in an AI-based message. The recording said that the company and its associates no longer manufacture DVR hardware, “and our remaining inventory is now depleted.” TiVo said it remains “committed to providing support for our DVR customers and will continue to provide support for the foreseeable future.” TiVo in 1999 created the first set-top device enabling users to record and skip ads within television programming.

Linear TV is Dead

By DewDude • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

They just lost their market entirely. Cable has gotten too expensive. Everyone streams. Most providers are shutting down and telling people to go to YouTube.

Suuuuurrre

By Smonster • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
TiVo said it remains “committed to providing support for our DVR customers and will continue to provide support for the foreseeable future.” Translation. “You folks have 6 months to two years tops before completely abandon the platform beyond a token forum where you guys can share tips and vent frustration to each other. Hopefully that is long enough for us to convince the public Tivo means something else than its common vernacular.”

Now Open-Source Your Code

By Tokolosh • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

When you abandon your hardware, you are expected to abandon your software.

Fuck Smart TVs.

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I’ve always taken issue with smart TVs and their probable accelerated obsolescence. The TV vendors are not motivated to maintain or update the software on old models, instead focusing solely on next years model. That seems OK, until they intentionally fuck over the consumer.

This was born out for me personally just last month. I own a few Vizio Smart TVs. Their smart apps were being supported by Yahoo!, strangely enough. But, after several years, Yahoo! was discontinuing support for the smart apps(Amazon, Netflix, Plex…). That’s fine and understandable. What’s not fine nor acceptable is that on the deadline date, Yahoo/Vizio wiped all perfectly functioning apps off the devices. The apps all ceased to exist with the recommendation to buy new TVs.

Fuck Smart TVs! I want a display screen with a built in digital tuner. Everything else is a scam and spyware.

In an interesting aside, switching from from the Yahoo! Amazon app to the Apple TV Amazon app brought be unskippable ads. While there were no ads when watching through the Yahoo! Amazon app, every Amazon show via the Apple TV Amazon app has unskippable ads. Makes me want to sail the seven seas.

TIVO is dead. Long live TIVO

By rocket rancher • Score: 3 Thread

An era comes to a close. I was using a VHS recorder to time- and format-shift television shows I liked (specifically Babylon 5 at the time.) I remember the vice-president of TNT programming specifically calling us pirates for doing that, which we gleefully piled on in rec.arts.sf.tv.b5. :) Then TIVO came along about a year later (late 1999, early 2000, something like that) and the VHS experience went digital. Not only could we fast forward through ads, but TIVO’s easily-cracked encryption allowed a whole cottage industry of ad removers to grow and thrive. I had a cron job running on my Slackware-fueled (I know, I’m dating myself) media server that extracted the day’s TIVO recordings, decrypted them, fed them through an ad-stripper (that I found on pre-Dice sourceforge) and queued them up for me to watch the next day. With TIVO’s fantastic season pass recording, along with mulitple-channel simultaneous recording, it was a good time for consumers of linear TV. Streaming is nice, though I now just pay cash, instead of skull-sweat, for the privilege of going ad-free. I will miss ye, Tivo.

Renewables Overtake Coal As World’s Biggest Source of Electricity

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC:
Renewable energy overtook coal as the world’s leading source of electricity in the first half of this year — a historic first, according to new data from the global energy think tank Ember. Electricity demand is growing around the world but the growth in solar and wind was so strong it met 100% of the extra electricity demand, even helping drive a slight decline in coal and gas use. However, Ember says the headlines mask a mixed global picture.

Developing countries, especially China, led the clean energy charge but richer nations including the US and EU relied more than before on planet-warming fossil fuels for electricity generation. This divide is likely to get more pronounced, according to a separate report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). It predicts renewables will grow much less strongly than forecast in the US as a result of the policies of President Donald Trump’s administration. Coal, a major contributor to global warming, was still the world’s largest individual source of energy generation in 2024, a position it has held for more than 50 years, according to the IEA.

Re:Coal maybe, not gas

By mrspoonsi • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Individual days are less important than the whole year. If renewables out produce coal to be the worlds biggest source of electricity generation, then by definition is larger also than natural gas.

Re:…but Trump Says

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
Yes, nobody wants to see coal. But, my country grandma in PA got a 15% reduction in her property taxes by switching her oil furnace to a coal furnace.

Re:…but Trump Says

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 4, Informative Thread
And just to show you I’m not “blowing smoke” (pun indended) —

https://legacystoves.com/produ…

Re:Coal maybe, not gas

By coofercat • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

We brits aren’t great at rooftop solar - we’re getting better, but there’s a long, long way to go. The square kilometres of untapped space are many, and if we get to using it, then the demand for grid electricity changes dramatically. Sure, cloudy days aren’t as good as sunny ones, but I’ll bet a lot of houses are just consuming “power vampires” right now, all of which could be powered by some solar, even on a cloudy day.

Say nothing about our pretty terrible record on insulating our houses - if we do that, then the use of gas drops off a lot, and for those with electrical heating, things improve there too. The government is stuck in a rut of raising taxes until productivity improves, but if they ever get to doing some sort of incentives for domestic rooftop solar and (probably more importantly) thermal performance of our houses, then we could shift our whole grid and carbon discussion by quite a distance.

But yes, our dependence on gas is far too great.

Re:…but Trump Says

By Grady Martin • Score: 4, Informative Thread

One thing that ChatGPT does well is fact-checking.

Could someone living in Pennsylvania theoretically reduce property taxes by 15% by “upgrading” an oil furnace to a coal one?

That’s a really interesting and creative idea — but no, someone living in Pennsylvania could not reduce their property taxes by 15% by switching from oil to coal heating.

It then delves into minutae of Pennsylvanian tax law, a furnace’s impact on assessed property value, and how not even coal refuse (as opposed to ordinary coal) could affect property tax.

Perhaps your grandmother miscommunicated or was even deceived or misled. Are you able to provide any more details?

Should the Autism Spectrum Be Split Apart?

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
XXongo writes:
A New York times article suggests that merging the diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome into the Autism diagnosis in 2013, thus creating the “autism spectrum disorder,” was not helpful (paywalled; alternative source). That broadening of the diagnosis, along with the increasing awareness of the disorder, is largely responsible for the steep rise in autism cases that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called "an epidemic" and has attributed to theories of causality that mainstream scientists reject, like vaccines and, more recently, Tylenol. But the same diagnosis now applies to both people who are non-verbal, frequently engage in self-destructive behavior such as pounding their heads against the floor, and may require full-time care, but also to people who are merely somewhat socially awkward, possibly engage in repetitive behaviors, and have a narrow range of interests. “Everything changed when we included Asperger’s [in the diagnosis of autism],” said Dr. Eric Fombonne, a psychiatrist and researcher at Oregon Health & Science University. He noted that in the earliest studies of autism rates, 75% of people with the diagnosis had intellectual disabilities. Now, only about a third do.

Question is

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Why does everyone seemingly have autism now? Is it better diagnosis, over diagnosis, re-definitio of autism or something else?

Re:Question is

By Spazmania • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The diagnoses were merged because the evidence had begun to suggest that they were different severities of the same ailment. If the evidence has begun to suggest that we’re dealing with fundamentally different ailments then the diagnoses should be split accordingly. If not then you’re shuffling names for the sake of politics and it’s not a good day in science when that happens.

Re:Question is

By RobinH • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
I’m married to a psychologist, and I can assure you that the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it, and it was pushed through anyways for political reasons. I’m not sure if the psychology profession (and medical profession as well) truly understand how much they’re contributing to the falling public trust in institutions by doing stuff like this, but it’s plain as day to me.

Re:Redefinitions by activists

By gtall • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

“It’s pretty well understood that current “let’s get everything under the same umbrella so activists can claim they have more support” has been modus operandi for far left activists for a while now. "

Bull, that was the right wingnuts what did that so they could claim anything they didn’t like was a “Conspiracy”.

Re:Question is

By AleRunner • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I’m married to a psychologist, and I can assure you that the DSM 5 (the guidebook for diagnostics) was created by a committee that was heavily influenced by politics, and there was a significant pushback within the psychology community about it.

This is the side effect of the fundamental problem that we really don’t understand minds. Just as our AI people are basically alchemists prior to the acceptance of atomic theory, these guys are the same thing, just with the fact that some of them understand and admit that. These guys are right in the middle of our current culture wars without a solid basic scientific basis for what they do. We observe that chemicals affect or change neurotransmitters. We see some clear changes in the brain. Sometimes we see people’s minds changed by destruction of bits of the brain, but we also see those minds recover and completely work around loss of what we used to think of as fundamental parts of the infrastructure.

That’s before you start getting to diseases of the mind. We used to have “gender dysphoria”. Then people observed that some brains inside males really seem to behave in female ways and started believing that their identity was fundamental. Then others showed that the brain and certainly mind are much more plastic that people thought before. In some cases your treatment and surroundings can visibly change the sex that your brain would be identified with in scans.

To really work out what’s going on in even that small area, you should do randomized trials and double blind experiments. Needless to say, randomly changing the way someone’s parents bring them up gets into ethics problems and isn’t done. The science is really difficult and is often done badly. When governments have attempted to get a rational scientific summary of the current state, that ended up with scientific criticism on both sides and ended up as a political shitshow

DSM-N is where psychologists actually take that stuff on board and have to make recommendations for doctors. Their job is really really difficult. If the whole research field is totally politicized and if what was illegal under one US government becomes illegal to avoid under another then that becomes an inherently political job.

Since “gender” is by definition of the word a product of the mind (what I believe I am - whether through self examination, self determination, realism or madnes) and we don’t have a proper theory of that mind, et alone a clear way to link the mind to the “sex” of the brain or even 100% clarity about what that even means, you can’t even clearly define most of the terms and ideas needed to debate the issue scientifically.

Now, I’ve tried to be careful and, reasonably neutral and point to how the politics interferes with the scientific debate about one particular determination that has to be made for DSM. There’s a 90% chance that if the critics don’t read this last sentence we’re going to get a massive flame war (and a 70% chance even if they do) from people who are more invested in this and probably know more specific facts about recent literature than me. Remember, these people are, in the end, Alchemists debating whether iron will soon be transmuted into gold or not.

How would you do DSM avoiding that?

Wordle Game Show In the Works At NBC

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
NBC is developing a game show based on the New York Times’ Wordle puzzle, with Today anchor Savannah Guthrie set to host and Jimmy Fallon executive producing through his company, Electric Hot Dog. The Times is also a production partner. From the Hollywood Reporter:
Wordle, which the Times acquired in 2022 and logs billions of plays from the paper’s games site annually, gives players six tries to guess a five-letter word, revealing only if letters are in the right place (via a green background) or part of the word but in the wrong place (with a gold background). Should it go forward, the Wordle show would join another Fallon-produced game show, Password, on NBC’s unscripted roster. The Tonight Show emcee also executive produces and hosts the network’s On Brand, a competition series that revolves around advertising and marketing.

You mean like “Lingo” was?

By hymie! • Score: 3 Thread

You mean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… ?

Can Cory Doctorow’s ‘Enshittification’ Transform the Tech Industry Debate?

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times:
Over the course of a nearly four-decade career, Cory Doctorow has written 15 novels, four graphic novels, dozens of short stories, six nonfiction books, approximately 60,000 blog posts and thousands of essays. And yet for all the millions of words he’s published, these days the award-winning science fiction author and veteran internet activist is best known for just a single one: Enshittification. The term, which Doctorow, 54, popularized in essays in 2022 and 2023, refers to the way that online platforms become worse to use over time, as the corporations that own them try to make more money. Though the coinage is cheeky, in Doctorow’s telling the phenomenon it describes is a specific, nearly scientific process that progresses according to discrete stages, like a disease.

Since then, the meaning has expanded to encompass a general vibe — a feeling far greater than frustration at Facebook, which long ago ceased being a good way to connect with friends, or Google, whose search is now baggy with SEO spam. Of late, the idea has been employed to describe everything from video games to television to American democracy itself. “It’s frustrating. It’s demoralizing. It’s even terrifying,” Doctorow said in a 2024 speech. On Tuesday, Farrar Straus & Giroux will release "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” Doctorow’s book-length elaboration on his essays, complete with case studies (Uber, Twitter, Photoshop) and his prescriptions for change, which revolve around breaking up big tech companies and regulating them more robustly.
Further reading: The Enshittification Hall of Shame

Disintermediation in tech

By will4 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Limit the number of internet connected, soon to be bricked, devices you have.

There is no debate

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Nobody is talking about doing anything about all the bad things that keep happening. We are just bitching about it.

Large companies have too much power to go up against with anything except government or massive amounts of organization AKA unions.

About half the country has laid down their arms and chosen to comply in advance rather than fight back with the only weapons they have. A little bit of voter suppression and a little bit of threats of violence is enough to keep the other half in line.

For the time being there letting us bitch and moan but it won’t be long before we lose even that privilege.

I would be curious to get honest answers from the half that has given up on what they think they got in return. But that’s kind of a moot point.

Anything we could use to stop everything from getting worse isn’t on the table and all that’s left are fools fantasizing about fighting back against heavily armed and trained and supplied soldiers and militarized police with their little semi-automatic rifles. Maybe fully automatic if they know how to use a machine shop…

I would love for somebody to explain specifically what they expect us to do against large tech companies. You could say don’t buy their products but let’s not kid ourselves here. Boycotts don’t work in the face of mega corporations that control basically every market. You dropping Linux on a few of your home computers doesn’t stop Facebook from materially affecting your life in a negative way.

I’m open to solutions but I’ve yet to have anyone give me anything useful or concrete. Just a lot of cope and a lot of bitching

Re:There is no debate

By misnohmer • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I would be curious to get honest answers from the half that has given up on what they think they got in return.

If they are anything like me, it’s simple really. At one point I realized I cannot fix the world, so rather than sulk about what is happening, I simply adapt to the ever changing world and do what is best for me and my family. For example, I don’t use almost any social media, never had a FB account, or WhatsUp, or Instagram, or Twitter/X, etc, but I’ve made money on some of their stock. Same for some companies making internet dependent appliances, most people love them, I paid extra for few of my appliances to not have an internet connection. Once they become pay per use, or simply bricked because manufacturer discontinues the service, I say you sleep in the bed you made for yourself. People will do what people will do regardless of what I think, even if I think it’s stupid or bad for them, so that is irrelevant, therefore why not hookup to that gravy train to benefit me or my family if I can. Democracy, whether in politics or in markets where people vote with their money or giving away their personal information, means the majority rules. Majority of humanity is not that bright, and I think getting dumber with time, so you have to treat their decisions like natural disasters - try to avoid areas at risk, and have contingency plans if one hits you.

Re:There is no debate

By AmiMoJo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The EU is doing stuff about it. Requirements to make products repairable, batteries swappable, minimum support periods, clear warnings that paid services are requires, refunds where functionality is significantly changed.

Props to Doctorow though. Coining such a compelling and accurate word has really helped with consumer understanding of the issue. Even in places like the US where the corporations make the rules, consumers are starting to understand and demand better.

Re:Wait until Cory starts buying tools

By MobyDisk • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Enshittification isn’t just “products getting worse over time” - it is where companies take an existing service, and either add features that benefit another party at your expense, or remove necessary features for it to function. Ex: You buy an ad-free streaming service to stream a certain TV series. The company then puts ads on it and removes the series you were watching. Or you visit a web site regularly, but now you have to sign-up to access it. Or the site now displays a bunch of pop-ups and only works on a particular operating system or browser.

If it was capitalism, you would just switch to a different streaming provider / web site. But with enshittification, there are barriers preventing that. Ex: No one else streams that series, or all the similar web sites require a login. In capitalism someone wins and someone loses, but with enshittification everyone loses.

This is different from “You buy a new pair of jeans, and it isn’t manufactured as well as their previous line of jeans.”