"Mad Max" seems to have seriously underestimated the creativity of Australians regarding energy production :)

I think they expected that since they had paid to purchase the game, they would be able to play that game for as long as they cared to, i.e. same as the deal you get when you purchase a book or a DVD.

You can argue that they were wrong to expect that, but that's the usual way of thinking about items that you buy, so that's what people (who haven't yet thought through the implications of software shrink-wrap licensing agreements) naturally expect.

If being able to play the game perpetually isn't a viable business model, then perhaps the publisher should be required to specify up-front how long (at minimum) they will guarantee purchasers access to the game; that way nobody will be surprised when their access goes away, because they understood the time-limit on what they were purchasing before they made the purchase.

... and in 2020 it was "anyone but Trump", as it will be again in 2028, assuming we still have elections then.

Step back a bit, and you realize the real voting pattern is "anyone but the incumbent", because the system has deteriorated to the point where problems don't get solved anymore, so voters are just blindly switching back and forth from one party to the other in the hopes that doing that will somehow lead to improvement. American Democracy has devolved into the world's most elaborate ring oscillator.

That's true, but some people might be sad if they previously were able to pay their rent and now they cannot. Hopefully there will be other jobs available for them to move to.

Scene: Lunchtime at the Central Market, a trendy/tourist-trappy food-court/market area in downtown Los Angeles. Waiting in line to buy a gourmet sandwich from the sandwich vendor.

In front of the counter: lots of hungry customers. Behind the counter, three bemused-looking sandwich-makers standing idle, because the order-taker at the register is holding a cell-phone to one ear, conversing furiously with the tech support line of the company that provides their cashless ordering system, while at the same time waving off customers because he can't accept their cash and his order-taking tablet's server is down so he can't accept their credit cards either.

My takeaway is that cashless transactions are fine, right up until the moment they suddenly stop working for whatever reason, and at that point everyone involved will either fall back to cash as a work-around, or wish that they could.

My #1 use for ChatGPT is "show me an example of some C code that implements functionality (X)".

Then I can read that example, research the APIs it is calling (to make sure they actually exist and are appropriate for what I'm trying to accomplish), and use it to write my own function that does something similar. This is often much faster than my previous approach (googling, asking for advice on StackOverflow, trial and error).

If bottom-up coding is a fallacy, someone has forgotten to let evolution know that. Here we all are, bottom-up coded, for better or worse.

People who live far away from a hospital and don't have much gas in the tank?

Yes, it is exactly the convenient avenue of the day, and that's the problem. People who own a gun are eight times more likely to die of suicide than people who do not, simply because they have easy in-home access to the most effective tool for the job. People who live in "food deserts" have poorer diets than people who have convenient access to healthy food, because nobody wants to travel across town when they're hungry. People playing video games solve most of their in-game challenges through (virtual) violence, because violent actions are what the game designers have mapped to the most convenient and obvious game-controls, while non-violent solutions require a lot more thought and contrivance, if they even are possible at all.

Convenience matters, because people are more likely to do something when it's convenient than when isn't. So in this case, ChatGPT gives mentally marginal people convenient access to an encouraging, enabling, delusion-reinforcing "friend" 24/7 in their own home, for free, with insufficient guard rails, leading to the outcomes we see reported here.

It's incorrect to think that mentally ill people are doomed to madness no matter what, just as it's incorrect to think that people with weakened immune systems are doomed to die of infection. They have a higher risk, certainly, but whether they actually fall victim or not depends a lot on what's going on in their environment.

You've misunderstood Darwinism. Natural selection has nothing to do with who "deserves" anything; it's only about whose genes get propagated forward and whose do not. And it's not (necessarily) the stupidest among us who will likely die off, it's the least fit, for whatever definition of "fit" is pragmatically relevant for a genome's survival and reproduction under current circumstances. In today's world, stupidity might actually be a reproductive advantage.

Who voted this submission up?

I know/knew some Japanese women who are/were living in the West, refusing to move back to Japan because they were not prepared to accept the subservient role demanded there - not least by their relatives there. One of them never really adjusted either, she moved to a small village after retirement (she had been there frequently over the years) but retained her cultural attitudes and was always an outsider there.

The masses rely on their skills to remain employed and to generate a reliable income for themselves. AI, to the extent it can, algorithmically replicates those skills and provides them to its owners for (close to) nothing, so that employers can now pay very little for services that they used to have to pay a skilled human worker more for. This effectively makes the skills that the humans invested long years in developing close to worthless -- the humans now have to compete against their own skillset, which has been separated from them and is able to undercut the value of their labor 24/7/365.

Sure, some humans can develop new skill sets, either working with AI or developing AI, but that's another big multi-year investment to make, with no real guarantee that the next generation of AI won't simply learn and replicate those skills as well. A worker can of course use an AI himself, but unless his AI can somehow provide some service that no other AI can provide just as well, his work product is still commoditized and won't make him much of an income.

I don't think country A really cares one way or the other. It's just that the leader of country A is up well past his nap time, and he needs some plausible rationale for the temper tantrum he is going to throw in order to gather some more attention, so this is what he's chosen this time.

Don't forget the other end of the equation: has the time it takes for a customer to get their support issue effectively resolved decreased?