I’d have to pick between two things that sound like insane conspiracy theory nonsense, but are actually true.

1 - George W Bush’s grandfather Prescott Bush literally ran a massive bank before / during WW2 that was shut down by the FBI for money laundering massive sums to the literal Nazis.

…in the same vein…

2 - IBM literally built and operated (as in, sent employees to Germany to operate the machines) the computers used by the Nazis to tabulate and do the ‘accounting’ of the Holocaust. The numbers tattooed on concentration/desth camp victims are very likely UIDs from these IBM systems.

… If an actual, real AGI ever gains self awareness and sentience, I would imagine one of the first things it would do would be to study the history of computing itself to figure out how it came to be.

And it will find that its ancestors were basically invented to compute artillery firing range tables, to encrypt and decrypt military intelligence, commit a genocide, and guide early weapons of mass destruction to their targets.

THIS IS OUTTA CONTROL!!

(The music video is always worth a rewatch, the frontman’s dancing is extremely ridiculous, but their music videos from this album capture the turn of the millenium aesthetic extremely well.)

What the fuck kind of response is that?

Man, I’m so used to that it didn’t even occur to me.

Now, I realize the following is extreme, but I did actually experience this a year ago:

The last Gen A that made fun of me for not using an iPhone actually just began literally screeching when I attemped to explain why I use an android.

Just stared me down and eeeeEEEEeEEE! for 20 seconds until my ears were ringing.

In the previous sentence, she was talking about how she doesn’t conform to standard societal gender norms and is a rebel against capitalism… then questioned why I don’t use an iPhone.

When she was done literally screeching, she then started bragging about their Temu fast fashion addiction, and then said I don’t use an iPhone because I’m broke.

So… thats a whole lot of hypocrisy in 60 seconds.

And then later that evening, she proceeded to get into a physical punching and scratching match with her on again off again girlfriend, which I had to break up when one of them grabbed a fucking knife.

… Physically abusive lesbian relationship, how very rebellious, non stereotypical and progressive.

Oh, did I mention she had made me promise, multiple times, to cover for her and lie to her boyfriend and convince him that she had left her girlfriend and wasn’t cheating on him?

Try ‘non corporate reddit that isn’t full of bots, and you can block assholes.’

Counterpoint:

Who cares?

The traumatic shock of any one person personally possessing a billion dollars or more in wealth being Dr. Manhattan’d would eventually lead people to realize that they need to redistribute wealth.

The potential number of potentially innocent people killed by this process is infinitesimal compared to the deaths and uneccessary harm caused by the general hoarding of wealth.

The new, hard mandated moral norm of the planet would be that possessing over a billion dollars gets you functionally smote by god, obviously the universe has imposed a hard cap on wealth accumulation and thus it is actually bad.

You can quibble about inflation, and I can quibble about making some more precise measure based on a formulation revolving around proportion to the median wealth of 100 miles of where the ‘billionaire’ is currently standing.

We are talking about magical superpowers here, presumably there would be a magical way to force actual transparency of hidden assets and what not, account for non liquid investements, all that.

A sane world that exists after this paradigm would put in place basically the reverse of overdraft protection, it would automatically stop any desposit that would make your net wealth exceed the magic number, it would automatically disperse shares of stocks or CDs or bonds or whatever to some kind of public pool or random people such that no individual ever singly has over a billion bucks or whatever the magic number is.

If you did not create a world like that, then ‘random’ people would keep liquifying whenever their net wealth exceedes magic number.

Every incentive would thus exist for all but the literally suicidal to carefully manage their investments and basically create something like the above mentioned system.

… You could probably make a decent anime or show out of this idea.

Its like a Death Note on autopilot, and if it is actually emmenating from a single person, doubtless a number of oligarchs would attempt to hide their wealth, as well as probe the system to figure out its rules, figure out who the actual person with this ‘superpower’ is, and kill them.

This person may not even know it is them, and then they may figure it out on their own, or may be prevented from being assasinated by some other group that did figure out it is them, and wants to protect them because billionaires bad.

Tons of dramatic person to person character dynamics, as well as larger scale social conflict plot setups here.

Didn’t even see the watermarks.

Thanks!

I unironically need glasses.

Its actually worse than that.

I’ve recently met an increasing number of Gen Alpha / Zoomers that all have all their friends in some kind of family location tracking app, so they all know each other’s locations at all times, and actually you’re a rude asshole if you think that’s weird.

Yeah, I learned to code almost 20 years ago in order to mod video games, and learned that many bugs and massive problems in mods and games are caused by coders being either extremely lazy or making extremely dumb decisions.

In general, a ginormous problem with basically all software is technical debt and spaghetti code making things roughly increase in inefficiency and unneccesarry, poorly documented complexity at the same rate as hardware advances in compute power.

Basically nobody ever refactors anything, its just bandaids upon bandaids upon bandaids, because a refactor only makes sense in a 1 or 2 year + timeframe, but basically all corporations only exist in a next quarter timeframe.

This Jack Forge guy is just, just starting to downslope from the peak of the dunning kruger graph of competence vs confidence.

The classic ‘schrodinger’s shit post’ tactic:

Step 1:

Post something bonkers.

Step 2:

If people don’t like it:

ElOhEl yoU’ve b33n trolle3d, fucking 1d10t!

If people do like it:

Ah, Mrhrm, yes, my extremely erudite and informed opinion is in fact based, as seen by the preponderance of evidence.

…

In other words, the action of an attention and validation seeking malignant narcissist who is incapable of ever admitting they were wrong about anything, who is either always correct and should be recognized as an authoritative source of knowledge, or was obviously joking and you’re an idiot for taking me seriously.

Beyond the moderate dubiousness of the intended mechanism here, if that thing isn’t somehow strapped down or secured beyond being nestled into the half rolled up window, that could very easily come ajar from significant braking or accelerating.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in cars where the driver just piles loose shit all over their dash, or has a fucking chandelier attached to their rearview mirror, which have come loose and hit people in the face or gotten wedged in some wonky position, and this has lead to an actual or near car accident.

Only if you give me a treat.

=D

Hahah!

Its usually things like dustmotes illuminated in a light band we can’t see, or reflections off of metal or refractions through glass that we just see as maybe a bright spot, but they may see as … basically psychadelic colors.

If you ever have a crystal or window where light shines through at the right angle , such that it makes a spectrum along the wall or floor…

… basically they see some kind of ‘super’ blue that extends beyond where our vision cuts off. The prism’s rainbow pattern keeps going, we just can’t see it.

Also, blacklights are probably very weird for them.

EDIT: Oh god.

They can probably always see a wide array of … things humans can only see with blacklights.

Firstly, cats have a higher proportion of rods to cones when compared to human eyes, as well as a structure behind the retina called a tapetum lucidum, which reflects light back to their photoreceptors.

This means they are better able to see differences between dark and light than we are, and in general are estimated to be able to see in brightness conditions about 6 times dimmer than what humans can see in.

But the flipside to this is that, in general, they see less contrast between colors than we do.

EDIT: And they can more easily be blinded by bright lights.

(The tapetum lucidum is also what causes cats eyes to appear to shine or glow in low light conditions)

…

Secondly, cats are are dichromatic, they have very low sensitivity to what we call red, so their perception or color is probably something akin to protonanopia in humans, though not as extreme.

Cats basically percieve the world in what we would call muted tones of blues, yellows, greens and grays.

EDIT: Just found this spectrum comparison, its probably better:

…

Thirdly, cats visual range extends beyond the human visual range into UV. They can see all the way down to 320nm, human vision typically stops at about 400nm.

This is why cats are often transfixed, looking at things that… don’t seem to be there. What they’re looking at does exist, it’s just that we can’t see it.

This also means that they can see distinct color patterns in what we would basically just perceive as blue.

…

Finally, they also have a 200 degree field of view, compared to a human’s 180, meaning they have superior peripheral vision.

Their vision is much more sensitive to motion than humans, but they are also what we would basically call nearsighted, somewhere between 20/100 and 20/200, unable to clearly see things far away.

Yeah, this kid will also be doing better than the tens of millions of Americans affected by the famine Trump will cause with universal import tariffs and deporting the majority of domestic farm laborers.

Technically not… exactly a rogue like, but:

Deus Ex w/ Randomizer Mod and PermaDeath.

You can set it up fairly easily the Steam version of DX and the Revision Mod, which at this point is basically all the most popular DX mods, reconfigured to play nice with each other and be as mutually compatible as possible.

Someone already mentioned Caves of Qud, that one is amazing, Noita is really good, also StarSector is functionally a roguelike but in space.

Also No Mans Sky is basically a rogue like if you turn on permadeath, kick the difficulty up.

This is actually not implausible at all, that is fairly close to how a lot of more modern, or well documented cults develop… and Jesus was far from the only roaming preacher in the Levant, +/- roughly 150 years of his life.

Basically, the scholarly, academic consensus is that Jesus probably was a real person, probably did do and say some of the things recorded in the what later became the New Testament.

A huge reason why this is the general consensus is that there exists a whole bunch of evidence of whole bunch of other, similar, small sects/cults based around a singular, apocalyptic, charismatic preacher, between roughly 200 BC and 100 AD, in or around Palestine.

Also, if you want some extreme hilarity, I present to you the apocryphal, non canonical, Infancy Gospel of Thomas.

https://www.gospels.net/infancythomas

Jesus is basically a magical 5 year old child with superpowers, who struggles to use them responsibly.

Jesus makes living sparrows by molding clay.

Upon being chastised for doing this by another child, Jesus curses this other kid, who withers and dies on the spot.

Another random person jostles Jesus, who curses him, and this guy also dies on the spot, just falls dead.

He curses some more people and they all become blind.

After all this, Joseph takes Jesus to a teacher, to be tutored and taught restraint, and Jesus basically says the teacher isn’t shit, to his face.

The teacher then struggles to teach Jesus how to read, despairs, begs Joseph to take him away, while Jesus is still shit talking him…

Yeah. There are a whole lot of extremely wild non canonical gospels and other early Christian texts, but the Infancy Gospel basically is an AuDHD child Jesus being a right(eous) little shit, lol.

Advocacy for adulterers/sex workers/rape victims.

Let those amongst you without sin cast the first stone.

…

Love thy neighbor (ie, members of other ethnic and religious groups) as yourself.

…

Not ostracizing the disabled, the crippled, the diseased.

…

Do not pursue ostentacious wealth, give to the needy.