‘Not like that, Steve!’

It was half joking, but realistically, the cat is basically innocent, stuck in the care of a person who refuses to listen to reason in favor of their irrational beliefs, like a kid raised by a religious zealot. I won’t actually say the poster should go commit whatever crime cat kidnapping is, but I would say their friend may not be capable of making sound decisions, which inherently makes them untrustworthy, which makes their friendship dubious. If you can’t trust someone, they’re not really a friend.

VPNs help your privacy against ISPs, not cookie tracking and malware like Facebook.

Complete wipe? Probably not. Change on a scale so deep and wide as to render their relation to what we are currently as relevant as our relation to a nautilus? Yeah. Pretty much guaranteed. Deep time has seen more worlds made of this planet than you could ever imagine surviving.

There seems to be a bit of an odd relation between its value and cost. Building a model and setting up a data center is horrifically expensive, so LLMs as a service have to be just as expensive. But the stuff that can be done by LLMs is low stakes, low thought work, like copy writing, chatbot customer service answering the same 30 FAQs but crashing out on anything else, summarizing this morning’s headlines, etc. The price on these things is still being hashed out but it’s looking a lot like using AI is like hiring Anthropic for $100,000/yr. to replace a person who only gets paid $45,000/yr.

Where is my grip on reality (not socially comfortable consensus delusion, but reality) failing?

Take the cat. Be the Cat Protective Services the cat needs. Then find real friends who aren’t so delusional they probably shouldn’t be considered legally capable of giving consent.

One of the grand, society wide problems (at least in the English speaking world, my experience with other parts is limited) is the way in which people, in an effort to avoid hitting people’s feelings, and to keep things simple for children, have stretched the word ‘friend’ to gloss over important distinctions between different relationships.

In order to avoid hurting people’s feelings, they point at a coworker who they share memes with over the company slack channels and say ‘friend’ even though they never speak outside of those memes, they don’t know anything about each other, and they wouldn’t trust them with anything more meaningful than a meme.

In order to avoid having to explain the difference between different kinds of relationship (which they quite possibly don’t know themselves) to kids, adults point at the kid their kid shares a classroom with and loves like a brother, and the kid who puts their kid through mild physical torture on a nearly daily basis, and calls them both ‘friend.’ How is the kid supposed to acknowledge the difference they have no words for outside of making hand waving gestures How are they supposed to teach their own kids the difference if they don’t learn it?

English has the words friend, buddy, coworker, pal, comrade, ally, mate, classmate, bunkmate, playmate, acquaintance, companion, partner, associate, chum, bro, and more, but because people are too lazy, ignorant, or socially anxious, they all end up as ‘friend.’

It is possible to think of time as a ‘line’ with events strung on it like flags/tags.

Some people believe there are points at which events seem like they could result in different outcomes, like flipping a coin. They flip a coin and it comes up ‘heads’ but they can imagine a world where the flip came up ‘tails.’

Some people even think both the ‘heads’ world and the ‘tails’ world are equally real, just that people in one cannot interact with the other. Both worlds continue forever.

These are ‘parallel’ or ‘alternate’ timelines.

Here comes heat wave Aaauughh.

That’s probably a joke for legal reasons but I have to wonder how often someone like Vance thinks the phrase, ‘One little push…’

Not until after the trial.

Never seen that anywhere before. I don’t think your ‘we’ is the same as our ‘we.’

If this is the simulation the entity that is running it is ineffably more complicated than you can possibly imagine with your tiny simulation of a brain.

Mmm…

Also, what is that… what appears to be a baseball, but green with red stitching?

Second. Someone did the United Healthcare guy already.

In the same way a lot of bullshitters are. He’d say 105 things a week, many of them being mutually exclusive, and then when one of the random guesses happened to have turned out to be true, he’d crow and preen to say he was right and play a clip editing out the parts where he’d said all the other nonsense.

That one gets you hunted and eaten by human predators in certain parts of America.

Social anxiety is not neurodivergent. It’s more unusual to NOT think about how you are perceived. Asking the internet because you don’t trust people to be honest with you, though…