The idea is you have investments running that return enough to keep the place running indefinitely.

Yeah. This is really the most terrifying version of aliens. Not ones that want to take over the world in a grand dramatic fashion. Instead, I find truly indifferent aliens to be far more terrifying of a concept. We are literally animals to them. Or, more they view us as we view other animals.

Imagine being abducted by aliens. Instead of showing you the universe or trying to communicate with you, they don’t even bother. They just proceed to vivisect you. They dissect you alive, without any anesthetic. They only give you a paralytic to keep your from screaming or resisting. They’re doing the equivalent of wild animal research and they’re simply indifferent to your suffering. You are not a person to them. Your pain means nothing. Your family will never know what happened to you, and the aliens don’t even bother trying to justify their actions to you. They make no attempt at communication. They slowly take you apart piece by piece, silently going about their work. You’ll never know who they are, where they’re from, or why they’re doing this. They do not owe you an explanation. To them you are no different than a plant.

After all, Cain only ever killed one man…

I mean, if the bar was mostly regulars, and they’re all used to one of them bringing their dog in, and letting them sit at the bar? I imagine that would become mundane quite quickly. Humans can get used to damn near anything.

Obviously you’re instructing OP to pump chlorine gas into the cabins of loud vehicles.

Are you Philip J Fry?

My bloodline is currently rotting in a landfill somewhere outside of Bangkok…

Cop guns really are like “the call of the void” aren’t they? All I know is if I’m ever trapped in a Groundhog Day time loop, one of the first things I’m doing is grabbing a cop’s gun. I don’t want to grab it and shoot anyone with it. I just want to grab it and run off into the distance, cackling with glee like a madman.

I mean, Dr. Who was originally intended as an educational TV series. The original pitch was the Doctor would travel to historical time periods and teach kids in the process. It just developed a life of its own and grew out from there.

Exactly. Imagine you’re taking a class. Imagine your note taking process is:

1. Record an audio copy of the lecture.
2. Feed the audio into an LLM to transcribe it.
3. Have the LLM condense the transcription into notes.

What good have you actually accomplished? The point of studying is not to produce a derivative work of a professor’s lecture. The point is to actually learn something. And this is best done by working through the material, on your own, using your own mind and faculties. It is the act of actually doing the transformation that builds the rich conceptual networks that result in effective learning.

The education system is fundamentally bullshit and they’re not wrong to try to get out of doing the make work.

Just because you failed to see the value of the writings you were assigned does not mean those writings were without value.

Exactly. Some universities end their spring terms in early May. Some in early June. K12 schools tend to more consistently end their years in early June, but that’s still spread out over a few weeks.

The technology itself is great though. Imagine having an AI that you can easily train at home on 100s of different academic papers, and then run specific analyses or find patterns that would be too big for humans to see at first.

Imagine is the key word. I’ve actually tried to use LLMs to perform literature analyses in my field, and they’re total crap. They produce something that sounds true to someone not familiar with a field. But if you actually have some expert knowledge in a field, the LLM just completely falls apart. Imagine is all you can do, because LLMs cannot perform basic literature review and project planning, let alone find patterns in papers that human scientists can’t. The emperor has no clothes.

Oma Desala approves.

The problem with this is that every market is going to have a certain number of empty homes in it in any given time. Properties are bought and sold, vacated and re-rented, and often in this process they sit vacant for a few months. Properties need to be cleaned or renovated. It doesn’t matter how egalitarian the home ownership distribution is. It doesn’t matter if you’re talking socialized housing. Any housing market will have some large number of vacant units at any given time.

My point is that it’s incredibly foolish to just look at the raw numbers of “vacant” homes. Most of those “vacant” homes are only temporarily vacant as part of the churn of the real estate market.

The truth is home construction dropped off a cliff after 2008. The real causes of the housing crisis are due to:

1. A general shortage of home construction.
2. Consolidation and mergers among home construction companies.
3. General wealth/income inequality encouraging resources to go to small numbers of lavish homes for the wealthy instead of large numbers of modest homes for the working class.

Vacant units are not a significant cause of the high cost of housing. Are units sometimes kept empty because of financial reasons or to avoid the rent dropping in certain saturated markets? Yes. But that behavior cannot be maintained long term. In practice, there isn’t some vast supply of vacant housing, in places where people want to live, that can just be handed over to the homeless.

I mean, I already did become the waifu!

In practice, your plan would just result in abandoned dead towns in rural Kansas being turned into fenceless concentration camps for the formerly homeless.

You’re correct in a technical sense but incorrect in a social sense. In 2025, “AI” in the common vernacular means LLMs. You can huff and puff about it, and about how there are plenty of non-LLM AIs out there. But you might as well complain that people mean silicon-based Turing-complete machines when they refer to a “computer,” even though technically a computer can mean many other things. You might as well be complaining about how a computer could refer to someone that does calculations by hand for a living. Or you could refer to something like Babbage’s difference engine as a computer. There are many things that can technically fall under the category of “computer.” But you know damn well what people are saying when they describe a computer. And hell, in common vernacular, a smart phone isn’t even a “computer,” even though it literally is just a computer. Words have both technical and vernacular meanings.

In 2025, in the language real speak in the real world, “AI” is a synonym for “LLM.”

What makes you think I don’t do that on my current computer?