I love a good double entendre.

And in those three years, most of the world will have figured out how to route around the US altogether in such a way that it'll be a far bigger pain in the ass to start including us again than it would be to just continue to avoid us. Trump's lasting legacy will be that he's turned the United States into a non-player on the world stage. Making America Irrelevant Again should have been his slogan.

I've seen it said elsewhere and dismissed it as hyperbole, but more and more it seems, "The cruelty is the point."

Remember when the villains on Captain Planet seemed too simplistically evil and greedy to actually exist? Where even little kids were thinking, "These guys are absurd!" Sadly, some of the big decision makers now were little kids then, and watching those guys thinking, "I can't wait until I have enough power to do what those guys are doing."

Subject pretty much summarizes Altman's dream. That the unthinking masses will, without thought, fork over money, and without thought, fork over every thought they have to this device that will, also without thought (because AI doesn't actually think) suck up every data point it can to shovel into the mothership for more AI training data so they can better predict... uh, when to take a bite of your device? You'd think the AI companies would be gorged on data at this point, but apparently there's still some data they believe they don't have. All this device will be is an always on spy, perhaps one people with, without thought, carry around with them everywhere, sucking up background conversations around them, as well as answering queries that will be building a profile to best predict when to shove what ad at you in between answers.

The outward plan, the one they admit, is the hope that they can replace the entire workforce with machines. Since the government has zero concern about anyone that can't provide for themselves, there's a "hidden" but corollary to the outwardly stated goal. Once they've removed the ability for people to provide for themselves, and therefore have enough game tokens (money) left over to spend on whatever products are being pushed by the owners, they'll need SOMEONE to buy things. And since they've managed to convince us digital assets are real enough to be worth spending money on, they'll simply want to create digital representations of consumers. Ones that are easier to control than even us. I assume there will be some digital payment system for work rendered per cycle or some-such that they can then use to spend on whatever digital flashy things.

Or maybe they'll just spin up some digital only version of the matrix, where the entire world is modeled rather than lived in, with digital humans living digital lives of misery, permanently enslaved to the owner class digitally, spinning on their digital hamster wheels, buying their digital goods, and never really knowing that's what's happening. We can't expect the owner class to be satisfied with wringing actual humanity dry. They'll want to continue to extract misery from something.

RedundantOS.

Another documentary, Space 1999, would strongly disagree with this assertion. Space might be big, but the moon can be launched away from Earth via nuclear explosions so fast that it will come across an intelligent species every week!

You missed the post-coding moment when the original requesting folk(s) say that this is not at all what they envisioned and the entire spec changes and then you're essentially stuck in a "GOTO 1" situation for a few months as they keep changing the request after the fact.

And our government officials insist that private industry is "better" than government at getting things done. Your center paragraph there pretty much defines modern government as well.

"Who do you trust when everyone's a crook?" --Queensryche., Revolution Calling

It'll end up as a forever pay service just like everything else. "Pay us, or we block your sunlight and redirect it to space." That seems to be the way everything we do goes these days.

In either case, 1 billion or 2 billion years, we'll either have managed to finish ourselves off, or we'll still be bickering over the imaginary game tokens we've devised to ascribe value of a human being, i.e. money. We refuse to grow up as a species and think in the long-term, because there's a chance we may lose a few game tokens this quarter if we actually start planning for the future.

$39.95 per day to continue receiving your insulin dose. Or we can turn on the insulin blockers. Your choice.

I was always surprised that no one ever responded to Londo, "Like I'm gonna take shit from somebody with that hair."

I see they mention translation, but that feels like a weird thing to want to do with a copy-paste. If I turn this on and copy some code from an older project and paste it into a new project, will it automatically refactor it into something that doesn't function but looks prettier? It just seems like copy-paste is one of the simplest, dumbest things a computer helps us with in a way that's unobtrusive. Is anyone asking for "smart" copy-paste beyond "paste as plain text?"