Capitalism has cooked these people’s brains. There is nothing left of value in these people’s brains.

Yeah, it’s a wild idea, but the number of lives they’ve saved and extended far outweigh any danger. Sewer systems might actually be what increased average human lifespans more than almost anything else in history.

Financial censorship is a useful tool for people who want stuff censored.

“Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure” has always been my policy for spiders, mosquitoes and ticks, so I’m looking forward to World War 3 going nuclear. I’m just a bit concerned that the “from orbit” part implies I’m supposed to be up there when it happens, and while I understand the basic mechanics of how to get there, I’m not sure how I’m going to handle the logistics after that point.

Have it spray tear gas first. But wait, then the laser won’t be able to penetrate the cloud. Maybe we could add a quadcopter drone to clear a path to the mosquito for the laser to fire. But then we’ll need a system so the drone doesn’t run into a human choking on tear gas, and the drone can’t see because of the limited visibility, could we use infrared sensors I wonder? /s

This is a stupid system. I love engineers, but they tend to uh… overengineer things like this.

Very normal behaviors for an independent country. /s

What’s that sound? It sounds like fizzing… all these bubbles keep popping… wait, is the foam getting smaller or is it just me?

Us digital hippies just believe in free data and world peace, man.

Rest assured, the feeling is deeply mutual.

If you really want to piss them off, name politicians from Taiwan. They tell us it is part of China after all. (/s)

And nothing of value was lost. Good riddance. Genocidal apartheid terrorists don’t belong in the U.N anyway.

Given that AIs are demonstratably incapable of successfully operating a vending machine for more than about a week, sounds like a great time to start a competitor.

Sustainable technological societies do NOT use more and more electricity, until such time as they have ensured that the externalized environmental costs of the energy providing that electricity have been adequately addressed. Posing our mostly fossil-fuelled “technological society” as if it is the only available choice besides the stone age is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.

I don’t know if I’d say “many”, but the water usage is a red herring anyway. More importantly, data centers invariably use a lot of power and they are explicitly the reason we are currently reactivating mothballed nuclear and coal power plants, the reason we are not shutting down natural gas plants, in fact many of them are running temporarily, regularly or even full-time on their own small-scale natural gas turbines.

And they are doing this to generate mass quantities of shitty text and images, and to train new models to do the same, things that provide little to no actual value to humanity.

AI datacenters are an environmental catastrophe, whether they use any water or not.

Yeah like most people probably don’t remember the web before Google, but there was altavista. You know what happened to altavista? It became overrun by SEO bullshit and people stopped using them literally overnight because Google did a better job. If Google starts doing a shit job, you know what’s going to happen? People will stop using them literally overnight as soon as anyone else starts doing a better job.

Yes, web search is a “hard” problem, but a lot of it is a hard problem because there’s an insane amount of corporate SEO slop out there, and now there’s a lot of AI slop out there too. The first person to solve this problem is going to completely destroy Google. Is it an unsolvable problem? I don’t think so.

At its core it’s a federation problem. Websites want to be discovered. People want to discover websites. But bad people also want to abuse the discovery process to show their own spam that people don’t want to discover. The magic that Google brought to the table was PageRank, which allowed them to determine the authenticity of the spam by the number of backlinks that went from other real sites TO that site. This is essentially just “voting”, same as we do here. Of course immediately people tried to abuse it by generating their own massive backlink farms but those are pretty obvious and easy to taint as bad actors and scrub out their rankings or remove them completely. If it’s not clear yet how similar this is to the exact sort of trustworthiness problems the fediverse is also dealing with with, just wait. People will find ways to solve this.

The arms race against shitty content will never stop – but the point is, if Google is no longer participating in the war against shitty content and is now switching sides to become a producer of shitty content, they’re not going to succeed. People don’t want that shit, and people will instantly vote with their feet the moment any very inevitable alternative appears.

If you want to do businesses in a country, don’t complain when…

Complaining about things the government tells them to do on behalf of society is pretty much the foundation of every company’s whole business model at this point.

A high power laser? That feels like it might work. Perhaps we should start experimenting on Jeff Bezos’s head to see what works best.

Sadly the inescapable physical truth of convex vs concave lensing still relentlessly holds its tenacious grip on reality, despite the billions of dollars these folks have accumulated they have still, thus far, been unable to alter that particular aspect of reality.

The only solution I can offer for Jeff Bezos is to begin forming his skull inwards somewhat so that any captured light can reach a proper focusing point. As as astronomer with some experience with such reflective optical surfaces, I’d be happy to begin the grinding and polishing process for you at any time, I’ll just need you to hold him still while I work. It’s a very precise process.

I assume his head is mostly thick skull surrounding empty space anyway, so I think there should be little harm done.

I haven’t had my intro sequence where some dramatic event forces me out of my horrible corpo job yet, but I’m expecting it any day now.

These are the good guys, when we land in cyberpunk dystopia hell, these will be the guys I’m joining up with.