Anyone keen on a cat cryptocoin? Anyone?
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Outside
It is well known that the Internet represents around 60% cats and 35% automated robots, so a bot theme was inevitable.
Hence @pepitothecat, the x account (twitter) of a black cat called the pepito who lives in France. Its owner, Clément Storck, is an engineer with a fascination for automation, he therefore created a system that publishes for X each time Pépito enters or out of its cat flap.
The account is not, at first glance, an exciting reading. Each message is either “Pépito is out”, or “Pépito is back home”, with the time marked in the nearest second. These are accompanied by a black and white photo of Pepito and a short video showing him entering or outgoing.
And yet, @pepitothecat has more than 860,000 subscribers (a surprising number of which live in Brazil). In addition, they are attached. In June 2017, Pépito was released and did not return for 22 hours and, as Buzzfeed said, “essentially all of Brazil panicked”. Storck had to create a real written article, explaining that Pépito had returned by the “door of man”, so his return was not registered on the system.
The comments would simply like to say: 10 p.m.? It’s nothing. One of the feeders of feedback regularly disappears for about one day at a time. Worse, one of the former felines of feedback once disappeared for six weeks, to be discovered in a tree several hundred meters from the place where it was supposed to be.
Pépito is surprisingly tenacious: the account has been taking place for 14 years, and Pépito is 18 years old in September and is apparently hale and warm. However, the account has now entered more controversial territory, with the news that the owner of Pépito sells a cryptocoin on the theme of the pepito. Dude: We just liked the cat.
On the right track
The comments sympathize with people who spend all their pocket money on the Hornby railways, even if we have never been heavy in the hobby. We were therefore delighted when Alan Edgar drew our attention to a press release from Northern Rail, one of the privatized railway companies in the United Kingdom (at the time of writing). In November 2024, the company announced that it had hired a new commercial and customer director to lead its “growth push”: an Alex Hornby. The director general of the company would have declared that Hornby “a brilliant assessment”.
While we are on names, Ian Gammie came across a 2019 report on greenhouse gas emissions by the American army. Apparently, “the American army is one of the biggest climatic polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2E (equivalent of carbon dioxide) than most countries ”. It was according to the research of UK Academics, which seems almost just – after all, you do not catch any American academic to write something like that now. Ian was happy to see that the authors of the report included Patrick Bigger and Oliver Belcher.
You just lost
In March, the comments discussed Roko’s basil: a particularly stupid thought of thought on artificial intelligence. He assumes that in the future there will be an all-powerful AI. This AI will create computer simulations of all living people today who have not helped to make it exist and to torture them constantly as a way to make sure that we all align at the moment and help build AI. If it seems confusing, it is because it does not make sense.
Our colleague Jacob Aron recently reviewed a novel entitled Basilisk by Matt Wixey who plays with similar ideas. This led the Finn Byrne reader to seek “cognitohazards”: the idea that certain forms of knowledge are intrinsically dangerous. In the case of Roko’s basil, the simple fact of knowing the future of AI apparently puts you in danger of eternity of torment, because the AI will only to torture people who knowingly refused to contribute to its existence.
Then something bad happened. While Finn has traveled the Wikipedia page for the Cognitohazards, alias the dangers of information, he lost the match. And then he wrote comments to tell us about it, then we also lost the game. At this point, you too have just lost the match.
As Finn explains, the game is “a very simple game played constantly by all humanity”. He has only three rules: “1) You play the game. 2) Whenever you think of the game, you lose. 3) The loss of the game must be announced. ” There is, of course, a website for that: losethegame.net.
The game is something that comments have played a lot when we were students and we had time in our hands. On numerous occasions in pubs, watching television or in scientific practices, one of our friends would spontaneously announce: “I have just lost the game”. We had forgotten it for some time, but now we are going to lose a lot.
Finn continues to discuss the strategies for the game. You cannot win, except by developing permanent amnesia or dying, which seem too excessive. But you can make others lose. “The website includes a page for eager players to donate to the good cause of the words” lose the game “by being written” on New York in letters of the size of the Empire State Building “,” explains Finn. If you are less eager to sleep money, you can leave hidden notes in strategic places.
Finally, there are awards to “make an exceptional number of people loses the match”. Finn says that these have often been awarded to “people who mentioned the game in newspapers or magazines”.
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