This is my working assumption for all those teenage dystopias.

Hunger Games? World outside the US is fine. Better, now that the hegemon is more interested in watching it’s own population murder each other for television ratings.

Don’t want me making that assumption about your story? Maybe mention anywhere outside the continental US at least one [1] time. At least Handmaid’s Tale acknowledges Canada. And I guess heaven forbid Mexico ever get a mention.

I like this button layout. If one of the face buttons is gonna be used more than all the others, why shouldn’t it be bigger?

Yeah, Trump’s ideology is that of whomever had a polite conversation with him last. The only thing he actually believes in is television ratings.

It’s why his first administration’s policies were tamer than this one; there were slightly more ‘moderate’ (or, in a normal country, ‘hard right’) Republicans. This go round, he’s only surrounded by deranged sycophants and dorky natzi-fetish staffers.

most yankees don’t have coherent political views

He was a mormon kid who wanted people to be nice to each other. And shot someone about it. That’s not really right or left.

Nobody in US political leadership wants to set the precedent of facing legal consequences for their actions while in power.

State terrorism is a contradiction in terms. Legally, terrorism is violence carried out by a group that is not recognized as a state internationally. States cannot do terrorism, the term exists to protect their monopoly on legal violence. George Washington was a terrorist until the British empire recognized and began doing business with the constitutional United States. We see a similar change occurring with Taliban members and the present government of Afghanistan.

More importantly, though. You claim liberal democracy is fundamentally incompatible with authoritarianism, yet if we dig into the present and recent past of the United States, we find policies that match the list you have provided.

The Lavender Scare and Hoover’s FBI, the Red Scare and COINTELPRO, the police response to Kent State anti-war protests in 1970, the police response Columbia’s anti-genocide protests last year, the ongoing existence of privately run labor camps and prison farms.

Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock. Here is its prompt: Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting.

are you using the same prompt?

Sorry, do you think a business failing is only possible with government coercion?

And what government coercion gave Google near monopolies on web search and video? Microsoft Windows accounts for 70% of desktop computers, did a government give them that? Whom did the government coerce for Amazon to have such domination of server hosting and online retail?

I don’t think you’ve been paying close attention to whats been happening in your lifetime.

In a free market, competition has end results. Buisnes don’t just keep competing with one another ad infinitum. One of them eventually cant keep up and closes shop. It’s competitors expand into the space it previously filled. This process repeats until you have fewer and fewer firms that account for more and more of their sector of the economy. New business do not have resources to eke out space in an already filled niche.

Under a long enough time frame, a free market creates less competition.

wow, yeah. At least pennies have the excuse of being actually useful when they were first introduced.

The article mentions that pennies almost never get pulled from circulation because they almost never get spent. New rolls of pennies get distributed, the coins are handed out as change and then… nothing. The vast majority of them never get used after that. Cant pull an old coin from circulation if it never makes its way back to a bank.

Yeesh, talk about purple prose

no, it’s $30,000,000 worth of pennies.

Valve is notably better (not good, but better) than the other companies you’ve listed.

That is, of course, an anomaly. A good monarchy lasts only as long as the monarch. A good company that exists for longer than the average human lifespan will quickly become no different from its peers.

AI has been used to refer to human like intelligence in fiction for at least half a century.

it’s a poignant quote

but

a moment like this will never happen. There will be severe consequence from climate change within our lifetimes, certainly. And there – may – be a point where all the technology and comforts of the present no longer exist. But there will be many generations between us and that point. The CEO and shareholders of BP will not be around to see the world they set in motion, nor speak to its people.

Apocalypse is fiction. The trajectory of history can be read from present day conditions, and from how we chose to act. But that wheel turns slowly.

Unless I misunderstand, in China it’s illegal to distribute VPNs, but simply using one and accessing the wider net is fine. That implementation isn’t great, but it could also be a lot worse. Effectively it means anyone who’s tech savvy enough can leave the walled garden whenever they like with practically no consequence. Though, it still requires some group of people assume the legal risk of setting up and hosting the VPN infrastructure.

I feel like there must be some means of achieving the same effect without criminalizing people just for providing a service. Like, defaulting to a garden of public and private webpages that meat the standard, but still with some means of leaving that garden provided you pass a minor techincal barrier to entry.

Also forcing every social media site and glorified-website-app to default to chronological sort every time you close the browser tab or leave the app. It’s a simple change, but it would do a lot.

Thank you for the synopsis. However;

This is a clanker:

and this is software:

I wouldn’t say never, but certainly not this century. Probably not the next one, either.

And at this point we might as well refer to it as something like “Machine Consciousness”, because “AI” an any derivatives of it have been rendered garbage for actually talking about the sci-fi concept.

Eh, it’s not like the current ones were all that good anyway