Because the “have fun being poor (as I gamble my life savings on a website with pump and dump basically in the name)” crowd outnumbers and is much louder than the “I am using this decentralized currency because authoritarians will inevitably strangle anything with a single point of control” crowd.

It makes what they did to Murphy to create RoboCop doubly evil, but I’ve been led to believe that that’s one of the big messages of the movie.

Their plan? Bring it about so that Rocko’s Modern Basilisk can torture the unbelievers (as if hearing their inchoate speculation about what the-computer-that-can’t-even-do-math-consistently will one day be able to do isn’t already torment enough).

These dumbasses have reinvented premillennial dispensationalism.

For the rest of us, I guess Butlerian Jihad is always an option.

The natural gas power plant would be producing the electricity that would go beyond the regular demand. And no, there aren’t any reactors there. There’s only about 50 nuclear plants in the country and Danville, VA didn’t get one.

Natural gas makes the plurality of electricity produced in the US, and to get there, it murdered coal, not nuclear or renewables, so bad as it is, it does represent an improvement in the American energy mix.

I think I must’ve missed that Verge article. I guess that dashes my “this is a creative writing exercise by somebody in Joburg” theory.

But we know that lizards have self preservation instincts (which for the purpose of this conversation I’ll say is interchangable with sentience (it’s probably a good enough proxy at any rate). But we know this because we have lots of people who have observed lizard behavior, not because The Lizard Farm, Inc has hyped up how alive and ensouled their lizards arev in a bid to get ever more VC funding.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic about this tech and my obsolete meat sack will get tossed to the time-traveling torture robot. But I think it’s more likely that we have a money grabbing hype train in the tradition of the Mechanical Turk or Theranos than it is that we have created a new lifeform by feeding every extant piece of writing that isn’t nailed down (and some that are) to the sand we’ve forced to do math.

Well, the only claim of this self preservation (that I’ve seen) is this article, which is on a website I’m unfamiliar with (which I often interpret as ‘more likely to be a creative writing exercise than the average news site’) and its only citation is a company that has a vested interest in making us believe the tech is better than it may actually be.

Fine, I won’t complain when Yudkowski’s followers take matters into their own hands.

How else are they going to be able to brag about their 90 trillion daily AI users?

How did the company named after the thing Sauron used to communicate with/spy on Saruman lose its moral compass?

Shrinking their market share is a much bigger middle finger. If you use their product and shut off a bunch of features, you’re still using the rest of their product and its other features.

If you’re planing to ‘invest’ your lunch money and get returns big enough to pay for the lunch too, you don’t have a plan, you have a gambling addiction.

Too late. I already jumped ship because of Copilot’s “Recall”, and I’m not interested in going through a round of partitioning the hard drive and installing a new OS so soon.

“They” is the car manufacturers. And yes, they were promised by Apartheid Willy Wonka.

And they fell for it. Partly because this happened back in like, 2010, when tech still felt promising and fun and partly (mostly?) because they wanted to.

Ehh, they were promised that full self driving was only a few years away. If that had been the case, touchscreens would be perfectly fine. But a decade of “only two more years, we swear” later, it’s time for the manufacturers to get back to work on AM instead of FM.

Wait, are these AI boosters bragging about how close they are to building God the torture that Roko’s Basilisk is inflicting on us all?

You can just switch to Libre, but as Microsoft products (even paid) enshittify and as the Linux scene makes itself more user friendly, switching the rest of the way over just kind of starts to make sense.

He can’t say that in a meeting that will obviously have leaks. It would be “value-destroying.”

What’s the point of having “Fuck You Money” if you don’t say “Fuck you” when it matters?

Blue sky (and just about anything else) is an improvement, but remember, there is no bottom, things can always be worse. Truth Social and Gab both still exist.

These websites, because they are all centralized, are all ultimately moderated in accordance with the whims of their owners, the effect of which was thrown into sharp relief after Apartheid Willy Wonka bought Twitter.

With a federated platform like Mastodon, no single owner would be able to do this. If an instance suddenly became terrible, they could be de-federated and they’d lose their reach.

Of course, if one instance became particularly large, the ‘whims of the owner’ problem would come right back, but at least the alternatives would still be readily available.

What if your robot was just a guy?

Grok Habsburg