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.

Oh good, the Burrito Taxi app’s gonna tell me I can order the Whopper from McDonald’s.

Also, this is the exact kind of transaction they had in mind when they created the tech, but everyone decided it was only ever for drugs, because that’s what the Wall St owned media told them to think

What were the completely legal products that had Visa and Mastercard standing on the sidelines in 2009? Because without a real life example, I don’t think big media had to do much to get people to ignore this use case at the time.

If people had used cryptocurrency as a currency instead of as a “it’s totally not a security, we swear, even though we’re only saying that to evade SEC regulations a little longer” there’d be a lot fewer people calling it a scam.

For sixteen years, crypto’s only use cases seemed to be buying illegal goods and securities fraud. Finally, we have another use case presenting: perfectly legal transactions that credit card companies have gotten cold feet about.

Every time I pull the string on the back of this doll it says something nice to me. Is this true love?

Our product will make all jobs obsolete. That’s why we need to work our employees to death making it!

We had that nearly a century ago.

Meet grok circa 1920

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.

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?