"I've personally never met or heard of a rational, functional criminal."

There are a lot of them, they fill boardrooms, political buildings, luxury yachts and banking offices. They just have enough money and connections to get away with it

Based on what? GDP?--maybe, our biggest export is probably financial crime. All of those GDP gains ain't going to people. Average French person has it a lot better than we do here...

I dunno, it's a useful planning exercise for a "wtf" situation--don't other organisations use Zombie Outbreak for the same sort of thing? And i'm pretty sure the nutters in the Vatican have a department setup solely for how to handle Extraterrestrials being found or showing up.

I used to build automated voice systems and chatbots for a large retail organisation, this was in the days of traditional NLU but before LLM stuff.

I mandated every bot and automated journey we deployed had to have a number of things in place to prevent this problem--really trivial stuff like "if there 2 or more failure states in succession (error or customer says something like 'no not that', offer a human agent.", or if a human agent is requested but no automation was attempted, encourage the customer to try automation first but don't force them to stay in automation.

There was always pressure from other parts of the org (marketing, financial types etc.) to contain people inside bots in a hostile way all to "reduce costs" which is a false economy, because customers either leave out of frustration or these tasks generate full blown complaints which ended up costing more to manage.

It's tough to push back on that stuff for some dev teams, I'm guessing they get outranked a lot. I was lucky to have board-level backing of my approach

The USA has 25% of the world's prison population, with only 5% of the population. Get a grip.

The "absolute freedom of speech" delusion is uniquely an American one, the rest of the world isn't that naive.

Brexit is a bad example, almost everyone thinks it's a total disaster and mistake. In some delicious irony, all the racists (not all brexit voters were racist, but all racists were brexit voters) who supported it directly caused a huge increase in non-white migration due to leaving the EU :)

That aside, migration is not a huge problem. It is being manufactured as a problem by the very wealthy. They're terrified that people are realising they are the problem, and use their wealth (they own a lot of media companies also) to find someone, anyone, who isn't them to blame and to stir people up about it. If we hadn't had decades of neoliberal economics and right-wing rule, people would not be so poor and disillusioned... whether that was deliberate or just gross stupidity on the part of politicians and rich dickheads, who can say...

haha

I had to chuckle at this quote of his: "My mental faculties remained in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of the higher-ups. This is typical with everyone in the military."

I think this is the entire point of all the training? To produce someone who will, on command, murder someone else without question or thought?

More Americans Crowdfunded Basic Needs In 2025, GoFundMe Report Shows

Are you talking about the dog, or the car?

Are things different in the USA than across the Atlantic?

Over here you can fill like 2 shopping bags with fresh fruits, vegetables, pasta, rice, beans/lentils and all sorts of stuff easily for less than £15 (~$20) that will last 2 weeks or more. It's dirt cheap to buy that stuff in the UK and most of mainland Europe.

I genuinely wanna know?

Or they'll all install some free multiplayer mobile game that has public chat and use that to communicate.

Or just, you know, use one of the many many messaging services / chat rooms etc. that are not banned! No need to to fanny about with games

Does it need to be very competitive in the world market? As long as it's providing for and protecting its citizens, what's the point?

The EU and most European countries directly subsidise industries. It's called industrial policy and strategy. Same goes for the USA. That particular point is irrelevant, your others are good though

An LLM helped me build an automatic farm in minecraft with my child. And if you don't understand why that's impressive, you ought to reassess.

It's not that impressive at all, it just regurgitated and re-wrote the content from hundreds of websites and video transcripts that tell you how to do that... The impressive part was all of those people figuring this out and writing it up themselves.

        https://www.ign.com/wikis/mine...
        https://ender-chest.com/tutori...
        https://www.namehero.com/gamin...
        https://timesofindia.indiatime...
        https://www.youtube.com/playli...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/Minec...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/Minec...
        https://www.reddit.com/r/techn...

etc.

also:

  - trains often depart/arrive directly from urban centres, so you don't have 1hr+ commutes after the plane arrives to even get to where you're going
  - if you miss a train, a lot of tickets you can buy just let you get on the next one
  - capacity can easily be increased when needed by just adding more carriages
  - it's often nice just to look out of the window for a trip and seeing the world go by instead of just clouds