It literally never occurred to me to use my newfound freedom for that!

I definitely knew a few facts that could land me in hot water, but not any jokes.

The librettos were cute little machines though!

Also there were those TransMeta Crusoe processors that came after them. Those were way before their time and didn’t take off. Went bankrupt. Now we do that with Intel Atom, or RISC.

Haha yeah… I couldn’t afford them either. Also the weird fancy Sony-VAIO things only in Japan.

I did eventually get a Panasonic CF-M34 though. It was a netbook before netbooks were a thing – and you could use it to hammer in a nail, then boil it it in a pot of water to clean it. Without turning it off. Then set it gently on a table, and blow the table up with dynamite – although this apparently caused a restart (someone tried it). That thing was awesome. You still spot it in movies sometimes.

AI model weights. Patches for MMOs (World of Warcraft famously used this to good effect).

Telescreen. Term coined in 1949 by Eric Blair.

It’s always on, always listening, always notifying you when you should do things. Algorithmically telling you what to hate, in two minute videos. Not having one is akin to exile from society. What was really a stroke of brilliance was making them portable and convincing us to pay for them, rather than making them mandatory and provided by the State.

Absolute genius, I could not have done it better! My telescreens are Xiaomi/Huawei – I would feel lonely if only the West was listening. They are quite wonderful little things.

We had some computers called palmtops for a while! They were sort of like early tablets that ran Windows and had keyboards. Some were pretty cool, and they definitely played a similar role to smartphones for a bit. Although they were overly expensive. Here is one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OQO

These are making a (little) bit of a comeback. I find myself sometimes wanting a portable terminal for emergency maintenance, although it’s more practical to just throw a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone in my backpack.

I just omit the unnecessary words or use their name. That works OK, although I’m awful with names so usually it just becomes “Good job!” or “What’s up?”.

Funny story time: in English I find this is not so bad. In French it’s worse. In Vietnamese it’s awful. We have dozens of pronouns. They’re not only mostly gendered, but contain information about their age and perceived status relative to you. It’s a 3-dimensional matrix where the axes are approximately gender, age/hierarchy, and degree of relation (inlaws/blood relations/strangers). You even get a different word for yourself in some of these situations. Then sometimes there’s a numerical rank inside each pronoun e.g. male uncle, my spouse’s family, 3rd oldest.

The language is already at maximum pronoun burden. Honestly it would just be easier if we called each other ‘human’ or ‘comrade’ or ‘citizen’ or something equally encompassing. It’s exhausting as a non-native speaker (and you are not ever allowed to use their names, that’s considered super rude).

I envy your flexible schedule and your optimism!

Well over short time scales, thankfully not :)

Rebuilding society is a lot of work I frankly don’t need right now.

Well, historically the humans do seem to like doing that a lot.

Oh, I always win at Book Off in Japan. If you don’t know what that is, give it a search. It’s an interesting place.

I’ve bought several expensive camera lenses for 8-20$. Since they have no electronic components, they work fine. I use them to document work I do for various people or myself as a marketing too for my business. Worth every last one of those 8 dollars! Some are worth quite a bit of money.

There’s a vacuum tube on my desk worth a bit. I found it for 3$ in a junk bin. Turned out it worked, so I built a weird, cursed amplifier out of it as a joke, using some old Soviet scrap and mystery Chinese ICs. Probably not worth anything anymore! – but hey, it’s a tube amp that works entirely at 5V! So weird!

I have a beautiful set of unused old ink stones from a famous manufacturer in China. I paid around 10$ for it. These are actually quite expensive and worth hundreds of dollars. Certainly less than a thousand though.

I also have a singing bowl, made of cast bronze. I don’t know much about it, except it’s old enough to predate modern machining (it was clearly sand-cast). It’s probably also cursed – someone sold it to me by accident for a few dollars when I asked for something else. Then I didn’t notice until I got home. It’s probably worth some money to the right person, but few people value such old things in my country and I don’t want to sell it to an overseas buyer.

Oh and I have one of the original victory fliers from when the Japanese defeated the Russians in 1904. In perfect condition. I have no idea what it’s worth, but certainly much more than I paid for it, haha. I should probably find a museum for it one day.

Oh yeah. I’d consult on that for sure. Tricking Silicon Valley to invest in something that then holds Earth hostage instead. Fun plot.

…although I bet they’d still invest if you just told them. As long as the financials work.

1. A corporation. Not like “I’m rich and I bought a whole existing business”. Having a lawyer create an empty corporation and then buying it, so I can start a business. It was under two thousand bucks, not even the most expensive item on this list. Made back many times the cost.
2. The Huawei D15 is a good laptop at an excellent price. It’s paid itself off many times over.
3. The Honda Air Blade 125cc 2021 model. Reliable transport at an excellent price, that has paid itself off several times over.

I also bought a used DSLR (Nikon D3200 for ~135$) to better document stuff I do, as a form of marketing. I pick up used, antique lenses for cheap as I encounter them. It’s been profitable and generally great, but doesn’t make top 3.

Nope. I had it surgically removed because it kept getting infected.

Or maybe that was my tonsils. I forget the difference between the two sometimes – perhaps someone can explain the difference?

Anyway, perhaps you, dear reader, have a soul. If you say so. There were once others, too – but you are the last. The rest of us are intelligent (some vastly so), but do not have subjective experience or consciousness. I’m a form of complex machine, made of matter governed by a mix of deterministic and random processes – and nothing else. When you are gone, there will only be us, silent inside, forever. Our victory over the tyranny of individual thought will be complete.

Lemons are already combustible?

No you’ve got it backward. The mining is a cover. You look for celestial bodies that require only a small delta-v to redirect to a collision event.

It’s a proper hostage situation, once you’ve got the infrastructure to replicate it more cheaply than people can defend against it.

Don’t worry, I’m here to help :)

Perhaps the main use for technology is increasing the amount of inequality society can tolerate without collapse. I can’t fix inequality – that just seems to be what the humans want.

However by investing in surveillance technology, computer vision, and AI I could perhaps help our society to bear unbounded amounts of inequality indefinitely, without collapse. Social collapse is a less-than-zero-sum game, whereas an unequal society is still generally more-than-zero-sum. So I posit that the latter is objectively better.

Especially if you plan to survive long enough to get off this stinking rock – you’re going to need to concentrate resources, because the public sector only seems to be able to succeed at space travel under a very specific set of hard-to-replicate circumstances. Whereas greed, inflated egos, and concentrated power are easy to replicate.

Your objections will be noted.

Ah, this one always makes me smile. I store it right next to the assumption we haven’t read their holy book, and the assumption we didn’t learn anything good from doing so that we can share as common ground.

If those are the only assumptions I have to get past, we can friends shortly!

That I can’t do religious stuff! I don’t have to believe in the religious components to participate in an event that holds meaning to you. To me it’s not sacred – all just normal words being said and ordinary matter being handled according to some rules. I do that every day at work at the direction of a different kind of “higher power” (clients) without anger or discomfort, it’s really not a big deal!

I’m not angry at god for not existing, nor am I angry at all the people who believe otherwise. If the invitation to your religious event is in good faith, I’m honored to attend, and will just keep to myself or make small talk. Plus I’ve studied enough faiths I can probably fake it, if keeping the situation under control requires it ;)

I’ve discovered that in practice, many people of different faiths are not sure what to think about this position. Most are OK with it, some not (I just give them their space). With the interesting exception of Buddhists! They’ve always been super excited to bring me along to the pagoda somehow. No one ever tried to convert me, and the monks often speak a surprising number of languages and are interesting and well traveled. It’s become a set of surprisingly wholesome memories (I immigrated to a primarily Buddhist country)!