CarbonIceDragon

Honestly, maybe slightly justified by the nature of the setting? The number of ships that seem to exist in universe, compared to the number of entire planets full of people to draw crew from, is so low that one must imagine that the entry requirements can be exceptionally high. One could also imagine better technology might imply better education technology as well as more refined techniques for using it.

Assuming the picture isn't edited or generated

Ad Jesus, sacrificed his time for your media.

rhetorical question, I do realize im not unique in that but its more to make the point that this idea seems flawed even beyond the tech not being up to it yet.

I know I can't be the only one that, even if AI was up to doing all this reliably, wouldn't want AI spending my money on it's own like this, surely? Like, I can be pretty picky and tend to spend a lot of time shopping around for things. A significant fraction of the time I end up deciding not to buy anything because I can't find exactly what I want at a price I'm willing to spend for it. I think I'd get hella stressed out that my AI would just buy the first thing that fit a category, or the cheapest, or whatever some company paid the AI developer to have it prefer, or such like that, and not to mention the worry that I might suggest buying something as a joke to someone else and have the AI hear and take it seriously or something and then my money's gone before I realize.

It's funny because the characters act in a way that is blatantly inappropriate for the situation, a lot of humor is like this, even including violence.

Which means that playing it is also free, no?

Free to play depends on what the operating model actually is I'd say. Some pay to win mobile game is worse than free with paid cosmetics, which in turn is worse than something like freeciv.

Because of inflation and such, but the important aspect of them is being super rich compared to everyone else (hence we don't count people that have a billion of some much less valuable currency), and that's a very old problem.

Billionaires aren't new. I also don't really think LLMs will be as impactful as they get hyped or feared to be, and actually think AI as a whole outside mere chatbots will be positive if not the revolution it gets hyped as.

Honestly I do think there has been an improvement. It might not seem like that when viewing the past, but the past is easy to overestimate- we don't have to live it anymore.

As to civil rights, it should be pointed out that while recent years have seen regression in the US, its not always a regression to the point that things were at back then, and more importantly, the rest of the world does not necessarily share the political woes of the US.

Mastodon might not be legally exempt, but depending on how much effort the UK government puts into enforcing this, large swaths of it might be functionally so. Most instances presumably arent hosted in the UK, and while some of those outside that country might block traffic there or be big enough for the UK government to order ISPs there to block them for noncompliance, theres a decent chance that some smaller, foreign run instances might simply ignore whatever the UK is doing, and if a UK user signs up to one of these, or uses a VPN to use one that does block the UK, and can still get the content from the rest of the network due to federation anyway, then the platform as a whole could potentially get away with ignoring those rules in a way that a single large site couldnt.