Somewhere, Chris Cornell is hearing about this story and smiling.

100% bullshit.
This is indeed the world in 2026, but that has not always been the world. It doesn't HAVE to be like this.

It used to be two people could sit down and talk about almost anything without it turning into politics.
Not everything is the fault of the libtards.
Not everything is the fault of the MAGA legions.

Your (and frankly, all of social media's) obsession with slavishly consuming the bullshit binary is unhealthy.

Of course subjects CAN have political relevance, but they don't have to. We can talk about local students struggling to pass basic performance benchmarks. My "blaming the fucking teachers' unions and their DEI woke agena" is no more productive than you saying "it's the fucking Great Orange Satan". Both are ways to AVOID substantive change by scaling the argument beyond what either of us can meaningfully change; they're both excuses for accomplishing nothing but getting a righteous frisson of rage and maybe a little extra hate.

He's never seen her face.

There we go. I appreciate your contribution 100% proving my point.

Like throwing chum in the water to sharks. It doesn't matter the subject, it's always political, isn't it?

It doesn't surprise anyone, you can already see this forum is full of the usual suspects spouting their long-established stances.

"Oh no they're going to do it now" Really? That's the best you've got?

So you're going to pretend you don't know about Soviet weapons deployed in space basically as long as either of us has been alive?

Or are we pretending there's no Chinese space weapons program?

How naive are you, or just disingenuous?

There's a weird confluence here of the capability of basically everyone having access to more information than ever, and the most constant nonsense gaslighting at the same time.

One can - instantly, really - ask about something incredibly obscure like Fermat's last theorem and depending on how much one is willing to accept someone else's summary, their own comprehension, and appetite for falling down a rabbit hole of REALLY detailed explanation, context, history, personalities, and everything involved, one can - likewise instantly - get not only the basic information but pretty nearly any gradation of explanation that wanted. And I can even get that wherever I happen to be - a library, a classroom, but also a bus or sitting on the shitter.

Objectively, that's a COOL THING.
Really, it is an amazing accomplishment for humanity generally.

Simultaneously, though we have more or less constant gaslighting over even the most stupid/obvious of facts. In the US it's often political, whether from the president & his government, or the opposition. Every single thing now has political weight in which the moment it's presented, the side-weighting are applied and if it's my side I'm for it, if it's the other side I'm against it, and by god there will never be reconciliation on even the most basic of facts.

I'd ask how we got here, but I expect all I'd see are politically-weighted answers anyway.

My point is just to highlight the constant irony of the availability of infinite information coinciding with the apparently-collective abandonment of any fixed concept of reality.

local LLMs aren't there yet and probably won't for the forseable future for ordinary people. If you want to run a full model like DeepSeek v4.1 Flash, you need something like half a TB of RAM.

The open-source LLMs are a different threat: They enable a service industry independent of the large players. I could today get some venture capital, rent a few racks in a hosting center, install a bunch of beefy machines and offer the same service as Claude or ChatGPT, just on an open-source model. The differences in benchmarks are becoming irrelevant for 95% of common use cases. And if I can offer that service for $19/m while OpenAI wants $29/m then OpenAI has a problem.

And IMHO this is the chinese strategy: Undermine the US AI industry by breaking its business model.

Has everyone gone insane or are we witnessing a major PsyOps ?

Since AI isn't magical, for it to be able to "kill all humans", it would have to be able to acquire the means to do so. Which means that these already exist. It means someone is able to do it right now. And we're chill with that, but worried about AI?

No doubt a bunch of autonomous weapon systems linked into a C&C could cause considerable bloodshed. Given that most of the existing weapon systems of that kind are essentially suicide drones, it'll still be limited damage.

Human-killing virus? Still need a means of creating and delivering it.
Nuclear war? We have humans in the loop.
Drive us all insane with AI-slop TikToks? A few percent of humanity still don't use that.

So what is the actual scenario ? When someone shouts "AI will kill us all", why don't we ask them "how, exactly" ?

He was busy that day helping Ms. Sanchez pick the right size for her new bigger boobs.

Which may be the one thing about this whole situation that cheeses Donald Trump off the most...

With all this rushing to improve AI engines and whatnot? It's the uptime/reliability that's concerning me as much as anything else.
I've seen ChatGPT Work have multiple outages just in the short time our office started using it. And even when they claim systems are running normally? You can easily get timeouts trying to complete relatively simple requests in systems like Co-Pilot, at least using the free edition.

If I ask my co-worker to complete a task, I have a pretty reasonable assumption he's going to do that. If he fails to complete requests several times in a short time-frame? Then it's likely he'll get in trouble for that, even potentially resulting in his termination. AI should be held to an even higher standard since it's a machine.

What happens when everyone is counting on AI to do necessary parts of daily workflows and then it has an extended outage? That's like your whole workforce going on strike.

Alternatively: "I'm old and unlikely to see the worst of it anyway, so please keep giving me billions."

I miss pc at power systems.
"Is it off?" was never a question.

Considerably more difficult than you imagine. Between them, they have almost 70 command-line options or flags. Taking into account that many of those behave differently depending on the presence or absence of other flags, there's a couple hundred different code paths. Then you need to handle directories, files, sparse files, sym- and hard-links, on and across different filesystems, not to mention the various file-like things scattered around (pipes, streams, etc.)

It's not rocket science, but neither is it trivial.