Xi: "Hey! I broke in first, Zork, now beat it!"

is there any hard data that it actually improves anything?

Yes, ChatGPT clearly states that it's cheaper and better than humans.

ChatTP

I swear I just got through a session with Esty chat support that sounds just like that: canned empathy. Real people did answer questions, but were aided by something making such fluffy statements in-between.

It's like the AI version of that phone-wait message that says, "Your call is very important to us" while you queue for half an hour.

I want deeds, NOT words!

And it would be more entertaining to have a sarcastic Bender-style bot, as long as I can call it nasty names back. Chewing out a LoutBot makes the wait feel shorter, and is cathartic.

Reminds me of the last two panels of this XKCD. Our rights are only being violated half as much. Yay, I guess? Strictly speaking, it's better than the alternative, and yet someone is clearly doing their job horribly wrong.

Pronounce it "Pesky"

Regardless, this is gonna turbo-charge foil hats. I've been trying to find ways to make money off conspiracy nuts. It's a win-win: I'd get richer, and they'd get a much-needed wallet-spanking lesson in reality. Don't think of it as manipulation, but as Professor Reality getting paid for giving lessons.

Harvard claims it's part of academic freedom, and to let the scientific process correct bad ideas, not university administration. True or not, it seems an honest stance. But it may become a practical problem if too many attention-seeking nuts sink the U's reputation.

"How would you ever get rid of a poor leader? I mean, what if ants lived *thousands* of days? We'd be stuck with a bad queen seemingly forever!"

Stick them in a Truman Show tank, giving them plenty of distractions and fake admiration to keep them out of our hair.

But in wealthy countries, the birth rate is trending toward a shrinking population. Extending (quality) life may help reverse the trend.

Ironically, restricting calories has proven to help lab animals live roughly 10% longer. Thus, there is some truth to your joke.

Thank You David Sinclair for being humanity's guinea pig! Even if it doesn't turn out to work right, I applaud you for testing. Failure is scientific data also. Someday some brave soul like yours may actually stumble on the right formula.

I personally suspect it won't work until nano-bots can trek around our body and fix age-related cell DNA mutations. I'd guestimate that's at least 20 years away for the wealthy (done overseas to avoid regs), and longer for us plebes.

Given that you're talking about cars in a conversation about ships, you may want to rethink tossing around words like gibberish. Crawl back under your bridge, troll.

Mashing Ctrl-C like a maniac during the boot cycle would do it.

I also got a TI-99/4A as my first machine. Fun story about "on the path:" Texas Instruments actually made a bunch of those machines in Johnson City, TN. I moved there in the late 90s and got a job working for Siemens, who had bought the industrial automation division of TI a few years prior, which included the Johnson City plant. I had a desk in a lab in a large electronics manufacturing space that was repurposed as a cube farm and was privileged enough to work with some amazing people, a few legit graybeards and a bunch of old school EE types. In passing, one of them gave me a history lesson about the plant and what they had done there in the past.

It turned out that my desk at my first "real" IT job was fifteen feet from where my first computer was made.

Coincidentally, and not as happy a memory, my mother came down to visit me at Christmas that year, and I showed her my office between Christmas and New Years when almost no one was in the office. She took a picture of me at my desk, and that picture hung in her home ever since. She just passed away last December, twenty five years to the day after that picture was taken.

I was as bored as you were in the stores, and used to go to all the display PCs and add "ctty null" to their autoexec.bat files.