You clearly haven't met my cat. We rescued him and he's not very cuddly. I suppose he is kinda cute sometimes.

That's the problem, in my experience those chatbots can't resist telling you how great you are. I had to ask Google Gemini to tone it down a bit.

Israel consistently breaks every cease fire. You won't have to wait long.

Oh, did Naziyahoo stop sending them money?

They expect people to not know, and they are taking advantage of them. You are forgetting that the average person knows how fucking nothing works.

I'll go ahead and accept those percentages, but only with the caveat that this reality is based on the pervasive, dominant paradigm of not questioning authority.

We bred them to be like that. It started out that they were just useful pest control and then we gradually selectively bred the ones that were the cutest and most affectionate.

I'd honestly be a little surprised if there's much protective effect.

It's possible that having to go through the setup process yourself is a little too much seeing how the sausage is made vs. interacting with a pleasant frontend cynically put together by someone who knows how 'engagement' works; but it's not like the nerd reputation for skewing socially awkward or the AI bro reputation for reaching a bit too quickly for slightly mystical anthropomorphisms are entirely unearned(the 'soul.md' is a frankly somewhat depressing genre).

At least for now; there might be some confounding demographic effects if you are talking one of the chunkier local models; in a country with a per-capita GDP of ~$14k being able to comfortably afford, or willing to uncomfortably afford, the necessary hardware would make you either at least modestly wealthier than average or significantly more interested than average; but as you slouch toward stuff that runs on more typical hardware the demographic differences presumably decrease.

Because around half the country either doesn't believe that's happening or is in favor of it happening, and "their" side is in control.

Read the 13th and tell us which one we are

Hilarious that this was modded "troll". I just didn't get around to doing one clock one year, and noticed that it was no real effort to add 1 to it, and that I need not bother with the other ones.

Because I do a lot of GNSS and time related stuff anyway, I tend to be working with UTC a lot of the time. During summer time I have to remember to add one to all the timestamps anyway.

A lot of people seem to think that if someone's telling them they love them, it must be true. I don't think they were raised to think.

Speaking from personal experience of both the good and bad kind, you only have successful relationships when they do make sense, and you're not participating out of desperation.

You inserted that into the conversation. Have fun with your mobile goalposts.

Sure, and I wasn't saying that they are the same as human relationships. I'm saying that as an engineer I see this is a flaw in the "design" of humans, one that cats and AI are able to exploit. Affection is an incredibly powerful drug, and you don't even have to spike the victim's drink to administer it.

Have you ever owned a cat? Or more accurately, has a cat ever enslaved you with little morsels of affection in exchange for lavish feasts, on-demand massages, free healthcare and being generally treated like royalty?

Cats, by complete chance, evolved to a form that humans find more than just pleasing. Socially, they have little shame, are demanding, and affection is used as a tool to get what they want. If they were humans, they would be an abusive partner who takes advantage at every opportunity.

Something about humans craves what they offer, and chatbots too apparently. Maybe a good comparison would be nicotine. It's easy to become dependent on it. Some people are obliged to use AI for work, they can't even choose not to start smoking in the first place.