ha ha, obviously I'm just pulling your leg, but that's just it...
prior art? I think I drew a tree with a crayon in the first grade!!
Yeah, these guys have to be just bullshitting the system to see what they can get away with.
Hopefully, the system works well enough.

Excuuuuse me.

ShatGPT missed my second year Pascal program that used recursion to traverse a tree of arbitrary depth, circa 1982.

Who doesn't need to go 300 mph? 495 km/h?

Fuck yeah, I'm going to the beer store, honey. I'll be back in ...umm.. 12 seconds.

So true. I forgot. It's been a while... but I recall sales guys at Mitel back in the days when Mitel was doing well, saying that exact thing.
I was green, and told them "you can't quote them that! you're missing the main processor card and other required kit. You're quoting bare bones racks"... and they said 'we have do that because Nortel does it, and then their bid looks a lot cheaper than ours" .. "so we leave out required hardware, the costliest hardware, so we can have a competitive bid". Then after we win the bid, we nickel and dime the client until the rack is outfitted to what they actually need.... humanity is always the problem.

touche

I'll project further. Pretty easy to see The King is following the Nazzee playbook, stack courts, round up immigrants with storm troopers, etc. So next obvious step is to create another emergency... so he'll start a war, then invoke emergency powers to call off elections.

That is pretty easy to predict.

He could have help though, all he needs is for pootin to invade Estonia or maybe drop a bomb on Poland, then it's an easy slide to just say they did it first.

I thought we were being replaced by AI? Someone should mention that to Eric. Sam? Are you there?

Does it have legs?

Yeah, Apple would never do anything high handed like change the terms of service while you are looking out the window or sneak new surveillance sw into the next release or raise prices once you are balls deep in Apple koolaid.

Your naivety is only exceed by your willful blindness to dependency. You're going need some AI on that, and you are going to love it. Shhhh... never say a bad word about <in hushed tones> Apppplllle. Amen, think no more, problems solved.

And tell me how this protects US national interests/data?

All I got was Ellison bla bla UAE bla bla Murdoch bla bla $$$ bla bla

Great news!
Now we can burn more and pollute more!!
Yay, lets hear it for resiliency.

(/s)

What it usually means, afaik, is that the business is SOOO profitable, that they don't want to share it, they want to keep it all for themselves. Also, no legal requirement to publish financials. The most profitable companies love to be private.

You're choose not to see what is obvious.
Biden didn't stack the supreme court and appoint partisan judges by the hundreds.
Biden didn't turn the USA in to a crypto cash machine and try to make a withdrawl.
Biden didn't publicly fuck his allies, and suck up to literally all the worst dictators of the world.
Note: I don't even like Biden, but I can see that on balance, he was perhaps ineffective, and senile, but he didn't actively try to dismantle the institutions of his own country.

Trump has been committing fraud for his whole life and he got caught and convicted for crimes he committed.
Now he's senile and so weak he has to deploy the military against his own people?
So, yeah, kindly go fuck yourself and everyone who looks like you.

Vanity is what hooks people on SM.
Look at me!
Maybe vanity is too mild a characterization, I think narcissism is probably a better fit.
I'm in love with my image, is probably closer.

But I take your point, that it COULD have some value. Take this august forum we call Slashdot. For some reason, it kind of works. A forum for hobbyists can represent a positive application of the tech. But. We generally agree this site is a "forum" and not "social media", for reasons, one of which is that we interact with each other rather than algorithms. I would suggest it's the algorithmic dis-intermediation that makes social media pernicious. I used Instagram in the olden days, when it was quite a bit like this forum. People voted on posts. There was no algorithmic interference.. you could meet people who shared your interests, I met several artists that became friends. It was fun.

But once it became a skin over Facebook social graphs or whatever they call their algorithms, it became dogshit. They flooded it with fake profiles and agents, they squeezed the living shit out of the voting system. I used to get up to a thousand likes on some of my paintings, and after Facebook took over, I would get about 5% of the likes. Yeah, like I'd post the same pic that got 1000 likes, and now it would only get 50. Then they asked me if I'd like to buy 4 likes per week for $5/week, or I could get a bargain rate of 12 likes for only $10/week. Seriously?

Yeah, I deleted everything and eventually managed to cancel the account. Don't reply to any emails from them for at least 6 months or they'll re-activate the account. Anyways that was the bitter end of how Facebook screws everything and everyone. I read, here, this week, that Instagram has 3 billion monthly users. Bullshit. That's likely 2 billion fake puppets/agents. Before quitting I began to take screenshots to prove they were fucking with me, but it became too much work to put my case together, so I just walked away, never looked back.

Since I already play several musical instruments, I just did that instead, as I recommend to Facebook refugees. Guitar is actually a fine instrument, and has the benefits of being pretty easy to be able to get to playing your first tune, but offers a lot of room to grow if you take a deeper interest.

But, anyways, I know my notions will not change anything or anyone's mind.
If anyone takes anything away from my screed, it's stop draining your lifeforce into Social Media and learn a musical instrument. Put your effort into yourself, stop giving your time away.

We know The King is incapable of abstract thought, so it is assured that Xi is getting the better side of this deal. I'll let you chumps in on an open secret: it's the questions that you don't ask that will bite you in the ass, not the ones you do ask. I'd be amazed to find out that Ghina isn't still getting a nice fat data stream.

So if you buy low fat fish sticks, you get low fat. But you probably got a lethal dose of corn syrup to make up for the lack of fat.

  Oh OH! How about Signal App. We ONLY keep your phone number and not well known, we ping your GPS location. So we know your device address and your physical whereabouts. Surely, they would never monetize that? I wonder where all the money comes from to pay for your free service?

face it, you're just not asking the right questions.
<spooky music from X-Files plays>
Trust no one.