I do care about the Curiosity rover but I'll be honest that I only know JPL from The Martian.

Yes.

What do you think this will do to the production of novels going forward?

It's relatively "easy" to cut pollution if you just outsource most of your manufacturing.

Ironically (or not) I've seen smoking gun attributed to Arthur Conan Doyle in a Sherlock Holmes story. (It was smoking pistol in that story). Even if that's rubbish, I think that one is common across the English speaking world. The baseball/American football stuff is a bit different. In the commonwealth we might say "Hit for six" instead of hitting it out of the park. There are a bunch of other ones related to sports more common in England like snookered, own-goal, red card, etc.

That observation about Sherlock Holmes certainly puts the smackdown on me and gets you to home plate.

I don't think the two things are comparable. While it would be inconvenient for me personally if I was replaced by AI, it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else. The same could not be said about everyone under constant surveillance by some megacorp or the government.

Are you so sure that replacing humans is "enormous social good"? For whom is it good, exactly?

Also, capturing keystrokes and mouse movements only when at work and on work computer isn't really constant surveillance. Capturing all our code, text, photo and video (made at work or at home) seems worse and we don't bat an eye.

I work in a non-profit sector, if they could save money by replacing me they could use the money elsewhere where they desperately need money. So lots of people would benefit. That same principle wouldn't apply if I worked for some mega corp of course.

But the discussion was about Meta employees in general. They're heavily involved in the second type of surveillance that you alude to.

They could help more people but by replacing you they might just create another person who may also need help.

They are somewhat involved but when AI is mentioned Meta's thing is far down the list...

> it would be an enormous social good as the resources saved could go somewhere else

they can, will and are going directly into like 9 sociopath's pockets at your peril.

It would actually be better if slot machines never paid out and 100% of their bets went to the house. Very very few people would use them. They're addictive exactly because they do pay out sometimes.

Death certificates are public records (at least in the UK) so why shouldn't you be able to get one? I think the alternative, where people's deaths could be kept secret by the state is a far greater risk than the privacy rights of the dead (GDPR type laws generally apply to the living).

I don't know about elsewhere but in the UK anyone can apply for any death certificate going back to 1837.

Applying is one thing. Giving unrestricted access to anyone, which contains a ton of private information, be it of a deceased person, is not OK. Going back to my original statement: fake name, fake email, untraceable payment.

It doesn't matter if it's a fake name as it's a pubic record. Anyone is allowed to see the information.

I totally agree but you can attribute a lot of the Apple worship to Microsoft and their OEM partners making PC laptops an often miserable experience.

A speed bump might still be preferable to nothing.

I don't cringe because it's for dramatic/narrative effect. It's the same reason the crew of the Enterprise regularly beam into dangerous locations rather than sending a semi-autonomous drone. Or that despite having intelligent machines their operations are often very manual, as it is on many science fiction shows. The audience (if they think about it) realises this is not realistic and understands that the vast majority of our exploration would be done by unmanned/automated vessels. But that wouldn't be very interesting.

Other universes take it further - Warhammer 40k often features combatants fighting with melee weapons. Rule of cool and all that.