The economy collapses and you get a revolution, mass emigration, and/or other major societal upheavals – probably as soon as a lot of people start going hungry…

I don’t share your confidence in that; we live in the dumbest timeline, after all…

Jailbreak me a piece of that KitKat bar? 🤨️

Bill’s PC. As in Bill Gates, probably. You’re lucky it didn’t get overrun with malware.

(No idea who/what inspired the Japanese name マサキ though.)

I believe we’re now talking about how he murders children

Unfortunately, yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_airstrike

No, we are communicating. People can coordinate their actions to achieve things that are impossible for an individual. We obviously don’t have perfect shared understanding, and miscommunications are not uncommon (as others have already pointed out) but we can exchange enough information to do useful things.

Also, we can make jokes. The fact that it’s possible to craft a joke and make someone laugh by setting up and intentionally subverting expectations through language is pretty good evidence that we have shared understanding and similar processing.

Should be trivial to set up something like that if you’ve got parts you want to work with. Any desktop with an automatic background switcher should be able to cycle through images in a directory you specify on a timer. Set up your favorite remote access software (SSH, Samba, NFS …) and you’re done. If you want more control over the behavior, you could script up something custom with a little more effort – but it’s still not particularly hard to implement something like that.

Watch out for burn in on the screen if you’re leaving it on all the time.

Bee-kake

My guess was that it was probably due to Hollywood, but some form of mass communication, almost certainly.

I had a roommate from Manchester (UK) for a couple months back in college. I’m American (US). He seemed to have no trouble understanding me, but I usually couldn’t understand what he said without him repeating it multiple times.