It's a paper copy of underground utility records and a backhoe.

Don't have to be a profit^w prophet to see that coming.

IQ measurements keep going up.
Autism diagnoses keep going up.
The price of food keeps going up.
People get a year older every year.

Something fishy is going on.

Probably the next code that it outputs will be:

Are they going to chip you, or control your brain by more direct means?

My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

Yes, but think how great the fire sale is going to be for everyone else.

Well, some people think AI will extinctify us within four years, whereas if the IRGC gets nukes they'll figure out like everyone else that they can't actually use them except in self defense without getting erased, so the only difference will be that we won't be able to try crush them anymore.

Yes, tell us how easy the current effort is turning out to be. Someone grabbed a tiger by the tail and can neither subdue it nor let go. The IRGC is probably laughing its ass off.

The conversation only seems unnatural because they didn't use the right avatar.

If you choose the "Max Headroom" avatar, then everything will look and feel exactly as you would expect. Moreover, the dystopian vibe he gives off will be a perfect fit with the current state of the world.

Said every Native American ever.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

Wrong again.

Moreover, many of the big complex systems I've worked on were big and complex mainly because OOP nitwits had designed them. They often didn't understand how computers actually work, lost sight of the fact that they were writing a computer program, and spewed out frameworks that filled countless gigabytes of resident memory with endlessly deep layers of nothingburger abstractions. Maybe that didn't matter so much when memory was cheap, but that's no longer the case.

If you think that there's only one way to deal with large data sets, you're a just noob that needs more experience before spouting your theories.

C++ is just as much of a sieve as C, only more obtuse.

"Object models" are an anti-feature.

The ideal for memory safety is to have an air-tight pressure vessel.

With C, you're starting that task with a colander. You've managed to fill two of the colander's holes with silicone caulk. Congratulations.

A space weapons arms race plus one million data center satellites.

What could possibly go wrong?