Well, there are always ready-to-go solutions. A 1TB external drive isn’t all that expensive nowadays, and they’re enough for daily use!

Plus, honestly… there are soo many tutorials online about how to set up everything, and most things are a couple of commands one has to copy/paste into a command prompt. The anxiety is far worse than the procedure itself.

Maybe what’s needed is propagating these tutorials more, make them visible and highlight their accessibility in terms of procedural difficulty!

This! Invest in local storage as much as possible, ideally create your own proper storage server! Given how fragmented and volatile things are becoming, this isn’t even just about access anymore, it’s about archival as well.

Can’t they all just go back to focusing on rockets and Mars colonies and such? Would be nice if they fucked off into space and left the rest of us to do not-so-stupid shit…

Well, philosophical and epistemological suicide for now, but snowball it for a couple of decades and we may just reach the practical side, too…

Edit: or, hell, maybe not even decades given the increase in energy consumption with every iteration…

I hope we’re alone in the Universe.

…can we please have Skynet instead? Please?

… my brain wants to assume it’s “seditious,” but my heart knows any assumption would be bold when it’s about what Trump meant…

“Only beer and Coke come in cans, what are you talking about? Have you ever seen anything else come in cans? I haven’t! And if you have, that was probably fake news.”

“It is bonk these here nasty tricks bonk that show bonk the Lib’ruls’ bonk true colours! clang”

“No, no, no, I like Pringles, Pringles are amazing, Pringles are great. Everybody here at the Oval Office loves Pringles, we can’t get enough of’em.”

Edit: on second thought… maybe you’re right, Lay’s come in bags, doubt those paragons of stupidity ever managed to figure out how the can works…

Omg, this guy’s the fucking President of the USA… (I do have object permanence, yes, but he’s so fucking dumb, that I frequently re-experience the shock)

Fuck off, you orange paedo!

I genuinely think it’s impossible. I think this would land us into Robocop 2, where they started overloading Murphy’s system with thousands of directives (granted, not with the purpose of generating the perfect set of Laws for him) and he just ends up acting like a generic pull-string action figure, becoming “useless” as a conscious being.

Most certainly impossible when attempted by humans, because we’re barely even competent enough to guide ourselves, let alone something else.

Yepyep, agreed! I was referring strictly to the Three Laws as a cautionary element.

Otherwise, I, too, think the point was to show that the only viable way to approach an equivalent or superior consciousness is as at least an equal, not as an inferior.

And it makes a lot of sense. There’s not much stopping a person from doing heinous stuff if a body of laws would be the only thing to stop them. I think socialisation plays a much more relevant role in the development of a conscience, of a moral compass, because empathy (edit: and by this, I don’t mean just the emotional bit of empathy, I mean everything which can be considered empathy, be it emotional, rational, or anything in between and around) is a significantly stronger motivator for avoiding doing harm than “because that’s the law.”

It’s basic child rearing as I see it, if children aren’t socialised, there will be a much higher chance that they won’t understand why doing something would harm another, they won’t see the actual consequences of their actions upon the subject. And if they don’t understand that the subject of their actions is a being just like them, with an internal life and feelings, then they wouldn’t have a strong enough* reason to not treat the subject as a piece of furniture, or a tool, or any other object one could see around them.

Edit: to clarify, the distinction I made between equivalent and superior consciousness wasn’t in reference to how smart one or the other is, I was referring to the complexity of said consciousness. For instance, I’d perceive anything which reacts to the world around them in a deliberate manner to be somewhat equivalent to me (see dogs, for instance), whereas something which takes in all of the factors mine does, plus some others, would be superior in terms of complexity. I genuinely don’t even know what example to offer here, because I can’t picture it. Which I think underlines why I’d say such a consciousness is superior.

I will say, I would now rephrase it as “superior/different” in retrospect.

Saw your comment as mine got posted, exactly! Those were cautionary tales, not how-tos! Like, even I, Robot, the Will Smith vehicle, got this point sorta’ right (although in a kinda’ stupid way), how are tech bros so oblivious of the point?!

Uuh… skipping over the fact that this is a pointless article, didn’t Asimov himself write the three laws specifically to show it’s a very stupid idea to think a human could cover all possible contingencies through three smart-sounding phrases?

Our free market’s good, yours is the problem! Gotta read the fine print!

Think you took a wrong turn somewhere, this is the Technology community…

“Thing set to die soon now worth less than the only other option remaining.”