So I just finished Mission Impossible, latest movie, in the theater. I tend to avoid Mr. Cruise because of him personally, but darn it if he's not a decent actor and usually has a top notch crew. Also, Simon Pegg filters some of the evil. I give it a B+. What's relevant to my tale is that the movie features an evil, possibly sentient, very pervasive AI that is very accurate in its predictions.

After the movie ended, I brought forth my iphone to look at while the credits rolled to a post-credits scene that never came. I glanced at a newsletter, which had "Pickleball" in the subject line. Now, I happen to think that pickleball is a sign of the apocalypse, and that the 1000 years of satan's rule will look a lot like Wall-E (who is obviously Christ). I was mulling posting a quip about that, and thought further that the quippiest way to do that was to talk about life on the ship in Wall-E. So I tapped the search bar and started typing "what is the name of the ship . . ." and, this where it gets freaky, before I could continue to tap out "in Wall-E" Siri suggested the fandom page for Wall-E.

Bzzz-wut? I checked my histories, I have not mentioned Wall-E or pickleball anywhere, to my recollection, I have never even mentioned it to anyone (I have probably complained abut pickleball in a general sense). As far as I know, the concept has only ever lived in my mind.

Now, I don't, as I sit here in this moment, believe that Siri can detect my thoughts. But it is a downright Fortean confluence of seemingly unconnected mental activity and external reality. I found (in my very short search) only one other mention, at hipinions.com of pickleball being related to Wall-e. If it is not merely coincidence, and not AI reading my mind, it is very peculiar and particularly well timed and specific predictive association by the AI, and one which I am certainly not entirely comfortable with, perhaps the first time I have ever had such a hmmm moment with technology.

It might be interesting what happens next, now that I have entered this datum into the AI's processing materials. Watch this space for further developments.

P.S. the ship in Wall-E is named "Axiom."

I was fortunate enough to grab a discounted 4090 while on my travels and just got everything installed. Already having a lot of fun pumping all my games to max settings, but I'm also interested in running generative AI stuff locally to really take advantage of all that VRAM.

Do you have any newbie-friendly Windows 11 software to recommend for getting started? Thanks!