A similar event occurred in Australia in 1880. A highwayman on the run from the law made his own armour out of ploughshares, and later got into a showdown with police. The armour held up to the police gunfire, but he was eventually taken down by shots to unprotected areas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

It may be enough to treat the moon as the metaphorical high ground. Now that Earth's orbit is getting crowded with spacecraft from many different nations, perhaps having a base on the moon has some strategic value.

Stop carrying a phone with you everywhere.

More shit getting rammed down our throats. Who wants this? I for one want my car to STFU and let me get from A to B.

Don't forget to deduct the cost of the stamp next year :-)

Here in .au, the previous government voluntarily killed our domestic car industry in ~2018. Funnily enough, as well as cheap Chinese EVs, we also see plenty of big Dodge Rams, Jeeps, etc even though they cost heaps more to buy and run. A huge portion of the automotive market is completely irrational. Hopefully the the kost recent oil price panics will make them see sense, but it didn't work in 1973, or during any of the other Middle East conflicts in the last half century. I just wish governments would stop pandering to these idiots. The writing has been on the wall for decades, fossil fuels are finite and prices will always go up in the long run.

I'm with you on everything else, but this one is direct consequence of the half hour of commercials at the start of movies these days.

I'm pretty sure there was an article share here on Slashdot recently that said less than 50% of Americans read a book in 2025.

Wait, you were serious? Wait while I laugh even harder.

Perplexity can fuck right off.

This whole concept is so crazy. Even "non-techy" people know about identity theft, not sharing passwords etc. The news has been full of amusing "AI" fuckups since the models became public. Most of those stories are riffs on the 1980s "computer fucked up" news stories from the 1980s. Even Joe Sixpack knows that computers can't be trusted.

So why the hell is anyone letting an LLM near anything useful or important? How are vendors marketing these "assistant" tools? At this point I can only conclude that it's a deliberate plot by OpenClaw et al to mine users' data so they have something else of value before the "AI" bubble pops. Either that, or OpenClaw et al are just a front for some three-letter agency, just like those "Anom" phones from a few years ago. Or Crypto AG from years before that.

This comes up a lot in online conversations. Often the poster just means "authoritarian," which is of course a tendency of many fascist and many "communist" systems.

Exactly. Orwell was an optimist. When he wrote 1984, he thought that the government would have to force people to submit to surveillance. Instead, people willingly paid money to buy these stupid glasses, and gave up their most intimate details to a private company.

"Now is a great time for the Edsel" said Henry Ford.

"Full speed ahead," said the captain of the Titanic.

Is this so bad? I run an extension cord whenever I need to recharge the battery in my ICE car in the driveway (it's an old battery in an old car) or when I need to run power tools outside.

Amen to this. I just had a burger from my local independent place. ~10USD. The owner makes the patties himself every morning. There's also fresh cheese, lettuce, bacon and more on there. The damn thing is huge and tastes delicious. Every time I go to McDonalds, BK, or even a "gourmet" burger place, I pay more money for less food that doesn't taste nice.