context

pascal's wager is the notion that if you assume heaven and hell and god and the devil are real, then the rational choice is to believe in god, because if god is real and you believe in god then you get into heaven and win, but if you don't believe in god then you go to hell and lose, whereas if god is not real and you don't believe you just die and you don't get into heaven anyway.

roko's basilisk is the same thing but replace god and the devil with super intelligent ai computers or something

if she ends up getting a settlment it'll be a tiny drop compared to industry profits. round-off errors like that are acceptable losses if it maintains the pretense of a system that's essentially benign for everyone.

sadly it appears data had defaulted to stardate when he made that comment, and stardate 2024 is January 9, 2325

looking forward to the spinoff trilogy in which the aldovian aristocracy sees their chance to seize control by asserting the claims of the old deposed monarchy following the post-soviet collapse of belgravia s.s.r. so they get to do a liberal-monarchist anastasia restoration fantasy

memory alpha says ww3 started in 2026 along with the 2nd u.s. civil war, but keep in mind that's all after the eugenics wars in the 90's, which canonically have been shifted into the future because of timey-wimey shenanigans to explain why the eugenics wars didn't happen yet irl

most historians agree that 2027 is an appropriate, if arbitrary, start date, but obviously i have my own opinion

i'm coming to the conclusion that more than anything else world war 3 is going to be very confusing for everyone involved

chatgpt and its relatives are fundamentally limited by the fact that linear increases in performance require exponentially increasing amounts of data and processing power, whereas its getting implicitly marketed as if it were the other way around.

so the inevitability of decreasing return on investment means it will be a race to the bottom to deploy cheap, shitty versions of this stuff anywhere it might be "good enough", and over time the ecosystem will evolve such that "good enough" is a depreciating standard even as it expands into more and more niches. everything will get worse in ways we haven't even imagined yet.

i think you're conflating united healthcare and united health group. witty is the ceo of united health group, which owns united healthcare. witty was thompson's boss throughout.

time is a flat circle

honestly i like borscht