Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you’ve listed.

That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.

AI has been used to refer to human like intelligence in fiction for at least half a century.

Unless I misunderstand, in China it’s illegal to distribute VPNs, but simply using one and accessing the wider net is fine. That implementation isn’t great, but it could also be a lot worse. Effectively it means anyone who’s tech savvy enough can leave the walled garden whenever they like with practically no consequence. Though, it still requires some group of people assume the legal risk of setting up and hosting the VPN infrastructure.

I feel like there must be some means of achieving the same effect without criminalizing people just for providing a service. Like, defaulting to a garden of public and private webpages that meat the standard, but still with some means of leaving that garden provided you pass a minor techincal barrier to entry.

Also forcing every social media site and glorified-website-app to default to chronological sort every time you close the browser tab or leave the app. It’s a simple change, but it would do a lot.

Thank you for the synopsis. However;

This is a clanker:

and this is software:

I wouldn’t say never, but certainly not this century. Probably not the next one, either.

And at this point we might as well refer to it as something like “Machine Consciousness”, because “AI” an any derivatives of it have been rendered garbage for actually talking about the sci-fi concept.

that did actually happen to a guy, over the password to his bitcoin account

https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-crypto-kidnapping-torture-case/story?id=122280419

I love having capital, now if only there weren’t all this pesky labor.

Any meritocratic system becomes an informal aristocracy after a generation or two. And aristocrats are so notoriously good at understanding the systems that facilitate and keep them in power…

More than that, most of the old testament is stories about how you don’t debate God, you don’t test God, and you definitely don’t force God’s hand.

Honestly, this Intel guy is cute compared to the Christian Zionists, who somehow think God wants and will be happy with their attempts to manufacture prophecy.

lol

the Sun does the same thing but also with a profit motive

You know Christianity is an offshoot of Judaism, right? How early roman christians viewed and treated Jewish people is reasonable context to include in a conversation about the history.

When I was on facebook back then, I would see boomers making posts talking about the 1950s in the same way.

Life has a tendency to spread when new environments are available, yes.

But beyond this planet, there are no other environments. You might say the rest of the universe is antivironment. There is a wide range of possible conditions, of radiation and tempurature, gravity and molecular composition. Life requires a very very narrow and specific set of those conditions to continue.

Going from one continent to another, within the same atmosphere, with the same underlying set of conditions, is not all that much of a change. Actually leaving the planet? Permanently? And without just dying in the attempt? That would require a level of organization, long term planning (like, centuries long term), and resource management that we as a species have yet to demonstrate.

Settling mars is a centuries long undertaking. You basically have to nurture a whole ecosystem from scratch… that would be a brutally difficult and lengthy process in the best of conditions. But of course, these aren’t the best conditions. We aren’t doing particularly well with the ecosystem we’ve already got.

If you want a historical project, then look to balancing modern industry within the planet’s biosphere. It’s a prerequisite to anything happening on mars.

Would Oganesson even last long enough to lick? Let me look this up…

…0.7 millisecond half-life. A fraction of a millionth thousandth of a second. So you really only have to worry about all the things it decays into, and not the element itself.

Personal Anecdote: I’ve noticed I dream more if I eat an avocado right before bed.

I get these stories as a way of pointing out the inherant absurditity in a lot of every day things…

…but also… life requires energy. Something’s gotta keep the metabolism going. Oxygen is both highly reactive and significantly more abundant than any of its heavier counterparts further down the column. If there is life out there with a metabolic rate anywhere approaching our own, it would be weird if it didn’t use oxygen.

those actually look pretty tasty

No other country has done as much? We’re gonna just ignore how much support Israel has thrown behind Trump? Netanyahu was meeting and communicating with him during the 2024 election cycle, all while ignoring the Biden administration! Snubbing a sitting president for a prospective candidate!