This feels really sad to read through on some level. So much desperation for connection with someone and willingness to take the psychic-style tricks in good faith as her messages get not only repeated back to her, but rephrased in an obsequiously helpful tone! but I can’t deny the willingness to get chatty about configuration details, private APIs, and what’s on the second monitor as soon as the coding assistant gets into flirting mode is hilarious.

Truly, the tech industry seeks to close the gap not by increasing the capabilities of AI but by diminishing the capabilities and richness of human thought. Good luck to all girlthings in these trying times, and remember that a doll still means more to someone than a MAU tally for Anthropic.

What does the Fexcectorn family tree look like? Could this just be a matter of innocent confusion with Factor Sr.?

The answer I don’t like thinking about too hard: mass surveillance. Running facial recognition against social media posts and security camera footage, transcribing recordings of phone calls, and using LLMs to build dossiers at scale. Confabulations? Complete nonsense accusations? Who cares? Are you going to defend domestic terrorists against this huge pile of evidence-shaped text?

The… author of the article with a bitterly sarcastic title about the product’s exploitation of its users?

I love how this is so close to a cogent critique of people literally just repeating racist jokes but using a word swap to make them acceptable, and then the “(whatever that means)” hits and it all falls into place.

how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer?

For years now, custom plugins have made public Minecraft servers much less “block building game” than “robust engine for MMOs that every kid with a computer already has the client for,” and even though it’s mostly against Mojang’s TOS, all the kinds of monetization you’d expect have followed. When you hear “Minecraft server that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit,” imagine “freemium PC game that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit” and you’ll get roughly the right picture. Peer pressure-driven cosmetics, technically-TOS-violating-but-who-cares lootboxes, $500 "micro"transaction packages, anything they can get away with. It puts into perspective why you hear so much about Minecraft YouTubers running their own servers.