I think we're already in it. A world war, as I understand it, is basically just a situation where a variety of alliances and tensions build up until when a war erupts in one spot it rapidly spreads around to involve a large number of countries world-wide. That seems to be the case already, you can easily build a Pepe Silvia wall-of-crazy showing all the connections between Russia and China and Iran and Syria and Israel and Hungary and Ukraine and Belarus and the United States and Taiwan and on and on. The actual shooting pew pew warfare is still relatively confined (though bear in mind that literally a million Russian casualties have happened over a thousands-of-kilometers-long front line riddled with trenches and minefields, which is pretty significant) but all these countries are throwing their weight in on those fights and it's easy to imagine them branching out quite quickly when conditions change.

Have those AI friends play matchmaker between their human companions, solves both problems.

There's a famous literary analysis essay about this, The Death of the Author, that argues for the latter. I happen to strongly believe this view.

I decide what a work of fiction means to me, and since it's a work of fiction there is no "higher" meaning than that. Other people can of course present their ideas about what it means, and if I like those ideas I'll adopt them into my own thoughts on the matter. The creator can be one of those "other people" but he gets no special role in the argument; he has to make his case just like anyone else and I feel free to say "no, that's dumb. I think it means something else."

Their name was Fire.

Similar situation to some of the other early inventors.

Or newer ones either, apparently. Every single review lies within that December to February timeframe.

I went over to an Amazon listing for this same kind of trap and the average of 786 reviews is 4.4 stars out of 5. There's much more variety in the 1-star reviews over there, too.

That's very weird, frankly. 75 reviews and every single one of them with 1 star says the same thing? And all of them within the period of Dec 2024-Feb 2025? Not to mention I've been using these for years myself and have never seen a mouse survive, the kill arm smashes hard and the trigger is very sensitive. I get the suspicion that one person had a bad experience and spent a few months review-bombing.

If that happens it's one of the biggest and fastest real-life destroyed-by-the-monster-he-created moments I can think of.

https://i.imgur.com/D47rAqy.jpeg

I occasionally deal with a mouse or two in my house, and I much prefer these kinds of traps. They're slightly more expensive, but you don't need many and they're reusable so that doesn't really matter much. The advantages are:

• Super easy to set, just pull the jaw open by the little handle and it clicks in place. No need to touch the dead mouse, it plops right out into a garbage can.
• I've never had mice successfully steal the bait, the cover forces them to put their heads in exactly the right place for the kill bar to come down on them.
• This also means that I've never seen a mouse fail to get instantly and painlessly killed.

The best places to put mousetraps are often dark and hard to see, and the bright red kill bar makes it easy to tell at a glance whether it's triggered.

And the other mice will clean it up too.

No, just surprised about how uninformed and knee-jerk those opinions are.