In Rome, during a triumph, the celebrated general would have a slave required to remind him that he would one day die.

These globe striding tyrants need this now, but one guy reminding them during their parties simply isn’t enough. Every moment of their lives should feature that reminder. Like tinnitus but “Memento Mori” (or its equivalent in their native tongue).

It makes what they did to Murphy to create RoboCop doubly evil, but I’ve been led to believe that that’s one of the big messages of the movie.

Every time I pull the string on the back of this doll it says something nice to me. Is this true love?

Our product will make all jobs obsolete. That’s why we need to work our employees to death making it!

Do we need to do Trianon again?

I think I must’ve missed that Verge article. I guess that dashes my “this is a creative writing exercise by somebody in Joburg” theory.

But we know that lizards have self preservation instincts (which for the purpose of this conversation I’ll say is interchangable with sentience (it’s probably a good enough proxy at any rate). But we know this because we have lots of people who have observed lizard behavior, not because The Lizard Farm, Inc has hyped up how alive and ensouled their lizards arev in a bid to get ever more VC funding.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic about this tech and my obsolete meat sack will get tossed to the time-traveling torture robot. But I think it’s more likely that we have a money grabbing hype train in the tradition of the Mechanical Turk or Theranos than it is that we have created a new lifeform by feeding every extant piece of writing that isn’t nailed down (and some that are) to the sand we’ve forced to do math.

In a banana republic, what’s a president but a local representative of the company?

Well, the only claim of this self preservation (that I’ve seen) is this article, which is on a website I’m unfamiliar with (which I often interpret as ‘more likely to be a creative writing exercise than the average news site’) and its only citation is a company that has a vested interest in making us believe the tech is better than it may actually be.

Fine, I won’t complain when Yudkowski’s followers take matters into their own hands.

How else are they going to be able to brag about their 90 trillion daily AI users?

They probably were intending/expecting arrests. There are probably protesters who didn’t go into the library because they specifically don’t want a criminal record (especially if they’re on a visa or some such).

And you can see in the comments here how angry the arrests are getting some people.

That’s the goal of a lot of nonviolent protest. Get your allies loud about it and split some moderates away from the authorities that they hadn’t really thought of as “the bad guys” before.

New chapter for Art of the Deal just dropped. Peace in our Time, ghostwritten by Neville Chamberlain.

Shrinking their market share is a much bigger middle finger. If you use their product and shut off a bunch of features, you’re still using the rest of their product and its other features.

If you’re planing to ‘invest’ your lunch money and get returns big enough to pay for the lunch too, you don’t have a plan, you have a gambling addiction.

I’m pretty sure everybody on these websites knows they’re more similar to enlisted soldiers than to Vladimir Putin.

Too late. I already jumped ship because of Copilot’s “Recall”, and I’m not interested in going through a round of partitioning the hard drive and installing a new OS so soon.

“They” is the car manufacturers. And yes, they were promised by Apartheid Willy Wonka.

And they fell for it. Partly because this happened back in like, 2010, when tech still felt promising and fun and partly (mostly?) because they wanted to.

Ehh, they were promised that full self driving was only a few years away. If that had been the case, touchscreens would be perfectly fine. But a decade of “only two more years, we swear” later, it’s time for the manufacturers to get back to work on AM instead of FM.