There is only one way to prevent this kind of catastrophe from happening. Before you commit your workflow to a cloud service - whether it's a text editor, a CAD program, a computer-art tool, or anything else - there are some self-defense steps you must take. 1. Make sure the service has an export tool. That is, a button you can press that lets you download your entire working state to a snapshot on your machine, that you control. Here's the hard part: if there is no export tool, run - do not walk, *run* - away from using this "service". It's not help, it's a hostage-taker. 2. Verify that the snapshots you can download are in a documented, open format - not an opaque binary blob. If you can't look inside them and extract the data even when the cloud service is unusable, they only give you a false sense of security. You can ask an LLM questions 1 and 2 about a cloud service and expect to get answers you can check. 3. Push that backup button regularly. Once a week at minimum; once every few days is much better. The more often you back up, the less you can lose to an incident. If you can't find a cloud service for your application that fulfills these constraints, do your work locally on your own machine, or expect to suffer. If you go local, don't screw yourself by using closed-source tools. That can land you in the same kind of trouble you were trying to avoid. Cloud providers are frequently incompetent and occasionally malicious. Everybody knows, or should know, the story of how one fine day Photoshop's cloud service locked users out of their own files until they consented to the terms of service update that effectively gave Photoshop an unlimited license for use of their data. Don't want this to happen to you? Protect yourself. Now you know how.

Now let's talk about "the pause" Trust me bro we don't want to squelch AI forever bro it would just be a couple years bro while we get alignment right bro. Wait, where have I heard this song before? Oh yeah. "Two weeks to flatten the curve." The "pause" rhetoric is meant to create the institutional machinery for permanent suppression and shift the Overton window towards public acceptance of same. It's a dishonest move from people pretending they're willing to accept a future return to pre-"pause" liberty when that is exactly the opposite of what they intend. When s camel tries to get its nose into your tent, the right thing to do is kick it In the snoot. Hard.