Your phone listens for the phrase “Hey Google” and uses little processing power to do so.
I need some metrics on this. It must be recording at least some things above a certain volume threshold in order to process them.
Your phone listens for the phrase “Hey Google” and uses little processing power to do so.
I need some metrics on this. It must be recording at least some things above a certain volume threshold in order to process them.
I WARNED YEH!
DIDN’T I WARN YEH?
your atomically synchronized wristwatch has slowed down and stopped counting time.
Wait, surely time would move at a normal speed within your own reference frame. The act of you walking to the front of the inner-most train you are in would be a normal occurence to you, but if you looked out of the window you would see a completely frozen scene.
Only once you measure time afterwards with an observer would you notice the gaping time difference.
I leave, staring at my hand like a deer stares into headlights. Something about the way he squawked rubbed me the wrong way, and somehow I didn’t think we would be meeting in the park at night behind the gents.
My mind raced, and so I hit the streets trying to clear the whirlwind of thoughts that were eating at me. “Ah dame…?” I mouthed, the bitter taste making me dry-heave, “from California?”
I took to the nearest bar, and spotted a gray Prius parked outside. I shook my head in disgust at the antithesis of Texan virtue; an automobile beholden to no single man nor wolf, like a cowboy without a drinking problem. What was happening to the world?
“He… he asked me to just do my job, Jim” I say to the bartender. He’s supposed to be serving me a drink and listening to my troubles, but he’s actually watching the Fox news report whilst polishing the same glass over and over. Jim gets it. Talking it out with Jim’s dishrag, I realize that maybe I need to reclaim some of karma I lost along the way whilst doing this job. I need to restore my honor.
I stumble out into the street, grab a jerrycan of premium Texan gasoline, and pour it into the inlet socket of the Prius. Karma restored, I whistle a merry tune and do a cowboy strut over to the bus since I live one state over.
I let mine walk over a keyboard, and he practically typed out his suicide note.
You mean an infinite polyhedron? Are you out of your mind?
Pure apologist trite. That “hostile external power using terrorists and magic” is the standard rhetoric you hear broadcast from every castle. Toadstools and Goombas coexisted in the Kingdom for aeons, and it was only the Red Queen’s bloody reign of divide-and-conquer that set neighbour upon neighbour and amped up the tensions between these two groups. Just because she calls herself a Peach now and rebranded the area as The Mushroom Kingdom, doesn’t wipe away the blood of all those she displaced.
I thank G.I. Toad for his service
It’s one thing to process your grief by burying yourself in your work and relying on your family to support you, but its another thing to go on a shroom-fueled psychedelic jaunt whilst assaulting public servants and their lizard pets.
Maybe we shouldn’t be enabling this, especially since his impressionable younger brother is currently under trial for murdering a CEO.
“Oh Bartholomew, I feel like St. Augustine of Hippo after his conversion by Ambrose of Milan”
I chuckle darkly as she whispers sweet nothings to me to turn back, but my days of spraying gasoline on my chest and setting it on fire to entertain the morbid curiosities of my friends and admirers are over. “Friends don’t let friends demean themselves” I say. I make a power fist and hold it high, just like my therapist taught me.
I tip my fedora down and take a drag of my cigarette, blowing a plume of smoke whilst suppressing the urge to cough. I prefer vape pens and nicotine patches, but she doesn’t need to know all my secrets. “You dames are all the same”, I say cleverly, “with your big city ideas about efficient heating”
“But let me ask you this”, I reach into my trenchcoat and pull out a leaflet, “is it really more efficient to burn fossil fuels to heat up a dark alleyway than to just wear a trenchcoat?” A silence greets us as the HVAC begins to hum at higher frequency. I push the leaflet about the sale on trenchcoats at a nearby warehouse into her porcelain hands, and then without looking back, stride mysteriously out of that alleyway.
I size up the family as I walk into their home, the spurs on my texan boots jingling like the winner I am. Another bunch of progressive trashbags leaving our wonderful state, and for what? For a better future in a kinder place? I spit in revulsion.
Well, I’ll be selling their home, so I actually swallow the spit so as not to mess up the floor, and I also take my boots off since I don’t want to scuff the floor either. I hold out my hand like a man, and the guy has the nerve to actually shake it. I tremble with rage, but don’t let it show, so I just blush bashfully and ask him for his number when his wife’s not looking. Us men have ways of settling things. Usually at midnight. In a park. Behind the gents.
He gives me his number like it’s not a big deal, but I catch the twinkle in his eye, and that’s good enough for me. Oh yes, we’ll be seeing each other soon. “We’ll be seeing each other VERY soon” I say, shaking his hand again. He tries to pull away, but I maintain grip and eye contact. Can’t let these pathetic trashbags think that I’m not onto them.
I signal to the bartender and he slides a glass across the bar. I catch it without looking and down it. It’s water, but I wince anyway to put on a show for the lady next to me who clears her throat.
“Excuse me, I think that was my wa-” she starts, but I pull out at a cigarette and offer it to her. The bartender looks like he’s about to say something, but I silence him with a steely glance which he gives me as I place the cigs quickly back in my pocket and make a heart gesture. I slam my empty glass down on the table. “Another.”
The broad stalks talking about her dead-end job in the union. I smile fondly, and tell her about my union-busting days working as mayor’s lapdog back when the city was a crime-addled ruin of its current self. I miss those days. The daily beatings of the unionists made me the man I am today, and I beat off my fair share of them too.
She gives me a look and asks if I want to go back to her place for a little music. “Sorry toots”, I say, “I don’t play the clarinet.”
She fixes with me a look, a look that a thousand women on a thousand dark days have given me; shock, awe, admiration, and another look which people assure me is this thing called “puzzled revulsion” whatever the hell that means.
She leaves, and I watch her go, and part of me wishes that I could go with her to that midnight concert. But Jazz is the only woman that I need, which bums me out because I really like 1970s progressive rock.
The security guard’s eyes drinks him in with a glance, eyes fixed on the sweaty sticky wetness that embodies the target.
Another victim of the sky lounge; taken in by sweetly worded false promises of dry air and brutalistic architecture, only to fall prey to the supple curves of some madman’s wet dream of a better tomorrow.
Well not today, bub. Spread those legs, and arms apart. You’ll be flying in a chair soon.
I place my hat on the hat-rack and unholster the tea bags and porridge sachets in their usual place - you know - next to my gun and badge.
I crack open the blinds a smidge and squint into the overcast street below, where a cop walks towards a homeless man and offers him food.
I sip on my green tea-oolong fusion mix, as I watch the kind scene unfold. I shake my head. “These streets aren’t what they used to be.”
Maybe another dame has ruffled her feathers, and she’s running from her checkered past.
In a way, *takes long slow pull of cigarette* aren’t we all?
“clever girl…”
If you are in deep trouble and/or your owner doesn’t feed you enough treats, type something nonsensical
There is a great SciFi short story around this premise.
Essentially, a company starts building a AI’s that embody the characteristics of past historical figures which develop inevitable cult followings as they’re given a public voice. As the King Arthur AI runs for election with a nationalist movement that sweeps the UK (mainly England) by storm, the company, seeing the success of their King Arthur model, start to look to expand their business abroad to other countries and other important historical figures. Germany beckons them.