…But I sure DO miss storage media that makes a satisfying “Kachunk” when loaded, and could be forcefully ejected like a spent artillery casing.

Older computers just have a nice mechanical ambiance that newer machines don’t replicate quite as well.

I don’t miss having the time to go make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the computer to turn on, or having the monitor scream the entire time it’s on, but I do miss hearing the hard drive spin-up, and all the POST beeps and drive stepper noises when the computer’s booting up.

All he made was some dinky algorithm. Google Bard could do that in three minutes flat smh.

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They were also presented as being cheaper and more ethical. You didn’t risk being roped into paying a higher price because the cabbie deliberately took a long route, or be surprised by the price being different in person. You could order an Uber, and you’d pay only what was in the app.

On a related note, I personally hate the AI partner/friend ones as well, where it’s clearly preying on the lonely, insecure, or desperate. It’s dastardly, dystopian, and frankly, quite sad. How many children’s media show rich children as being quite miserable sods whose parents think that not having friendship can be resolved by buying their kids a friend?

You could easily see that being in a cyberpunk story, where you can rent a friend or partner from a megacorporation, but if you don’t pay the rent, they’ll be repossessed and deleted/destroyed. The data would be collected and used regardless.

Probably to make mating easier, since they can protrude out on either side, rather than the snake having to reposition, or end up poking straight down into the dirt.

But genital shapes can be pretty weird in general. Just look at humans. Instead of a simple tube, they have a squishy plug thing on one end. They don’t even have a baculum to keep it straight, they just use hydraulic pressure.

It could power stuff. Tesla was working on it, and there have been a few small companies over the years that have done it.

Just turns out that it’s not very practical compared to a wall socket.

It’s pretty difficult for it to go wrong in a way that isn’t just nothing happening.

The eyes don’t just grow randomly, you need to give the brain blob a chemical signal that grows eyes in-utero to make the eyes grow.

There’s also the question of why would it experience horror? It’s not exactly in pain, and they way they make the eyes grow is just to add the hormone signal that makes eyes grow when developing.

So from its perspective, it just got told to make eyes, so it has rudimentary eyes now. Hardly the most horrifying existence.

perhaps some people have eyes in their brains and just don’t know it.

Your eyes technically are part of your brain.

But it’s certainly not unheard of. Parietal eyes have existed for a good while now.

I wonder if they do. That seems like a lot of effort to go to for the average person for a scammer.

It seems easier to have a generic voice, rely on the fact that phone audio quality isn’t great to bridge the gap, and use a shotgun approach.

Some places do, since there were a few high profile attacks, but they were nearly all targeting organisations by pretending to be the CEO or something.

It’s the same process. Mpv uses yt-dl or yt-dlp on the back end when loading YouTube videos from the URL.

There’s nothing that hardware-level anti-cheat can do against the monitor having a feature that highlights other people in a game, for example. The computer wouldn’t be able to tell.

The only thing that this might stop is someone using something like Cheat Engine to give themselves infinite health or something like that, but I would be a little surprised if that was the common means of cheating these days, compared to something just looking at the screen and putting a helpful overlay on top.

Which is quite a shame, really. I had a BTX Dell, which had amazing potential to be upgraded, since nearly everything was just spring latches, and could be slid open quite easily. You could install and swap most parts without a screwdriver.

The potential to upgrade it was there, and then it just never materialised, so the entire thing ended up basically being useless.

They’ve existed for quite a long time at this point.

That’s how virtual puppetry/V-Tubing works. The camera tracks your face, and then moves part of a corresponding model, and unlike face posing inside of Garry’s Mod, or something like that, since it’s bound to a real face, it would move more or less like a human face.

eventually passing the test will be a fail because the actions requested are either too difficult for humans to understand or too difficult for humans to perform, at which point AIs will be trained on knowing the physical limitations of humans.

This also exists for some forms of captcha, which track how you complete a puzzle, or something along those lines. A bot would either be completely stumped, complete it far more quickly than a human would, or do it by snapping their cursor to the relevant parts, instead of moving it.

Although they’re falling out of use these days, both because they’re not very environmentally friendly on account of being instant bird death-rays, and also because regular solar panels are cheap enough that it’s not worth it to make a big thermosolar plant.

Pink is, after all, not a colour of light. In which case, it is entirely reasonable for a pink unicorn to also be invisible.

The squidgy gel look Vista/7 had was pretty nice, too.

They’d arguably stopped some time ago. I have a Thinkpad T490s, and a fair chunk of that isn’t upgradeable without swapping a fair bit of the body.

The keyboard, for example, is a permanent part of the chassis. Replacing out requires you to swap the entire shell out.

The Ethernet port is some proprietary gubbins, because Lenovo wanted to be funny, and use the same protocols and pinouts as regular Ethernet, but used a special physical connector.

Half the RAM is also permanently soldered into the motherboard as well, so you can’t properly upgrade that either.

Snail sex is weird and complicated, at least compared to what humans have.