If they’re anything like me, it’s the old laptop that you’d install Linux on as an experiment.

And maybe that laptop was only ah… Semi-retired at the time.

“force” in this case means “extort information” or just straight up applied violence, I assume.

Would you accept lies and obfuscation instead?

Apparently that alt parks account is super weird and q-like.

They had “140k” members counting protesters (they claim). Seems made up.

For now I’m sticking with the low-but-verifiable numbers. Otherwise we leave ourselves open to being ignored the next time (on numbers/data).

Well, these days who the hell isn’t?

If they only get to use their toys in specific cases, they’ll pretend it’s always that case.

Right now the key words are “insurrectionist” and “terrorist” and “illegals”. They say the keyword, they suddenly get the loopholes.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say they suspected “illicit” materials just so they could gear up for their hero LARP.

For short-term wins I’d go with Neal Asher’s “Polity” civilization as at some point in the 20th Century, the AI just decides to take over and become benevolent rulers.

No societal collapse required.

But also a higher risk of enslavement by giant sentient crabs. Your call.

Agreed, but honestly either is ok. I’d prefer the Minds ruling me to humans too.

The main thing that would scare me is the Megadeath scenarios from the Idiran war.

But that seems like a pretty rare thing. Also, they seem to be a lot better at the sex and drugs thing than ST, as well as how they handle crime.

Coming after these guys is Neal Asher’s Polity. It’s like Culture “lite”, And the robots are a bit less “extra”.

And also that honking/screaming at the car is (even more of) a dick move now.

They’re not going away, they’re just going to be more persistent with their cold calling, and more infuriating with their call answering.

When the voice assistant came out I remember one of my coworkers showing it off to another.

To which the other coworker just said “hey Google, text Mom saying ‘you’re fat’”.

Because of that I’ve never had any voice tools connected to anything I own.

Gentrification came for flavortown.

Rent is now $4000/mth. No loitering.

Fox news will call them the calculus mafia in no time.

I like the look of the stencil/shape left behind by a removed logo.

Feels rebellious.

First you get the ideas, then you get the cringe, then you get the cool vase.

– me

Well he also has people like managers, publicists and agents who will think this way.

I’m not entirely sure it wasn’t the other way around.

He probably knew some charges were coming years ago, and started adapting his output accordingly.

Haha yeah the beers are from D’ij Brewery in Amsterdam.

And the red brick streets are very Dutch too.

$retVal and $item are my personal favourite.

And decent variable names if you can, as well.

No magic numbers!