I say this not as an insult (I promise) but as a genuine question: Were you sober when you made this comment?

I vaguely remember these specific things. I more clearly remember a bunch of stuff in this vein, at secretaries’ desks, on office walls, in guidance counselors’ offices, in feel-good TV programs that only aired on community UHF TV, etc. I found them sweet and meaningful until about age 12, and since then, yes, the urge to slap.

As a sightly drunk person I very much appreciate the people explaining the analogy.

Lived near the US-Mexico border for a while. License plates stolen twice. Apparently it’s a big thing there: slap them on a stolen car and drive into Mexico before anyone realizes.

When this was posted on twitter the first time I got more upvotes than ever before (i.e., like 20) for saying something like “But it’s a massive stadium full of car-sized treadmills with a car on each one. Each car has a 1% chance of solving a sudoku every day, so there are a few thousand constantly running, pouring exhaust into the sky.”

Or something like that.

And now AI makes it look almost quaint. Fuck.

As one billion fangirls (and some bois) have pointed out: he was more fuckable as a beast.

I heard a variant of this joke in 1999 and have repeated it to moderate mirth several times. It is a solid joke.

This, plus if we had any kind of political will or intelligence (as a nation; meaning the USA) we’d force AI companies to pay their extenalities: treat and sanitize every drop of water they use, and build the infrastructure to bring it back to communities; pay for their electrical infrastructure in advance and pay their electricity bills to the tune of “nobody else’s bill goes up”; some kind of massive carbon capture tax for their use (this one might not be possible to actually do; it’s too much); and of course paying royalties and copyright violation fines.

As at least one AI CEO has said, if they had to pay for all the laws they’ve broken and resources they’ve stolen, all AI companies currently existing would go out of business. let’s say they didn’t: The cost per token would be quite high, and very few people would use it.

It runs on theft and planet-scale destruction.

This thread, specifically the physics-knowledgeable people arguing with the Star Wars nerds with enough in-universe knowledge to explain things, is the best thing I’ve read all day.