Why the hell would anyone think about Cyrus the Great every day, let alone fondly.

Mr Burns (seated) and Smithers.

Frankly I'd be more impressed if they had a lab of non-thermodynamic devices.

Yeah that was my read of the game from my first exposure to it. "You have to buy cards sight-unseen hoping to get good ones? That's a scam."

It's like they looked at Dungeons and Dragons product churn and thought "No, that's not shitty enough"

wut

The real “techbros” are all business people in an actual position of power, not the introverted QA tester just trying to get through the day.

If the QA tester goes home and checks his Raspberry Pi dogecoin mining rig, and is saving up for a Cybertruck, he's probably a tech bro, if only a larval one.

I feel like TED bears some responsibility for this kind of thing, somehow.

The sign of a great CEO is that sense of urgency.

Or he now has the lung capacity of a 15% smaller 18 year old.

So who is going to be first to set up a grifty EA think tank where the thinking is admittedly all done by LLMs, and why shouldn't it be us.

Basically he's like the dudes who left Twitter for Gab or Truth Social and found it boring because there weren't any libs to own.

Where are they going to find 500 people in India who are good at solving cold fusion and will do it for pennies.

The middle picture looks very much like a young lesbian couple.

Not that there's anything wrong with lesbian couples of any age. It's just with this pair it's... odd.

I can't help it. I see a picture of them and it's like a puzzle I need to solve.

There's probably some blurring of what "AI doom" means for people. People might be left thinking that "there could be negative effects due to widespread job loss etc" without necessarily buying into the weird maximalist AI doom ideas or "torturing simulated you forever" nonsense.

And the weirdo cultists probably use that blurring to build support for their cause without revealing the weird shit they actually believe.

I suspect there are people who have complicated theories about the relative whiteness rankings, and thus superiority, of natives of Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands.

Eponymous even. Guess they don’t know who named sneerclub.

Mister Sneerclub of the Newport Sneerclubs, of course.

"widgets" must be a euphemism for "opioids"

All you need to know about Gruber is in this claim of his about phone photography, in a critique of a NY Times tech journalist who deigned to acknowledge that readers could just use flash to get better low-light photos:

A mainstream technology columnist should be explaining to readers why they should not use flash, and how best to capture low-light photographs without it. “You could always just use flash” is technology malpractice.

In reality, a mainstream technology columnist's job isn't to encourage readers to cough up hundreds of dollars to buy the newest phone for the sake of something that might be of negligible importance to most of them.

Gruber clearly thinks his job is to always encourage readers to buy the latest Apple phone. At least when his job isn't to sniff his own farts.

Flash is also technology! Most photography and videography is done using artificial light! There aren't many people walking around with spy satellite lenses like fucking Kubrick to do natural light camera work.

Also I think he's a bit of a fancy watch douchebag.

Someone send Roko a copy of James K. Morrow's novel "Towing Jehovah" which involves the enormous corpse of God being towed, by a (much smaller) oil tanker, from near the Equator north to a fijord for burial in a cave. (I lost interest toward the end).

It's not strictly relevant - I don't think the crew sets up on the corpse itself - but it'd be fun to watch where Roko's head goes.

"Step One: We kill God. Step Two: We harvest the cadaver, plastinate it, and build our city."

The African slave trade of slavs? I think she means Arab. Or Arab/Muslim-osphere.

I wouldn't think sub-Saharan Africans ran a lot of ships up to the Baltic or the Black Sea to capture slavs for enslavement. Ottomans, yes. Barbary pirates, perhaps. Of course some of the most prominent of the Barbary pirates were actually raised Christian or Jewish in Europe, and joined the pirates as adults.

And I wouldn't be surprised at all if Europeans also captured slavs for sale to the Ottomans.