… it is old-fashioned English–think Meredith, Esther, Olga, Gretchen…

I realize this is kind of beside the point but bear with me please. None of these names are English. Meredith is Welsh, Esther is from the Bible, Olga is Russian with a tinge of Scandinavian, and Gretchen is straight up German. Now, your actual name might be English so it is only tangentially relevant. And while you could dismiss this all as smarteassery on my part, which would be fair, I just want to impress upon you that what you think about names may not be correct. It’s not a popular piece of advice in 2026 but: do your own research first before you go to the courthouse. Just confirm with the search engine of your choice that you got the right idea. Don’t trust disagreed m so-called AI with this.

I wish you best of luck with your search. I’d suggest “Lee” - a common family name both in the anglosphere and a variant of a common Chinese one as well.

Ellis Island misspellings are a piece of patina of the US. I think at this point in time that makes them in themselves worth preserving. I don’t mean to talk you out of your plan here, it’s just fruit for thought.

If I created a battery that didn’t need charging until 100 years later, I probably would not sell the tech to phone manufacturers like Apple. We have seen some impressive miniaturization with the technology including the batteries in terms of capacity vs. size. That came by iteration; it got better with most new models. It’s conceivable that if a battery would store a century of juice we would have maxed out development of the rest of the device. But tbh I don’t think that will happen. There will be new modems, new chips, new storage technology. But the battery would stay the same? Apple in particular would hate that. They would also prefer you buy a new device every time or every x years at least. So they’ll put a smaller one into the device and sell the wonder battery as a power bank. They will also cater to the hiker and prepper segments of the market.

Also, people born in countries with good healthcare today have a good chance of living well over 100. So they might be utterly confused at 112 when their phone suddenly shuts down.

I can imagine such a scenario as well because we are humans and we would do dumb shit like that.

FTL can mean different things. It could be the Trekkian warping space around you. It could be the Galactican jump to somewhere else. Or a portal. Or something else. Which tech it will be will matter. And different to most sci-fi, there could be more than one way if indeed c can be smashed.

The problem with space is that it isn’t completely empty and stuff in it moves like evil landmines. You don’t want to warp into a moon or jump inside an asteroid belt. Which means you will need this sort of highway or scenic spot system of space that is actually confirmed empty so travel along the route doesn’t blow you up or jumping doesn’t mean you accidentally end up in a black hole. In my mind, that would prohibit the use of the technology inside a star system because there are two many moving parts to consider and keep track of. So you need to take a year-long sub-LTS access ramp to reach the highway at the edge of the solar system before you can move safely faster than a flash. The same is true for the resource rich destination.

That’s why I can also imagine a scenario where having the technology might not be as impactful as we fear and thus not lead to war. The infrastructure would have to be so massive to make this work, it isn’t an immediate advantage to have it. More of a burden really, provided the economy still roughly works as it does today. And if we have the tech to reach the edge of our solar system in a shuttle bus service kind of way, we will be already enlarging our resource pool with stuff we find inside our solar system in an early Expansian kind of way. Better ROI on that than stuff from further away.

One of the funniest videos of politicians that I’ve seen recently was a casual meetup of Poland’s PM Donald Tusk and the then incoming Hungarian PM Magyar. He had just defeated Viktor Orban, Putin’s fifth column in the EU and authoritarian asshole of the year. Magyar introduces one of his ministers to Tusk. I don’t remember which ministry but her name is also Orban. Tusk is ever so briefly taken aback by the mention of that name, which Magyar realizes and quickly adds: “No relation.” They giggle at the mixup and Tusk just fires off nonchalantly something like: “Well, my name is Donald.” They laugh and move on.

Citations needed

Never gonna give you up. Never gonna let you go… Be careful what you wish for.

There was a time in the early 2000s when good old Google search was so good, it got you your results in record time. One query and a couple of clicks. And then they realized they could sell more ads if your search took just a couple of queries longer. Every query was a chance to sell more ads. And the results got worse.

Personally, I don’t use a search engine that spits out so-called AI results. I manage the old-fashioned way because I’m old. But the principle to give you shittier results to get you to rephrase your search and thus multiply ad sale opportunities surely applies here as well.

I think this is far more normalized in the US to bring god into everything. After all, it’s one nation, under god. And in god they trust! It’s on the money after all, thoughts and prayers. And lordy, the language is full of religious references, from oh my god gosh golly to dang darn dammit. There is also the performative “I was praying for” whatever, jeez, Jesus help me. I’m already irritated by all these religious vestiges in the language.

Piety is also this sort of monstrance required for political office in the US. Even when it’s quite unbelievable, like in the case of 47 who would only own a bible if he could sell it. And if you’re not a Catholic or some Protestant, you have you be Mormon or Islamic just enough to tick the religious box. But we might draw the line at Scientology because that’s all just made up nonsense, isn’t it.

I find it offensive when people just assume I believe in any god. The older I get the more I think Christopher Hitchens had a point when he said that ardent believers in monotheist religions are predisposed to vote for and follow authoritarian leaders. One god, one fuehrer.

I’m sorry if you had to chew on this for a month and I’m even more sorry to tell you that your reply makes no sense to me.

No, it doesn’t. Because I was not talking about physical sexual assault.

Nothing in law is simple. Legislators pass a law and after it passed that meat grinder it eventually gets brought up in courts where a second sausage is made by evaluating whose rights take precedence over others. And if we imagine the current US Supreme Court they will not ban deepfakes completely because it could limit the first amendment. And they would probably find in favor of the sad smelly asshole in his basement who made deepfake porn that was never meant to be public. So the creation of deepfakes will not be limited by law. The system can only react after the creation. By which point the damage is already done for the celebrity whose likeness was abused.

Right now it might be possible to get the companies to limit the models that can generate this stuff. But soon enough, maybe in a few years, it will be possible to train you own model on your terms that will run locally and if you’re savvy enough to set that up you’ll be savvy enough to sidestep any restrictions there as well.

Don’t impersonate without enthusiastic consent will not survive the tour up the legal system.

Yeah but it isn’t here.

All this so-called-AI generated policy meat still needs to go through the sausage grinder in both houses, filled with humans. So I think the scandal wouldn’t be as great.

The danger depends more on who you are. If you are in a position where deepfakes could be made to undermine you in your life, there is a higher danger. If you work a desk job in an accounting firm, that risk is much lower.

Deleting all your pictures from the internet is a fig leaf. How many pictures exist in other people’s photorolls that you are in? And even if you trusted all of them implicitly, how well do they do their security?

I think at this point in time, deepfakes are ultimately identifiable. By which I don’t mean anybody can tell immediately that it is one. But on repeated viewing enough people would get suspicious and when somebody analyzes the 1s and 0s it can be made certain. Society needs to adapt a delayed response tactic. This will take time but eventually we will look at deepfakes with the same skeptical eye we developed for photoshopped images. We are in the period of adjustment lag so the jeopardy is higher today than it will be a couple of years from now.

The biggest danger is for ladies because sexualized deepfakes are not only appalling but the legal system is also lagging to catch up in many places. As soon as a believable deepfake of a famous man makes the rounds, the laws are going to be tightened ASAP though.

There is also a legal battle that needs to be fought. Can I hypothetically make a deepfake sex video of my favorite female celebrity just for my own enjoyment? I could paint her oil on canvas as long as I kept it at my house. I could write fan fic and might even get away with posting that online. Could I not make this movie just for me? And if I protected my computer in a reasonable way, can I be held accountable if some other asshole leaked it onto the internet? We’ll have the answers in 10-15 years.

I don’t think you can make all deepfakes illegal so we’ll have you find a way to live with the threat.

If you want to get picky, Xwitter didn’t enshitify as laid out as a concept by Cory Doctorow. The best example is probably Amazon which went from being insanely user friendly to lock in users, to supplier-friendly and increasingly less so for users, until it had squeezed and shafted both groups. That’s enshitification and it doesn’t apply to Xwitter. They had problems to make money before a certain somebody bought it. They’ve been bleeding users since the eventually Nazi saluting manbaby bought it, who then wanted to sue advertisers who refused to buy ads on his service. There was no user lock-in and then a supplier lock-in. There was just shit. All their current problems are man made. By one specific man.

I would argue you cannot enshitify a service that was already shit. At this point this is more of a conshitidation.

Oh, man, this will affect tens of people.

I’m concerned about the resources it gobbles up but I’m not skynet scared.

The effectiveness and the benefits are overhyped by the people with a financial interest in it. We call it AI but it’s only one for two there in that it is artificial. It’s a technology in its infancy. And it hasn’t found a use case that will guarantee an ROI. And the companies involved here are running out of runway.

Cannibalism hasn’t been proven yet. But even without that, rich people not getting punished isn’t mildly infuriating. We are way past that.

And the world was already shit long before we learned about any of this. Because it was possible to get away with that shit before we found out and even still after we learned a little about it.

Billionaires aren’t the majority. Turn your morose mood into a political movement that will hold them to account.

Would the order be different in an imported fridge?