Whenever I need to do some writing, a decent dictionary and thesaurus are indispensable, whether to spice up my diction or simply find the word on the tip of my tongue.

With the AI overview replacing the reliable Oxford dictionary for good, Google has ceased to have anything good to offer me in this regard. Rather than list synonyms for each meaning of the word individually—a tried-and-true format engendering no complaints whatsoever—the AI attempts to guess which meaning I have in mind and only presents synonyms for that specific usage of the word. Seeing as I have given it no context to speak of, this goes about as well as you can expect.

Now, I have to clumsily tack on a rough description of what sense I am using and hope that it suffices to nudge the AI in the right direction. What used to be a straightforward process taking me at most a few seconds away from my writing and train of thought is now an annoying interruption that forces me to pseudo-converse with an infuriatingly obtuse large language model. The dictionary is a similar story. These used to be easily the most accessible word references I had at hand. Who asked for this?

Incidentally, the autocorrect suggestions for Google searches have also noticeably been switched from a clever and correct doppelganger technique for harnessing big data to more plug-in AI bullshit. No, my perfectly fine query does not need its verb tense adjusted. What a waste of time and resources.

A major talking point for blue-pushers is that "statistically", someone will push blue, and the only way to save them is to push blue also. Before all these self-perceived white knights collectively jump off a cliff to save ghostly mirages from evil and intimidating windmills, however, this is not a guarantee—assuming, of course, that the null hypothesis that everyone is acting to maximize their chances of survival is true. You can't just hand-wave away feasibility with the word "statistically". The go-to response for this is that demographics such as children who are unable to understand the question will press randomly.

Wait. What question? If we are to really quibble over pedantics, the most famous and pertinent wording of the dilemma, as posed above, makes no mention whatsoever of any question or prompt. An accurate interpretation of the prompt is that two buttons magically appear floating somewhere within reach of each and every human in the world, and, after presumably (we don't know) either every button is pressed or a set amount of time passes, a condition triggers for each button if that button is pressed by either more or less than 50% of all humans. What the tweet is really asking, at least literally, is which button you would press if two mysterious buttons appeared in front of you out of nowhere. Anything else is purely an assumption on your part.

Really, there is no getting around this fact. You have be assuming something if you're arguing one way or the other. Maybe, in your mind, the question, as written in the tweet (wait, what about the illiterate), is shown (wait, what about the blind) or read aloud (wait, what about the deaf) either in the original English form (wait, what about people who don't speak English), every language at once (wait, how is that logistically possible), or translated (wait, so the buttons can read minds now) so that people can press them (wait, what about the paralyzed). See the problem?

Some people will reasonably propose that the scenario only involves those who can somehow understand the buttons' implications and press them consciously. As this weakens a core tenant of theirs, blue-pushers will reject this interpretation and assert that their own set of assumptions is the one and only valid interpretation of the canonical prompt, but there is no reason for their assumptions to be more valid than anyone else's.

We have not even touched on problem of non-pushers. I think we can all agree that non-pushers will inevitably exist. What happens to them? The answer to that question is actually crucial. If they survive, then the red button does nothing while the blue button makes your life a conditional. If they don't, red-pushers are saving their own lives in exchange for throwing blue-pushers under the bus by destroying the only button standing in the way of impending global doom. Regardless, a brief consideration of that option inevitably leads to the conclusion that pressing both buttons must be possible too, unless it were that the buttons would disappear after one were pressed. Nothing about the prompt would indicate this, however, as both conditions would work just the same with pressing both buttons as an option. Wait—

In conclusion, everyone in the world is presented with a multiple-choice problem without a question, and the right answer is to press both. Argue anything else and you need to take your biased assumptions somewhere else.

A global election is being held between two figurehead candidates, conveniently running under red and blue banners, respectively.*

The red candidate

• Propped up by a powerful international Nazi terrorist organization
• Will, if they win, commit a genocide by personally tracking down and executing each and every individual who failed to vote for them in the name of eliminating inferior genes to advance the human race

The blue candidate

• A prominent ideologue for an influential cult that enjoys membership and support from most billionaires and has organized child trafficking rings in the past
• A vote for blue also requires signing a death pact and entering in a global surveillance program, which will enforce the collective suicide of all blue voters—physically and non-consensually imposed, if necessary—in the event that they lose

Rest assured knowing that both organizations will magically dissolve and disappear completely after fulfilling their campaign promises. Who are you voting for?

^(*Failure to vote lands you in the closest reproduction of hell we can create in the physical world, designed according to the popular interpretation of being eternal torture of the highest degree imaginable.)