Ya know, Skynet gets a bad rap. If they'd tweaked the target demographics, it would've actually led to a much improved humanity. And most of us probably wouldn't have minded the culling.

It's hit and miss with the hallucinations. I use Meta's AI (Llama 4), and it gives me some answers that are just, "WTF?," and I call it out and it improves. Some other answers are truly surprising in their usefulness. For giggles, I asked for a hypothetical, "How would I do $this," and it gave me an answer that I hadn't been able to find elsewhere, and was, "Holy shit! Nice!" And sometimes, it just echoes what I asked. So it's like a box of chocolates: you never know what you'll get. But it certainly isn't all hallucinations.

5dw, or 2y{, or :500. Try that in Nano.

My first Saturday in Prata di Pordenone, I woke up late and went out for a long-ish run through the nearby community, and got back to the hotel famished. Took a shower and headed out to find a spot to eat, only to learn that everything was closed until about 3:00pm. I would've eaten cardboard, if I'd found some. After that, I took to packing snacks in my backpack, just in case. It used to be PowerBars, but they don't make those anymore.

Way back in high school wrestling, we used to do stairs, and it might've been 18 or 20 steps, actually - basement to first floor - so we did them over and over. And over and over. Ugh. 40 years on, I still take the stairs instead of escalators, if I can; to the annoyance of my wife, but she gets over it.

Incorrect. Taxes are paid on profits, which is revenue minus costs. Costs of production are passed on to consumers; and even those costs are typically written off, to reduce tax burden. Higher taxes means less money back to the shareholders, but that's not a direct cost of business.

Ours is circa - eh, 2010, maybe? Might be even earlier. Even with a single pixel column out of action - probably a loose or wrecked capacitor inside of the case - I'm not interested in buying a new TV. As you said, it's good enough.

Plausible; but in that case, you would do what you could to avoid using that platform for "sensitive" data, right? Mundane stuff, sure; no big deal. Confidential stuff: no.

You're being intentionally obtuse, and you know it. If you called up the president of Deutsche Bank and asked for an appointment for lunch, tomorrow, do you think he'd take your call? Likewise, if you called either senator, or your congressperson, do you think you'd actually get to speak to them? "The rich" is a club, with additional perks, and the vast majority of us ain't in it.

They have tools that are unavailable to the rest of us. We can't just walk into a bank and ask for a line of credit based on our estimated assets. We can't even ask questions of our elected officials at town halls - they screen them ahead of time - let alone meet with them for lunch, or outright buy them off to bend laws to fit our desires. So what tools are available to Joe Average? Our AR-15s? Is that what you're suggesting?

If we didn't, they wouldn't exist. McDonalds that don't make money go out of business. Have you seen many of those?

It depends: Are you a friend of Trump's? Then it's fine. Are you a cyber-currency pusher who donated to Trump? Then it's fine.

I'll tell you why: because he's afraid of Lola. If you're old enough, you've heard the song Lola by The Kinks. It's a song about a person "who walks like a woman, but talks like a man," and Republicans are afraid - terrified - of falling for a guy in drag, because that would mean they're gay, and that's bad, m'kay? So if women are clearly women, and guys are clearly guys, then they don't have to worry about getting suckered into kissing someone they wouldn't normally kiss. Hence, culture wars focused on disproportionately stupid things.

They don't have to finesse this: nearly a third of the voting public *wants* to be surveilled. If Trump says he's for it, so are they. This is a cult that will shit their pants in public to stand in solidarity with their cult leader. Even if the remaining 2/3rds of the population protested in the streets, the Republicans in Congress have absolutely no spinal column to resist whatever Trump says. If this regime wants to spy on us, they'll fkn spy on us.

Don't take this slander, Woz! I'd bet you could beat up Gates back then, and probably now, too. I'll go as high as one dollar.