Internet in 2005: “Don’t trust anything you read in the newspaper, watch on TV, or hear on the radio. The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2015: “You can now read the newspaper, watch TV, and listen to the radio on the Internet! The real truth is here.”

Internet in 2025: “AI gibberish”

Stop threatening me with a good time

Appropriate, given the context

Access to it is 100% a free speech issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_safety_on_Roblox

I grew up in the 80s, when we had these huge high profile congressional debates over everything from Mortal Kombat to Twisted Sister. It still stuns me to see modern game platforms become everything the hysterical Satanic Panic folks warned us about. But now that it really is a hothouse for scamming, grooming, and extremism, nobody seems to fucking care.

Nobody should be letting their kids play Roblox. This is probably the best thing the Russian Parliament has done since Yeltsin ordered tanks to shell it.

The way you don’t ever seem to do anything with Zack, it feels like that mystery is the real C plot.

But it’s already a very dense game with a ton of little side quests and surprises. I’m having a great time.

Wonder if they’ll ever try to do a reinvention like this for six, eight, or nine?

Fool! This is the only folding phone any true man could need

😏

Same reason Gillette gave us that third razor

I’m enjoying the Remake because they’re laying out why it’s the B plot and giving Sephiroth more of a build up than just “oops I murdered your favorite character”

Wilson and Reagan left office before the dementia really took hold

Wilson had intended to seek a third term in 1920, but was fully incapacitated and bedridden by October of 1919

Multiple Reagan staffers confirm he was fully in the thrall of dementia by his final year.

I mean, “small business” can still get pretty big. You can bring in $40M with 1500 employees and still be clarified as “small”.

You can tell because they are trying to sell you “services” that you don’t need.

Show me a business that doesn’t. 😛

There’s plenty of gray area - franchises can be privately owned despite hosting a big brand logo, retailers can have boutique letterheads despite all being part of some corporate megalith (Laundry’s loves doing this shit), an office can be part of a group, a consultant can only have one or two clients and effectively operate as an off-book extension of the parent company, yadda yadda yadda.

But for the most part, the guy running the auto shop on the run down lot at the corner is independent. And you’ll know it when they go bankrupt in the next downturn, then get replaced by a Starbucks.

Lots of professional services are run out of small businesses - doctor’s offices, law firms, plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, etc.

Wilson and Reagan would suggest otherwise

Napster was audio only.

It was file type specific and had a soft file side limit, but that’s easy enough to work around.

Did you mean limewire, or kazaa, or one of the many napster clones that came after?

They all had it as well, yes

But Trump was showing early signs of dementia during his first term.

That’s what was reported. But, again, none of this reporting is reliable. It’s all just court gossip.

The difference here is evidence.

It’s credulity. Liberals are more receptive to “conservatives in decline” than they are when it is reported of their own politicians.

That’s why Feinstein got to die in office without facing any kind of serious challenger. And why Schumer will benefit from the same.

I don’t think we’re so far from having machines that pass the Turing test 100%.

The Turing test isn’t solved with technology, its solved with participants who are easier to fool or more sympathetic to computer output as humanly legible. In the end, it can boil down to social conventions far more than actual computing capacity.

Per the old Inglorious Bastards gag

You can fail the Turing Test not because you’re a computer but because you’re a British computer.

Because all the development has been focused on fakery rather than understanding and replicating consciousness, we’re close to the point where we can have a fake consciousness that would fool anyone.

We’ve ingested a bunch of early 21st century digital markers for English language Western oriented human speech and replicated those patterns. But human behavior isn’t limited to Americans shitposting on Reddit. Neither is American culture a static construct. As the spread between the median user and the median simulated user in the computer dataset diverges, the differences become more obvious.

Do we think the designers at OpenAI did a good enough job to keep catching up to the current zeitgeist?

On our left hand we have a party who, while generally spineless in the face of opposition, at least understands the general principles of governance

Andrew Cuomo couldn’t govern himself out of a paper bag and he ran one of the largest and richest states in the country for eight fucking years. So many of the Dem Senators that got kicked to the curb in '10 and '14 and '22 sucked ass. We’re still stuck carrying around dead weight like Fetterman and Slotkin holding winnable seats, while the occasional “Trump Democrat” like Amy McGrath sucks up hundreds of millions of dollars to face-plant during a blue wave year.

Can we maybe put down the theory that these people know what they’re doing? Dianne Feinstein could barely form coherent sentences by the time she was being wheeled into votes on life support. Chuck Schumer’s got his own party base in full revolt. Newsom can’t decide if he’s running for President or running a podcast.

None of these people can govern.

It’s the cross I’m willing to bare.

If you can’t find ample evidence of human sentience then you either aren’t looking or are deliberately misreading the definition of the term.

If you can’t find ample evidence that computers aren’t sentient, same goes.

You can definitely put blinders on and set yourself up to be fooled, one way or another. But there’s a huge difference between “unassailable proof” and “ample convincing data”.

Which politicians, exactly?

Trump, back during his first term (the rumors about him being on death’s door with COVID were rampant). Biden, for nearly his entire term in office. Hillary was going to die in the middle of her 2016 run. I remember people insisting Vladimir Putin was on his way out any day now all the way back in 2005 - there’s even a wikipedia article about how many times his death was misreported. And there’s an endless parade of rumors about Kim Jung Un keeling over, Ayatollah Khomanie being terminally ill, ffs “Castro is dying, get in the boats!” was a thing people said about Fidel from his mid-fifties until he handed over office to his brother Raul in 2008.

Pretty much anyone the US government / media doesn’t like gets a scattershot “dude could die any day now” headline from time to time. And the more reactionary the source, the more credulous the allegations.