Assuming of course, to be pessimistic, it hasn’t been weaponized. Siberian Anti-Plague Research facility doesn’t fill me with confidence, and you’d expect the hospital to have tried antibiotics, granted they may have been too late or used the wrong ones.

Let’s not forget Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and content farms which were actively corrupting (adding entropy to) search engine results even before LLMs, yay capitalism. They’ve dialed it to twelve with LLMs.

Iran will not let them out until after the midterms, there’s your war (undeclared like everything since WW2).

only Naoero, a tiny Pacific island ​nation formerly known as Nauru, has followed suit.

As it happens this is where Australia dumps unwanted refugees, which may well be an international crime, which would explain it.

Few =/= one. Bad headline.

Since Rubio announced the campaign, Venezuela and Chad have announced plans to withdraw from the court.

Venezuela is heading towards being a US vassal state. Not sure about Chad, but I’ll guess at heinous crimes being a factor.

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger ​announced their exits the previous year, denouncing the court as an instrument of “neocolonial repression.”

Well, they can’t be said to be following US lead then, but heinous crimes likely applies as well (still guessing).

Sane response to an insane world…

“I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further.”

It’s entirely possible to be evil and stupid, but insulated from your mistakes by money. The education and environment of the rich is highly conducive to socio/psychopathy, and selects strongly for it.

AI is not a synonym for large language model machine learning, but here we are. Language changes, sometimes for the stupid worse.

“Adequate communication flows freely between equals. Communication between non-equals is warped and distorted by second-circuit Domination and Submission rituals perpetuating communication jam and a Game Without End.” ― Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

More succinctly, ‘(Full) Communication is only possible between equals’.

A very common downfall for authoritarians, shame about all the destruction beforehand.

How about Mussolini’d?

Apple’s version is first rate and like $15. I use them to connect my computers to Class D Amps, gets me great 5/7.1

For mobile I’ve had the Qudelix-5K for a couple of years, pricey, but really nice. I forgot and left LDAC 990kbps/96kHz on for months (overkill and bad for battery life), nary a stutter at really impressive ranges. Pretty much makes the audio jack issue irrelevant.

And they say Anarchism can’t work. Fucking Linux Baby, progress in action.

Thank you kindly.

Likely just the world hitting it’s carrying capacity of humans. Similar things happen in other ecosystems. Nah, not Malthusian BS, just thermogoddamics.

Star Trek would never have been greenlighted if it had been created in the late 70s or any point after that.

True, it has it’s flaws, and has been abused through the years, but at core it represents HOPE in the future, a better world, competent, well educated people. Apparently that’s not what the producers like. Boot, face, forever.

Happiness is some chemicals in the brain and money can definitely buy all of those.

Eh, that’s a maybe, if you’re rich. Not saying medication can’t be useful, but the sane reaction to an insane world is also hard to deny.

What Fassbinder film is it?

The one-armed Man walks into a flower shop and says:

What flower expresses Days go by

And they just keep going by endlessly

Pulling you Into the future.

Days go by Endlessly

Endlessly pulling you Into the future.

And the florist says: White Lily.

-Laurie Anderson.

ETA: Here’s the youtube plebes, one minute from the eighties. Stop and have a think.

Yeah, valid, enshittification as per Doctorow mostly applies to systems you can change on the fly ( e.g. firmware-enabled devices) and engineered obsolescence (and indeed the march of progress making things genuinely obsolete) is not new. It’s just that so many physical products are worse than they were (not Toyotas, taps that used to last 50+ years and are lucky for a couple of years now, washing machines) that the term expanded. Some MBAs decided making ‘good enough’ cheap crap creates a ‘revenue stream’ when people have to replace it.

Technology does indeed progress, and many times that’s a good thing (and not just a cheaper way to get a product sold. LED lights are great). 9 Billion people leads to a lot of good ideas, not a doomsayer, but I’d still like focus returned to longevity and quality in some way that advertisers can’t fuck up. One can dream, I get sick of having to constantly research products to see if I’m going to need to do it again in a short time.

The “in the past stuff lasted forever” imho is a myth heavily fueled by survivorship bias.

Forever might be a bit strong, but recent built in obsolescence and enshittification would like a word. There was a time when longevity was a selling point, this is not that time. If you find that exception, embrace and share.

Yeah, I was thinking that but wasn’t convinced. Similarly Batman was born rich, trained hard and had bereavement thrust upon, which likely created the persona. Perhaps we’re all a bit nature, nurture, and luck.