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?

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?

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

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.

that did actually happen to a guy, over the password to his bitcoin account

https://abcnews.go.com/US/nyc-crypto-kidnapping-torture-case/story?id=122280419

I love having capital, now if only there weren’t all this pesky labor.

Any meritocratic system becomes an informal aristocracy after a generation or two. And aristocrats are so notoriously good at understanding the systems that facilitate and keep them in power…

and if you read theory, it’s just a detailed explanation of capitalism! Nobody actually has a concrete, actionable prescription of how to make “the good society”, just a general sense that something better is possible if we start doing something with what we already have

Do you count the Byzantine as separate or the same as Rome?

Your talking about structures comprising huge numbers of people across multiple generations. There is no clear “death”. Just the gradual shifting from one set of conditions to another. Pick any line in the sand, declare it to be the “end” of an empire, and you’ll still find people living under its rules, speaking the language, and using the currency well afterward.

Hell, look at Britain. No longer the globe-strangling power that they were, but it’s still the same country with the same rules and government and money.

throw in a smattering of aristocratic titles, and yeah that describes UK politics.