u/NoiseTraditional2699

I’m 15 and I broke my mom’s TV. It was a Samsung 55” from 2020 and I hit it with something while i was angry, which caused an impact on the screen and basically killed it. I know I’m responsible for it and I’m not trying to pretend I didn’t do it.

I bought my mom a replacement TCL 43” TV for her birthday and I’m paying for it in 4 installments. The problem is that it’s noticeably smaller than the old TV and I’m honestly pretty disappointed about that because I wanted to make things right and give her something decent. But I don’t have a job or a salary, I’m 15, and this purchase is basically everything I could afford; i’ve never really asked my family for anything major before.

I’m thinking about asking some family members if they could help me cover part of the cost of the 43”. Not because I think they owe me anything, but because I genuinely don’t have much money and I’m trying to take responsibility for something I did. I’d still keep paying what I can.

Would I be an asshole for asking them to help? I know I broke the TV, so I understand that ultimately it’s my responsibility. I just don’t have adult money to replace a 55” TV on my own and i’m trying to fix my mistake.

EDIT : I’m scrapping the GoFundMe idea. Instead, I’m gonna ask my family and maybe some neighbors if there’s anything I can do to earn the money myself. Yard work, cleaning, helping with stuff, whatever they’re willing to pay me for.

I feel like that’s a much better way to handle it anyway, since I’m the one who broke the TV and I should take responsibility for fixing it. I’m 15 so I obviously can’t get a normal job, but I can at least put in some work and pay what I can.

Yeah, I deleted the old r/BeamNGJuly12Memes post because it was already outdated, even though it was only about an hour old. 😭
If y’all are just here to post 0.39 memes, head over to r/BeamNG039Memes instead! They aint getting deleted anytime soon!

And if it doesn’t interest you, you can always hit the downvote button and never visit it again. But please give it a chance, maybe you’ll like it! And hey, if you do, Just, post your memes, and help build a little community.

I saw this idea on Instagram and the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.
Instead of relying mostly on dedicated Street View cars that might only pass through an area every few years, why not equip garbage trucks with 360° cameras? Garbage trucks already drive through most residential streets on a regular schedule, often once a week.

They’re basically one of the few vehicles that systematically cover entire neighborhoods over and over again.

The potential benefits seem huge:
Much more frequent map updates
Faster detection of road changes, construction, and new developments
Better navigation accuracy
Lower operating costs since the vehicles are already driving those routes
More coverage of residential areas that dedicated mapping cars don’t visit often

I know there would be privacy concerns and a lot of data to process, but Street View already blurs faces and license plates, so it doesn’t seem like an impossible problem to solve.

What’s interesting is that garbage trucks might actually be one of the best platforms for this. Postal vehicles only see one side of the street at a time, delivery vans follow changing routes, and buses stick to major roads.

Garbage trucks are among the few vehicles that consistently drive almost every residential street on a predictable schedule.

okay so this started as a shower thought and now i can’t stop thinking about it so bear with me

we all know AGI is coming. everyone’s focused on “it’ll take our jobs” or “it’ll cure cancer.” cool. fine. but i think we’re thinking way too small.
here’s the thing that broke my brain.

physicists already know HOW to create a universe. like, on paper, the mechanism exists. in 1990 three physicists (Farhi, Guth, Guven) worked out that if you concentrate enough energy into a small enough region, a bubble forms , and that bubble doesn’t explode outward into our universe.

it tunnels sideways out of our spacetime entirely and becomes its own universe. completely separate. its own space, its own time, its own physics.
we just can’t do it yet because it needs insane amounts of energy.

but here’s where AGI comes in.
imagine tens of millions of AGI systems running nonstop, with access to every physics paper ever written, every particle collision dataset, every telescope observation ever recorded.

not helping scientists. being scientists. generating hypotheses, running simulations, designing experiments, finding patterns across datasets that no human team could ever connect.

what they’d be looking for: loopholes.

because the universe is full of them. cosmic rays nature produces already reach halfway to the energy we’d need, for free. the Big Bang left imprints in the cosmic microwave background that encode information from when the universe was at Planck-scale temperatures.

black hole mergers generate spacetime curvature approaching the limits of physics and LIGO is recording them right now. there might even be tiny primordial black holes evaporating today and radiating at exactly the energy scales we need to understand.

AGI’s job isn’t to generate that energy. it’s to read the data the universe already left us. and once we understand the physics well enough,
once we crack quantum gravity, we could theoretically design a universe. tune the physical constants. set the rules. choose a combination where stars form, where chemistry works, where life is possible.

then trigger it.
and here’s the part that actually keeps me up at night:
once you create it, you can never observe it. never contact it. never know what happened inside. it’s permanently, causally disconnected from ours. you could spend a trillion years trying to send a signal and it would never arrive.

the beings inside would have no idea you existed.
they’d look up at their sky and wonder if they were alone in the universe.
they’d build science. they’d ask why their physical constants are so perfectly tuned for life to exist.. what are the odds, they’d say, that the universe just happened to work out this way?
they might even build their own AGI.
and start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, someone made them.

What scares me the most is an AGI owned by a few companies with enough money to lock the rest of humanity out.

For me, the answer is clear. AGI should be built as an open-source framework, not as a closed private weapon. I don’t mean everyone should get unlimited access to the most dangerous tools on day one. That would be reckless. I mean the core framework should be open, inspectable, tested in public, and governed in a way normal people can actually see, Closed-source AGI does not remove danger. It hides danger behind money, lawyers, NDAs, and corporate press releases.

People often say open source is risky because bad actors can use powerful systems. Fair. That risk exists. But closed source has its own problem, and people act like it doesn’t. A closed AGI still gives power to someone. It just gives it to billionaires, governments, giant labs, and companies with deep pockets. Are we really saying AGI becomes safe when only the richest people can touch it?, to me That sounds less like safety and more like gatekeeping.

If AGI becomes one of the most powerful tools in human history, then its rules should not live in a black box. You should be able to inspect the safety system. You should be able to see how it refuses harmful requests, how it handles human rights, how it reports mistakes, how it gets audited, and who has the power to update it. If one company controls all of that in secret, then the public has no real oversight. You just get a polished blog post saying everything is fine. I don’t trust that model…

Open source does not mean chaos. People say “open source” like it means throwing a godlike model onto the internet with no limits and yelling good luck. That’s not what I’m arguing for. I’m talking about an open framework: open safety rules, open evaluations, open governance, open audit tools, open research, and public review. The dangerous parts can still have controlled access. The point is that the structure should not be private scripture written by a few labs.

Because once AGI affects work, science, education, medicine, war, politics, and the economy, it stops being just a product. It becomes infrastructure. And infrastructure needs public trust.

Imagine if one private company owned the rules of electricity. Or the internet. Or the legal system. You would call that insane. But with AGI, people suddenly act like it’s normal because the tech is complicated and the CEOs sound calm on stage, and that doesn’t sit right.

A closed-source AGI can shape markets. It can automate research. It can influence voters. It can help with surveillance. It can replace jobs at scale. It can give one company or one state a ridiculous advantage over everyone else. If the public cannot inspect the system, then the public cannot know where the power really sits.

And yes, open-source AGI has risks. I’m not pretending otherwise. Bad actors exist. Some people will try to misuse anything powerful. That is why we need strong safeguards, serious audits, staged releases, permission layers, and public testing. But I would rather deal with visible risk than invisible power.

At least with an open framework, researchers can find flaws. Independent teams can test claims. Smaller countries, universities, and public labs can contribute. People can challenge the design instead of worshiping whatever a private company says. You get scrutiny. You get pressure. You get accountability. Closed AGI gives you a locked door.

If AGI is too dangerous for public scrutiny, then it is too dangerous for private ownership. If the system can reshape civilization, then civilization deserves a seat at the table. Not just investors. Not just CEOs. Not just governments with classified contracts. The framework should belong to humanity.

That means open standards. Open safety tests. Open alignment research. Open reporting when things fail. Clear rules for access. Clear limits on autonomy. Clear oversight from people outside the company building it. Not perfect, because nothing is perfect, but far better than “trust the lab that profits from moving fastest.”, AGI should not become a closed weapon held by whoever can afford the largest data center.

It should become an open framework built around human safety, public audit, and shared progress. Because if this technology is as powerful as people say it is, then hiding it inside private walls is not safety. It’s surrendering the future to whoever has the biggest wallet.

Thank you for anyone reading this.