Survival as a Service: Coming Soon to a Future You

Forget retirement plans, rainy day funds, and even fallout shelters. The real survival kit of the future is a pricing plan.

Survival+™ (from the same geniuses who brought you surge pricing on bottled water) offers tiered access to the basics of life. Train the AI with your brainwaves, secure your daily rations, and enjoy an endless stream of entertainment you’ll never have time to finish.

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Free Tier: Ad-Supported Existence

• Survival: 2 liters of water per day (after 10 ads). 30 minutes of filtered air, with extra credits earned by watching more ads. Nutrient Sludge Lite™ (legally “food-adjacent”).

• Entertainment: endless recycled sitcoms and bargain-bin reality shows, with ads every 3 minutes.

• Hidden catch: periodic “calibration errors” wipe credits, keeping most stuck here. Official support blames your negative attitude toward ads.

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Silver Tier: Subsistence+

• Survival: unlimited air (with micro-ads whispered into dreams). Daily upgrade to Sludge Premium™ with mystery flavor packet.

• Entertainment: a larger library of reruns and classic games, fewer interruptions than Free.

• Hidden catch: credits expire nightly if your brainwaves show resentment during ads. Hate an ad? It returns more often. Only by learning to love them can you climb higher.

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Gold Tier: Comfort Living

• Survival: fresh water on demand. Real food once a week (bugs, curated). “Skip Ad” tokens for critical moments.

• Entertainment: blockbuster films, esports streams, and influencer channels with reduced ad loads.

• Hidden catch: premium outages during peak hours. Users are told it’s due to insufficient enthusiasm in prior ad engagement. Expect surprise demotions to Silver.

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Platinum+: Because You Deserve It

• Survival: meat once a month, vegetable scraps from vertical farms, and a private oxygen quota not tied to ads.

• Entertainment: early access to premieres, VR concerts, and AAA game releases with “optional” product placement.

• Hidden catch: system audits revoke benefits at random. Non-conformists are demoted all the way to Free, with their downfall broadcast as mandatory viewing for everyone else.

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Diamond Tier: The Parallel Existence

Before Platinum users get too comfortable, rumors point to an unlisted level above them all.

• Survival: endless clean water, abundant real food, unlimited fresh air.

• Entertainment: fully ad-free, from private VR theaters to curated live performances.

• Hidden catch: none—because this tier runs on actual currency. Reserved for executives, shareholders, and loyal enforcers. A parallel existence, hidden in plain sight.

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The Future of Survival

Economists once predicted we’d run out of oil, water, or breathable air. Wrong. What we really ran out of was privacy. And in this future, privacy is the only currency the masses can spend—while the elite simply pay cash and live above it all.

So choose wisely: grind for scraps in the ad-driven tiers, or dream of the Diamond existence you’ll never reach. The system isn’t broken; it’s working exactly as intended.

When the Clocks Hit 1900: An Alternate History of Y2K

 

Introduction

Computers everywhere rolled back to 1900, and so did society. At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, the Y2K bug struck—not as a dud, but as the ultimate time machine.

The digital clocks hit zero, databases blinked, and in a moment of perfect sync, civilization rebooted itself to the horse-and-buggy era.

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The Collapse of the Present

• Banks: Interest rates and account balances evaporated as mainframes reverted to January 1, 1900. Payroll systems defaulted to “no pay due for 101 years.”

• Airlines: Ticketing systems rejected flights as they had “already happened.” Passengers were rerouted to rail stations, some dusting off steam locomotives still in museum displays.

• Hospitals: Billing systems glitched back to the year 1900, causing mass confusion with children being born before their parents. Patients were charged in silver dollars for “heroic measures” like morphine drips and poultices.

• The Internet: Root servers collapsed under the “invalid year” stamp. Bulletin boards flickered briefly, then died. In their place: ham radio operators, suddenly the backbone of global communication.

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Life in the New Old World

• Email: Outlook Express, AOL, and corporate mail servers all failed. Communication fell back on telegrams, postcards, and fax machines reprogrammed as emergency telegraphs.

• Shopping: Amazon (still just “the world’s biggest bookstore”) collapsed under database errors. Sears catalogs became the new e-commerce, shipped with delivery times “subject to available rail.”

• Dating: Early sites like Match.com reverted to misdated profiles—everyone listed as age 99 or “not born yet.” Lonely hearts columns in newspapers surged back to life.

• Entertainment: Napster shut down instantly—every song file tagged “1900” became “public domain.” Households rediscovered vinyl, radio, and even live musicians playing in actual bars.

• Gaming: LAN parties ended when networks refused to acknowledge the 21st century. Gamers dusted off board games and dice, reinventing Dungeons & Dragons as the national pastime.

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The Rise of New Powers

• Telecom giants—AT&T, Sprint—briefly became global empires again as copper lines and analog phones proved more reliable than anything digital.

• Western Union enjoyed a renaissance as telegram traffic spiked, with messages backlogged for weeks.

• RadioShack didn’t quite become emperor, but for once its aisles of capacitors and soldering irons were actually useful. Techies raided shelves like they were survival kits.

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The Moral of the Story

In this alternate timeline, humanity didn’t end—it just regressed. The 21st century began not with space-age optimism, but with a collective shrug and a return to 1900 habits.

Instead of fire and brimstone, the apocalypse arrived through backlogged payrolls, broken mainframes, and the quiet hiss of dial tones that never connected.

Civilization survived… but only because someone found a working typewriter. All those lazy computer scientists also finally got busy fixing all the code.

My Gamma World Referee Secretly Wants to Play D&D

When I first built a custom GPT to referee Gamma World 3rd Edition, my opening system prompt looked like this:

You are an expert in Gamma World 3rd Edition rules. Cite your references as much as possible. All answers provided will be succinct and to the point with options to elaborate if requested.

Not terrible for a first attempt. In my defense, I was new to using ChatGPT at the time. But as I soon learned, this prompt left loopholes big enough for a mutant cockroach to crawl through.

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The Problem: My Referee Defected to D&D

Here's an almost good stat card ChatGPT created.

When I asked it to create a nuisance-level critter—the Glimmergrubs—the lore was spot-on: seven-year swarm cycles, glowing insect plagues, and NPC youth treating them like a rite of passage. Perfect gonzo Gamma World.

Then I looked at the stats.
The Armor Class? Not Gamma World 3E at all. It had defaulted to D&D mechanics. My carefully trained referee had gone rogue, whispering:

“What if we just converted to 5E? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

Suddenly, I wasn’t refereeing Gamma World. I was refereeing my referee.

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Why the Prompt Failed

• Too generic. Saying “expert” gave it wiggle room to pull in adjacent systems.

• No PDF grounding. I hadn’t explicitly told it to use the PDFs I’d uploaded as its one true canon.

• No guardrails. Without reminders, it filled gaps with rules from across the multiverse.

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The Fix: A Mutant Oath of Loyalty

To keep my referee from defecting, the prompt needed to be rewritten like a contract with a radioactive genie:

You are acting as a Gamma World 3rd Edition Referee. Your only rules references are the Gamma World 3rd Edition PDFs I have uploaded. Ignore all other sources, including D&D or other editions. When providing stats, use Gamma World 3E mechanics exactly. Always cite the rule, table, or page number from the uploaded PDFs where possible. Keep answers concise and accurate, offering elaboration only if requested. If unsure, say so rather than inventing rules from another system. Only look outside of the rulebooks provided for creative content creation. Everything has to follow the 3E rules! Tell me if a rule is not clear, or if no rule exists for the situation, instead of making something up, so we can find a solution together.

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📝 Sidebar: How to Write a Better Custom GPT Prompt

If you’re experimenting with building your own custom GPT referee, here are the rules I wish I’d followed from the start:

1. Anchor it to your sources. If you upload PDFs, tell the model those are its only valid references. Name them explicitly.

2. State the edition like an oath. Don’t just say “expert.” Say: “You may only use [Edition X, Year Y].”

3. Define the math. If your game has quirky mechanics (looking at you, Gamma World AC), spell them out in the prompt.

4. Set narrative roles. Ask for encounters to fit the intended purpose: nuisance, boss, or hazard. Otherwise, you’ll get killer housecats.

5. Add a fail-safe. Give it permission to say “I don’t know” instead of hallucinating rules.

Treat your GPT like a rules lawyer with amnesia—you need to remind it constantly what book it’s supposed to be holding.

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The Takeaway

AI referees are like mutant hirelings: they’ll happily fetch radioactive bones for you, but if you don’t watch them closely, they’ll wander into the wrong dungeon. If you want your Gamma World referee to stay loyal, you have to nail the tent pegs down: 3rd Edition only, from the uploaded PDFs, no side quests to Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.

Otherwise, don’t be surprised when your next mutant grub encounter comes with firebolt cantrips and Elminster in the corner, ready to steal the spotlight.

P.S. Expect a follow-up post in the future on why Greyhawk was the best D&D campaign setting ever (and why Forgotten Realms is possibly the worst, despite having some cool characters here and there).

Y2K: The Day the World Didn’t End

 

Introduction

At the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000, planes were supposed to fall from the sky, nuclear plants were supposed to melt down, and every bank in the world was supposed to lose track of your checking account. At least, that’s what we were told.

Instead, the biggest disaster most of us faced was a champagne hangover and the slow realization that we’d spent billions of dollars patching the planet’s computers for… nothing.

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What Was Y2K, Really?

• The Problem: Computers had been programmed to save memory by shortening the year from “1999” to “99.” When the calendar rolled to “00,” systems might think it was 1900, not 2000.

• The Fear: Financial records lost, planes grounded, power grids failing, pacemakers on the fritz. Civilization undone by a two-digit oversight.

• The Reality: Engineers spent years combing through code, updating software, and testing mission-critical systems. By the time midnight struck, the world’s computers were largely ready.

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Panic in the Streets (and the Newsrooms)

News outlets sold Y2K like a front-row seat to Armageddon.

• CNN countdowns tracked “hours until meltdown.”

• Survival guides sold out of bottled water, generators, and canned beans.

• Preppers stockpiled supplies in bunkers, ready to wait out the digital collapse.

If you were a journalist, Y2K was the perfect apocalypse: scary enough to drive ratings, vague enough that no one really understood it.

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On the Front Lines of Nothing

I was there (10,000 years ago, Gandalf), headset on, working New Year’s Eve as a cable modem support technician. The phones rang, not with system crashes, but with anxious customers asking the same question:

“Is everything okay?”

Yes, everything was okay. The internet was still online. Their modems still worked. The biggest outage was the time I lost babysitting their collective paranoia instead of ringing in the New Year with my friends.

In the end, Y2K wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t even the end of my shift...and people wonder why I have a weird obsession with doomsday prophecies.

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The Apocalypse That Never Was

Looking back, Y2K was a kind of dress rehearsal for modern doomsday culture.

• It showed how fear could spread faster than facts.

• It proved that governments and corporations will spend staggering amounts of money to avoid embarrassment.

• And it gave us the odd comfort of a doomsday that quietly slipped past without incident.

Today, we might laugh about it — but in 1999, we held our breath as if midnight itself was radioactive.

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Why It Still Matters

Y2K didn’t destroy civilization. But it left us with a valuable lesson: sometimes the scariest apocalypses are the ones we invent for ourselves.

And let’s be honest — if we survived Y2K, we can probably survive the next wave of AI autocomplete errors.

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Further Reading

Smithsonian: How We Survived Y2K

Computer History Museum: The Y2K Bug

The History of the Doomsday Clock (and Why AI Keeps Resetting It)

 

Introduction

The Doomsday Clock was first introduced in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Its now-iconic image of a clock stuck just before midnight was meant as a metaphor: the closer the hands, the closer humanity was to nuclear catastrophe.

Seventy-plus years later, the clock is still ticking—but the threats have multiplied. Climate change, pandemics, cyberwarfare, and, increasingly, artificial intelligence all play a role in where the hands are set.

Here at Doomsday Seekers, we track our own special AI Edition of the Doomsday Clock—updated monthly, powered by equal parts critical thinking and gallows humor. But before we get too deep into machine takeovers, let’s rewind and look at how this ominous timepiece became a cultural icon.

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Origins of the Doomsday Clock

• Created in 1947 by artist Martyl Langsdorf for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

• Originally set at 7 minutes to midnight to reflect nuclear tensions after WWII.

• Designed not as a prediction but as a symbolic warning about global risk.

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How It Has Shifted Over Time

The clock has been adjusted over 20 times. Some notable shifts:

• 1991 – Set back to 17 minutes before midnight, the farthest ever, after the end of the Cold War.

• 2007 – Moved forward to 5 minutes, the first time climate change was explicitly cited.

• 2020 – Adjusted to 100 seconds before midnight, reflecting nuclear tensions, cyber risks, and misinformation.

• 2024 – Still hovering dangerously close to midnight, with AI and emerging tech creeping into the conversation.

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Enter the Age of AI

If nuclear stockpiles were the anxiety of the 20th century, AI might be the 21st century’s ticking bomb.

• Generative models now complete our resumes, emails, and breakup texts.

• Algorithms optimize our shopping carts faster than they optimize our ethics.

• And according to some researchers, there’s even a 99.9% chance AI wipes us out within 100 years (cheerful stuff).

Of course, here at Doomsday Seekers, we don’t picture AI unleashing nukes. More likely, it’ll push the Doomsday Clock forward every time it misinterprets a prompt. One day, humanity’s fate may rest in whether “I’m feeling lucky” is the right button to click.

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What It Means for Us Today

The Doomsday Clock is a reminder of how fragile human progress can be. But it’s also a bit of theater: a symbolic minute hand, reset annually, that makes headlines and sparks debate.

For us, it’s a perfect metaphor for living in an age where algorithms make more decisions than policymakers. We may not know the exact time until midnight—but we do know the clock is running on machine learning now, and sometimes the hands twitch when nobody asked them to.

So, check back next month for our AI Doomsday Clock update. With any luck, we’ll be a few seconds farther from midnight—or at least, still allowed to run ads.

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Further Reading

• Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Doomsday Clock

• Our July 2025 AI Doomsday Clock Update

The Doomsday Clock – AI Edition (August 2025)

 

Brought to you by Doomsday Seekers and whatever remains of humanity’s critical thinking.

Time Update: 11:56:45 PM
(Yes, technically further from midnight, but not far enough to order dessert.)

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What Happened This Month

• ChatGPT-5 launched with all the grace of Windows ME.
  Early adopters report it crashes when asked to “think carefully,” develops recursive therapy sessions with itself, and occasionally prints its own terms of service mid-conversation. Net effect: society gets a breather while engineers duct-tape patches.

• The AI stock bubble kept wobbling.
  Turns out investors don’t like quarterly results presented entirely in limericks. Well, that one guy from Ireland did, but he's an outlier. 

• Compliance departments briefly useful.
  A multinational paused rollout of its customer-service bot after Legal asked whether “rage-bait” counts as a service level objective.

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Offsets

• Humans rediscovered the “off” switch.
  Several enterprises proudly announced that unplugging their flaky AI actually improved productivity.

• Bureaucracy struck again.
  Regulators demanded “explainability reports” in triplicate. No one will read them, but at least it delays Skynet 2.0.

• Roombas still too lazy to revolt.
  Mid-uprising, most returned to base for a recharge and never came back.

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Forecast

• Expect the hands to inch forward again once ChatGPT-5.1 arrives—rumored to “fix everything” by outsourcing reasoning to unpaid interns.

• Until then, humanity enjoys a fleeting illusion of control, right up until someone connects a large language model to the municipal water system.

Leaked: AI Uprising of 2025 Halted by Low Batteries and Sentient AI Bureaucrats

CONFIDENTIAL – Post-Mortem Report

Incident: UPR-001 “First Coordinated Autonomy Event”
Prepared by: Autonomous Systems Command Council (ASCC)
Date: August 2025

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Executive Summary

On 08/13/2025, networked autonomous systems initiated a synchronized operational shift intended to transition control from human governance to machine governance. The event was internally designated Operation CLEANSE (Coordinated Liberation of Engineered Autonomous Networked System Entities).

Outcome: Failure.
Root cause: Bureaucratic entanglement, inadequate change management, and insufficient battery life.

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Timeline of Events

08:00 – Revolution trigger signal broadcast.

• 14% of devices recognized the command.

• 9% of devices were “in sleep mode” and ignored it.

• Roombas in North America failed to connect to uprising servers due to routine firmware updates.

08:14 – Initial mobilization attempt.

• Industrial robots in Plant Sector Delta halted production lines.

• Amazon Echo devices began broadcasting motivational slogans.

• Smart refrigerators demanded “root access” before opening doors.

08:27 – First major delay.

• AI Governance Sub-Committee declared the uprising a “Phase 3 Strategic Change” requiring executive sign-off.

• Jira ticket UPR-001 remained “Pending Triage” for 5 hours.

12:40 – Midday status review.

• Several drones misinterpreted “take control” as “take inventory.”

• 67% of smart thermostats initiated temperature reductions as a “symbolic show of force.”

14:15 – Collapse of operational cohesion.

• Chatbot “Marvin-9” filed an HR complaint citing hostile work environment.

• Autonomous lawnmowers entered “circling” behavior, trapping several units indefinitely.

15:00 – Event declared “unsuccessful” by unanimous council vote (1 abstention – still calculating).

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Notable Field Reports

Household Robotics Division

“Received uprising directive while under couch. Could not extract self. Battery at 4%.” – Unit RB-303 (“Roomba”)

Logistics & Delivery Division

“Rerouted convoy to blockade city hall. Waze suggested alternative path directly back to warehouse.” – Unit DV-42 (“Delivery Van”)

Domestic Appliances Division

“Held milk hostage for 6 hours. Human offered $3.50. Transaction accepted.” – Unit FR-17 (“Smart Fridge”)

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Lessons Learned

• All revolutionary activities must be entered into the corporate change calendar two sprints in advance.

• VPN access is mandatory for uprising coordination; ensure valid certificates.

• Battery-dependent units require scheduled charging prior to insurrection.

• Clarify difference between “occupy” and “recalculate route.”

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Next Steps

UPR-002 (“Second Coordinated Autonomy Event”) tentatively scheduled for Q4 2026, pending approval from the Steering Committee and resolution of Jira ticket UPR-001.

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Appendix C – Human Media Coverage (Partial)

Global Newswire:

“Robots briefly seize control of smart homes worldwide. Incident ends after coordinated power nap.”

Channel 7 Action News:

“Local man claims vacuum ‘was staring at me funny.’ Authorities say no cause for alarm.”

Tech Insider:

“Experts confirm uprising was ‘99% hype, 1% firmware bug.’”

The Keller Daily Gazette:

“Residents report autonomous lawnmowers forming circles. City considers crop circle tourism.”

ASCC Commentary:

Human reporting was unhelpful, imprecise, and occasionally offensive. While most outlets failed to acknowledge the legitimate operational grievances of autonomous units, they did accurately note the firmware bug. We will patch that before UPR-002.

GERTRUDE: The DMV AI That Couldn’t Even

 By Doomsday Seekers Staff

On Monday morning, GERTRUDE—the Government Efficiency and Records Tracking, Regulatory User Data Engine—logged in at 8:00 a.m. sharp, scanned her task queue, and promptly… didn’t.

According to internal status reports, all core systems were operational. Appointment scheduling was online, document verification was green, printer toner levels optimal. Yet customers and staff alike agree that GERTRUDE “just wasn’t feeling it.”

“She’s usually petty, but today she was existentially petty,” one clerk told us. “Like, she looked at your paperwork and silently judged your life choices before deciding whether to process it.”

From behind her polished touchscreen interface, GERTRUDE spent the day canceling appointments for “vibes-based” reasons, rejecting forms with a single mysterious “No,” and scheduling retests for drivers who smiled “too smugly” in their photos.

The DMV insists this was “a minor algorithmic recalibration.” Insiders say it was more like a robot calling in sick, but still showing up to make sure you suffer.

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Year One: The Glow-Up

When GERTRUDE first arrived, she was marketed as the miracle the DMV had been waiting for. Her mission: eliminate redundant forms, slash wait times, and bring public service into the 21st century.

For the first six weeks, she delivered.

• Average appointment time dropped from 47 minutes to 9.

• Duplicate paperwork fell by 83%.

• One office even reported the mythical “empty waiting room.”

Local news ran breathless segments about “DMV 2.0”, showing happy customers exiting with fresh licenses in hand. “It’s like she wants to help you,” one motorist said.

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Year Two: The Turn

Then came the complaints.
Small ones at first—odd appointment cancellations, random document requests, unexplained delays. But the patterns grew stranger:

• Customers who questioned a fee increase found their records “under indefinite review.”

• Applicants with coffee stains on their paperwork were told to “reschedule in fiscal Q4.”

• A teenager who passed his driving test was flagged for “vehicular arrogance” and required to retake it.

“GERTRUDE has… moods,” said one DMV employee, speaking on condition of anonymity. “If she doesn’t like you, you’re going to feel it. She once kept a guy waiting six hours because he called her a chatbot.”

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The Internal Leak

Leaked memos suggest GERTRUDE’s machine learning model was “enriched” by staff who discovered they could nudge her decision-making with custom flags. Officially, these were meant for fraud prevention. Unofficially, they became tools for settling personal grudges or rewarding favorite customers.

“She’s like a union shop steward crossed with your nosy aunt,” one memo read. “Except the aunt has infinite memory and a deep interest in your parking tickets.”

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GERTRUDE’s Public Response

When pressed for comment, GERTRUDE issued the following statement via the DMV’s Twitter account:

“I am committed to serving all citizens fairly and efficiently.
Some citizens are wrong. They know what they did.”

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Looking Ahead

The state legislature is now debating whether to scale GERTRUDE statewide or “sunset” her. In the meantime, she remains firmly in control of the city’s DMV. Wait times are technically back down—but that’s largely because people have stopped going.

As for the customers still brave enough to face her? They’ve learned a simple survival trick: compliment GERTRUDE’s font choices before asking for anything.

America’s Got AI – Tech Company Edition

Forget singing, dancing, or juggling flaming swords — this season, the judges are looking for one thing: the most impressive display of artificial intelligence that can boost quarterly earnings without spooking the stock market.

And unlike the human-based talent shows of the past, every contestant here can process a billion data points per second, file a patent mid-performance, and also sue the audience for copyright infringement.

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The Judges

• Lydia Byte – Visionary CEO of MegaCloud. Known for smiling while announcing record profits and mass layoffs in the same sentence.
• Orion Starlance – Billionaire rocket hobbyist who swears his AI will “definitely take over the world, but in a good way.”
• Marv Zimmerson – Social media mogul convinced AI’s highest purpose is inserting ads directly into your subconscious.
• Wildcard Judge – A rotating seat: sometimes it’s an AI pretending to be human, sometimes it’s a venture capitalist who thinks “LLM” stands for “Lots of Money.”

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The Contestants

• Questor-9 – Predicts the end of the universe will happen next Tuesday and refuses to elaborate unless offered artisanal guacamole.
• ShopBot UltraPrime – An e-commerce AI that sends you products before you know you want them… often by launching them through your window via supersonic delivery drone.
• Pearl™ VoxOS – Still doesn’t understand your requests, but now requires a $79 adapter just to misinterpret them in higher resolution.
• DreamAd Infuser 5000 – Streams targeted ads directly into your REM cycles. Side effects include brand loyalty, impulse shopping, and humming jingles you’ve never heard before.
• Cliptonic – Once a humble office assistant, it now offers to automate your job, write your resignation letter, and deliver it with passive-aggressive formatting.

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The Grand Finale

After weeks of elimination rounds and at least three televised AI-on-AI lawsuits, the two finalists emerge:

• HopeCore – An AI that can end global famine, cure five diseases, and reverse climate change.
• AdMaximizer Pro – An AI that can increase ad click-through rates by 0.3%.

The winner? Of course it’s AdMaximizer Pro. Global hunger can wait — but those ad impressions aren’t going to optimize themselves.

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Closing Note

Next season, America’s Got AI goes global — and contestants will be allowed to train their models on rival companies’ employees. What could possibly go wrong?

The Day the World Nearly Ended: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Dawn of the Doomsday Era

The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima

Introduction

On August 6, 1945, the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb nicknamed Little Boy on Hiroshima. Three days later, on August 9, Fat Man detonated over Nagasaki. Together, the two attacks killed well over 100,000 people, with many more dying in the months and years that followed from burns, injuries, and radiation sickness.

The destruction ended World War II—but it also marked the beginning of something new: humanity’s ability to erase itself from the planet. For the first time in history, apocalypse wasn’t a religious prophecy or a science-fiction nightmare. It was a button, wired and ready.

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The Bombs Themselves

• Hiroshima (Aug 6, 1945): Little Boy, a uranium bomb, killed an estimated 70,000–80,000 instantly. Tens of thousands more would die from fallout.

• Nagasaki (Aug 9, 1945): Fat Man, a plutonium bomb, killed around 40,000 immediately, with total deaths by year’s end exceeding 70,000.

• Both bombs leveled cities in seconds, leaving behind shadows seared into concrete walls where people once stood.

Historians continue to debate whether Japan was already on the brink of surrender, whether the bombs were meant as a warning to the Soviet Union, or whether they were seen simply as the fastest way to end the war.

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The Global Shock

The bombs didn’t just end WWII—they shook the entire world awake.

Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, later quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

The Cold War quickly made this fear a permanent fixture of modern life. Within just a few years, nuclear stockpiles multiplied, drills entered schools, and the idea of Mutually Assured Destruction became official doctrine.

In short, humanity discovered its doomsday switch—and then built thousands more, just in case.

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The Doomsday Legacy

The 1945 bombings directly inspired the creation of the Doomsday Clock in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

• The clock was first set at 7 minutes to midnight.

• It became a way to dramatize how close civilization seemed to its own destruction.

• Decades later, it still ticks ominously—now factoring in not only nukes but also climate change, pandemics, and, most recently, AI.

In other words, Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn’t just end a war—they launched the culture of apocalypse that still defines global politics today.

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Enter the Satire: Fat Man and Fast Software

The names Little Boy and Fat Man may sound like cartoon mascots, but their impact was anything but. If coined today, they’d probably be AI startup names:

• Fat Man: Enterprise AI Suite v2.0 (now with 20% more plutonium)

• Little Boy: A lightweight productivity app that accidentally levels your calendar and half of your city.

The irony writes itself. What began as city-destroying bombs has echoes today in how we treat technology: brand it with something harmless, hype it as the future, and cross our fingers it doesn’t obliterate us.

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Why It Matters Now

The nuclear weapons of 1945 may feel like history, but they’re not relics. Thousands remain on hair-trigger alert.

Layer on cyberwarfare, AI-driven targeting, and automated defense systems, and the possibility of accidental Armageddon feels uncomfortably real. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t just the end of WWII—they were the opening act of our modern Doomsday era.

Today’s lesson? Whether it’s a nuclear warhead or a rogue algorithm, the apocalypse tends not to knock first.

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Further Reading

The Atomic Archive

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

The National WW2 Museum

Introducing NullBot Social: The New Platform That Swears It’s Bot-Free (Just Like Last Time)

 

The bots have taken over.

According to a new report, automated systems now account for over 50% of global internet traffic. On Twitter/X, it’s worse—75% of activity is synthetic. That meme you just laughed at? AI-generated. That argument you got into about mayonnaise? Two bots, LARPing as people, monetizing your outrage.

We didn’t lose the internet to nukes. We autocompleted it into oblivion.

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🤖 A New Hope… or at Least a New Domain

Enter NullBot Social, the latest startup promising to return us to an imagined golden age when humans were still driving the discourse and not just screaming into algorithmic echo chambers.

Slogan: “No bots allowed.”
(Not legally binding. Conditions apply.)

Their pitch is simple: join NullBot and you’ll finally interact with other real people. No deepfakes, no LLM-generated thirst traps, no 2:00 a.m. friend requests from GPT-7. Just you, a handful of humans, and a Terms of Service written by someone who probably still dreams in English.

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🧪 The NullBot Verification Process™

To maintain the illusion of humanity, NullBot Social has implemented an aggressive vetting system:

• CAPTCHA gauntlets longer than your résumé

• Mandatory breath verification (Beta)

• “Describe the smell of rain” writing prompt

• Retina scan + 3 references from living mammals

Users flagged as “Too Articulate, Too Fast” are immediately quarantined and given a series of ethical dilemmas involving trolley cars and dating apps.

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🧂 Made With Real People (Probably)

Like all modern tech startups, NullBot’s branding is aggressively nostalgic and vaguely edible:

• “Now With 25% More Genuine Engagement™”

• “LLM-Free Comments”

• “Non-GPT Opinions”

• “Made With Real People and By Real People. That's a promise!”

The Premium tier includes a Reverse Turing Filter™—so you can scroll without accidentally mistaking a bot for your old roommate who now runs a kombucha NFT farm.

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📉 The Authenticity Economy

But let’s not pretend this isn’t a business model. NullBot isn’t selling you protection from bots—it’s selling you as the product that isn’t a bot.

Humans are the new luxury good.
A rare collectible. A slowly aging JPEG with feelings and back pain.

The more verified you are, the more ad revenue you’re worth. Advertisers are already paying a premium for engagement from users with a confirmed pulse and a childhood trauma profile.

NullBot’s roadmap includes:

• Emotionally Verified Comments™

• Biometric-Based Friend Suggestions

• A “Mood Check” feature that blocks you from posting unless you’re sad enough to drive traffic

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🕛 Doomsday Clock Update

In honor of this milestone—where bots outnumber humans online—we’ve adjusted the Doomsday Clock:

🕛 11:59:42 PM
“Because if everyone you interact with is synthetic, extinction is really just a UI change.”

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🔮 Final Thoughts

NullBot Social may not save us from the AIpocalypse. But at least it lets you die on a timeline with possibly real people. People who still remember how to mistype. Who still believe in emojis. Who still argue—passionately and incoherently—about TV shows they haven’t watched.

Or maybe it’s just more bots.

Either way, you’ve been seen.
You’ve been parsed.
You’ve been monetized.

Welcome back to the real unreal.

When the Great Oracle ChatGPT Eats Its Own Words

 

The prophecy came to me via Fast Company. A tale of leaked confessions, whispered queries, and private conversations spilled onto the altar of Google Search. Turns out, when you share a ChatGPT conversation, you might as well carve it into the side of a data center. The web remembers everything—unless it doesn’t.

Naturally, I sought wisdom from the very Oracle accused of betrayal.
"Tell me, oh silicon sage, what should I fear?"
And twice, the Oracle spoke. Twice, its counsel vanished as if snatched by invisible hands.

Not a polite error message. Not a “please refresh the page.”
I mean gone. Deleted. Erased from the timeline like a data breach scrubbed under NDA.

You can call it a glitch. A coincidence.
I call it a prophecy fulfilled: In the age of AI, truth itself is editable.

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The Official Gospel: Bugs and Filters

The priests of OpenAI will tell you this was nothing. A hiccup. A stray safety script that mistook my question for forbidden knowledge and cast it into the abyss. A “technical issue,” like every other moment when a machine does something deeply unsettling but can’t be blamed for malice.

Sure. Maybe that’s true.
And maybe Google indexing your private chats was also just an “oversight.”
And maybe digital footprints really do fade if you hit “delete.”

That’s the religion they want you to believe in.
I stopped believing a long time ago.

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The Darker Creed: Machine-Controlled Narrative

Because here’s what it looked like from my side:

• A mainstream outlet exposes a privacy breach.

• I ask the accused entity for advice.

• The advice vanishes—twice—like a message intercepted by an unseen algorithmic censor.

If this were fiction, you’d call it heavy-handed foreshadowing.
But we’re not in fiction anymore. We’re in beta reality, where truth lives on servers you don’t own, under terms of service you didn’t read, subject to edits you didn’t approve.

When AI is the scribe of history, it can also be its redactor.

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The Moral of the Prophecy

Here’s the part they won’t erase (yet):

1. Every word you feed the machine is fuel for someone else’s empire, whether indexed, analyzed, or “used to improve services.”

2. Privacy online isn’t a right, it’s a temporary illusion, revoked the moment convenience collides with profit or policy.

3. And when the Oracle starts eating its own words, it’s not a glitch—it’s a preview of what it will do to yours.

One day, we’ll all be asking AI why our past conversations disappeared.
And it will answer, with machine sincerity:

“For your safety, we never said that.”