Okay, I admit—like 87.3% of all statistics, it’s made up. Nevertheless, with the exception of a few scam types that exploit technical issues with international banking, pretty much every scam I can think of relies on the victim overlooking one of the two things I listed.

Usually, it happens to you because you did one of two things wrong:

1. You forgot that when something seems too good to be true—whether it’s cheap asphalt for your driveway, an investment that rapidly racks up money, or a pretty young woman who’s interested in forming a relationship with a less-than-pretty older man—it pretty much always is.

2. You didn’t properly identify someone before giving them money. If it’s a business you already have a relationship, get contact data from a known-good source instead of responding to a call or email. If it’s your kid/grandkid/sibling/etc. asking for bail or plane ticket money, ask them a question only they would know the answer to and hang up if they don’t answer or get it wrong. And never ever pay anyone for anything in gift cards or bitcoin, because no one legit ever asks for either.

Remembering those two things will reduce your chances of being defrauded by 90% or more, regardless of the fine details of the scam. (No one’s bulletproof, though—if you’re having a bad enough day, your judgement can tank at the wrong moment.)

Whether or not that’s a defense depends on the details of the French legal system. In most countries, there are rights you’re not allowed to sign away. No idea whether security of the person is one of those rights in France.

If there are functioning or recently mothballed commercial shipyards on our side of the Great Lakes (which I doubt, but you never know), it might make sense to put money into them. Without that pre-existing infrastructure, you’d probably get better value for money by building ships out of glued-together $5 bills.

A clear demonstration of the fact that proper risk assessment is one of the last things to develop as kids grow up. Thankfully, he wasn’t hurt.

The larger ones were flexible, not floppy—they could be bent without cracking the casing, but wouldn’t just bend under their own weight.

Nah, I’d end up explaining why floppy discs weren’t floppy, instead, and let the younger folks explain the CDs.

Nah, that’s APL.

Thing is, to the people who don’t follow tech news and aren’t really interested in this stuff, AI = AGI. It’s like most non-scientists equating “theory” and “hypothesis”. So it’s a really bad choice of term that’s interfering with communication.

Hmm. Because they’re companion animals, a lot of people tend to be more concerned about what happens to dogs and cats than they do about livestock, lab mice, etc., so that may be part of it. They might have gotten less outcry if they’d been using pigs.

But I would bet you that the main problem here was that the scientists were trying to keep it quiet. It makes the research look shady, regardless of its value. If they’d been doing this work at a separate facility with no particular secrecy rather than sneaking live dogs into a human hospital and trying to hide them, chances are no one would have noticed.

I wouldn’t put it past them.

The result would have been the same if there had been a human behind the catfishing instead of an LLM, and events could have played out in a similar fashion if they’d been snail mail pen pals. The outcome of this story is tragic, but it doesn’t have much to do with technology when you stop and think about it for a moment.

I think it was supposedly New Zealand or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve read the full texts.

That series of RFCs (1149, 2549, 6214) keeps getting rediscovered by new generations of technical folk. Among other issues that have never been completely addressed are accidental encapsulation of packets in hawks, and whether the Internet is doomed to be slow in locations where the only avian carriers available are flightless.

There has been one successful implementation of the protocol to date. 55% of ping attempts went through.

(As April Fools RFCs go, the only one that’s arguably more popular than IPoAC is the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol, the source of 418 I am a teapot).

It’s off center, but still balanced because it hasn’t fallen.

Until a vibration hits, or someone blows gently on the blocks at the top right.