If people had used cryptocurrency as a currency instead of as a “it’s totally not a security, we swear, even though we’re only saying that to evade SEC regulations a little longer” there’d be a lot fewer people calling it a scam.

For sixteen years, crypto’s only use cases seemed to be buying illegal goods and securities fraud. Finally, we have another use case presenting: perfectly legal transactions that credit card companies have gotten cold feet about.

We had that nearly a century ago.

Meet grok circa 1920

The natural gas power plant would be producing the electricity that would go beyond the regular demand. And no, there aren’t any reactors there. There’s only about 50 nuclear plants in the country and Danville, VA didn’t get one.

Natural gas makes the plurality of electricity produced in the US, and to get there, it murdered coal, not nuclear or renewables, so bad as it is, it does represent an improvement in the American energy mix.

I think I must’ve missed that Verge article. I guess that dashes my “this is a creative writing exercise by somebody in Joburg” theory.

But we know that lizards have self preservation instincts (which for the purpose of this conversation I’ll say is interchangable with sentience (it’s probably a good enough proxy at any rate). But we know this because we have lots of people who have observed lizard behavior, not because The Lizard Farm, Inc has hyped up how alive and ensouled their lizards arev in a bid to get ever more VC funding.

Maybe I’m too pessimistic about this tech and my obsolete meat sack will get tossed to the time-traveling torture robot. But I think it’s more likely that we have a money grabbing hype train in the tradition of the Mechanical Turk or Theranos than it is that we have created a new lifeform by feeding every extant piece of writing that isn’t nailed down (and some that are) to the sand we’ve forced to do math.

Well, the only claim of this self preservation (that I’ve seen) is this article, which is on a website I’m unfamiliar with (which I often interpret as ‘more likely to be a creative writing exercise than the average news site’) and its only citation is a company that has a vested interest in making us believe the tech is better than it may actually be.

Fine, I won’t complain when Yudkowski’s followers take matters into their own hands.

How else are they going to be able to brag about their 90 trillion daily AI users?

How did the company named after the thing Sauron used to communicate with/spy on Saruman lose its moral compass?

Shrinking their market share is a much bigger middle finger. If you use their product and shut off a bunch of features, you’re still using the rest of their product and its other features.

If you’re planing to ‘invest’ your lunch money and get returns big enough to pay for the lunch too, you don’t have a plan, you have a gambling addiction.

Too late. I already jumped ship because of Copilot’s “Recall”, and I’m not interested in going through a round of partitioning the hard drive and installing a new OS so soon.

As much Saudi money as he burned though, I’m expecting him to leave an embassy in a half dozen suitcases.