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AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, "as a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI", Palantir CTO tells CBS News' "Face the Nation" (www.businessinsider.com)
submitted 16 hours ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 13 points 6 hours ago (4 children)

Now that just pisses me off more. As someone who thoroughly enjoyed smoking but has stayed quit since the 90s, one of the things that has kept me quit has been the very quiet idea in the back of my head that if I ever needed to, if I ever really needed to, I could and would.

But the deal is I have to hold out as long as possible, or until an occasion where it no longer really matters. Meaning that because I'm a fucking mule of stubbornness I would probably see a mushroom cloud on the horizon and then die cursing that I have no time to fire up one last smoke for the occasion.

I don't even remember the exact year I quit now. I only remember I made that deal with myself and have kept it, and how good that very first toke of the very first cig is: all the rest go very quickly downhill from there and you're back to tasting like an ashtray and feeling like shit and wheezing up stairs. (Yes, it took me multiple tries to quit.) But I always had that one fantastic "emergency" first toke hidden in the back of my wallet of self-restraint.

And now these motherfuckers have taken that too. Pride's not great for much, but goddamn if I'll join these little pricks in a smoke. They've just sucked all the joy out of even the thought of it. Probably for the best, but damn. Hope it kills the little shits.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 hours ago

    These guys aren't smoking because their confidence is justified.

    They are smoking for the same reason people always have, especially those with stressful jobs.

    They just have a new lame excuse to cover for it.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 hours ago (1 child)

    From one ex-smoker to another, take some solace in the fact that they're at the extreme tippy top of the Dunning-Kruger curve and somehow think cancer is just one thing. There's so many different kinds of cancer they're hard to enumerate. With any luck you and I both will watch them slowly kill themselves in their death cult while we still have that last smoke tucked away in our back pocket.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 hours ago*

    With any luck you and I both will watch them slowly kill themselves in their death cult while we still have that last smoke tucked away in our back pocket.

    Thanks. May it be so. (Good to hear I'm not the only one with that last one in reserve.)

    You know, I remember at the time looking at non-smokers, both ex- and never-, and just kind of wishing I could be where they were already because that was one hell of a battle. I was able to do it, but it took me far, far longer to stop thinking about it than to stop doing it.

    At some point I made it; I rarely even think about smoking anymore. But even now, every so often when the shit's hitting the fan of life I'll think about it, briefly picture myself sitting on some dock on a silent water at sunset, sprawled on a lounger wearing a shitty hat and smoking that imagined last smoke, and then quickly think: "Not there yet. Long way to go. Cut that shit out." And I do, and don't think of it again for weeks. But I do still think of it, even after all these years. That's how addictive it is.

    They'll wish they were us soon enough.

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