I take the bus regularly, it's fine. Heard this shit all my life, then lost my license due to epilepsy and thought "oh crap." Turns out it's fine and actually a great way to dodge giving a shit about where I park.

...the same way it played out in the movie?

We write about "paperclip optimizers" as if they're some future AI problem, but in reality we run them every day to make ends-meet while the people who own them just focus on the compulsion to have more paperclips with no regard for societal consequences.

Modern companies see the paperclip optimizer and say "yeah, these guys are doing it right."

Hell, it's true just traveling across the US. Try "Phildadelphia Cheeseteak" a few hours' drive out of Philly. They'll ask if you want marinara.

GC, but Skies of Arcadia: Legends got me good as a kid

You're right that prescriptivism is fundamentally nonsense, but it's been more than a decade and I still put airquotes on "pizza" when referring to it around Pittsburgh, because I don't want to mislead visiting relatives

If "the room" refers to companies, which are human-operated paperclip optimizers, then yes.

Gotta 10x every two years, after all.

Thank you for the sink-washing idea, that might have just saved my bacon, and was easier than the shower wash I was planning

Currently on a longer vacay, was able to do laundry at a friend's near the beginning as planned, but two countries later I'm currently in a laundromat desert at a hotel near an airport.

So it's not really something you can rely on being able to do, unfortunately.

Edit: Just sink washed some things that should get me through the rest of the week after seeing that idea in the responses. Now it just rained, so fingers-crossed the clothes dry faster than they get the wet-mold smell

They should end it by having another drunk driver come out of left field and crash into you instead

For sure. It's the classic:

...on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.

• Douglas Adams

Pomme d'terror

Buddy had the nightmarish idea a while back with all the new generative ai stuff for video chat services injecting ads using the faces/voices of the participants in lieu of payment. Just, regularly-schedule ad breaks in your call where "your friend" suddenly starts talking about how excited they are about Raid: Shadow Legends

One of my favorites is any place selling a Che Guevara shirt

Ich spriche keine Deutsch, aber Fick die AFD

Columbus' contact resulted in a 92% loss of population in North, Central, and South America. Mexico City area only just re-reached its pre-contact population estimate in the 1960s.

"1491" is a good read.

No. This is a result of thinking of natural selection as working towards an "absolute" better and away from an "absolute" weaker, as opposed to pushing in directions that are entirely defined by the situation.

Natural selection is this: in populations that make copies of themselves, and have mistakes in their copies, those mistakes that better fit the situation the copies find themselves in are more likely to be represented in that population later down the line.

Note that I didn't say, at any point, the phrase "SuRvIVaL oF ThE FiTtEsT." Those four words have done great harm in creating a perception that there's some absolute understanding of what's permanently, definitely, forever better, and natural selection was pushing us towards that. But no such thing is going on: a human may have been born smarter than everyone alive and with genes allowing them to live forever, but who died as a baby when Pompeii went off - too bad they didn't have lava protection. Evolution is only an observation that, statistically, mutations in reproduction that better fit the scenario a given population is in tend to stick around more than those that don't - and guess what? That's still happening, even to humans - it's just that with medical science, we're gaining more control of the scenario our population exists in.

Now, can we do things with medical science - or science in general - that hurts people? Sure, there's plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad. But if you're asking "are we losing out on some 'absolute better' because we gained more control of the world we reproduce in," no, there is no "absolute" better. There's only "what's helpful in the current situation," and medicine lets us change the situation instead being forced to deal with a given situation, dying, and hoping one of our sibling mutated copies can cope.

My favorite was a guy in college who came in, used the urinal, used the hand dryer, and left.

My friends were very excitedly talking about setting up a corp in this when it was first announced.

They wanted my buy-in, and I asked if I could be head of HR, to which they said "yes".

So I bought it, created our corp, and performed my ideal goal: set up a corp recruitment posting called "entry-level Star Citizen player" which required 10+ years in Star Citizen.

We're now at the point where I have to find my log-in and change that to 20+ for the joke to make sense again.