I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

Reminds me of this https://youtu.be/zhbL8FFKARg?si=pAPl8FJs_D6B96yH

I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

Yea it’s a shame that so many of our fellow countrymen say this seriously.

Exactly right. Honestly at this point I think the Dems should just drop gun control entirely as an issue.

Let me preface this next section with the fact that I’ve been largely supportive of common sense gun control laws and think they would be a net positive. But give me a minute because this is a slightly more nuance point (the danger of bringing nuance to gun issues in America is apparent to me)

Why? Let’s say they were successful and made it harder to purchase guns that we categorize as especially dangerous.

1. This country is already awash in guns. Unlike other nations that have disarmed, there is no appetite for any kind of gun but back or gun seizure program, those dangerous guns will get into the hands of people that want to do dangerous things with them.
2. The less dangerous guns are still quite dangerous. Humans are creative, bump stocks, self modification of less dangerous guns, having a couple loaded guns, all ways to make less dangerous guns equally dangerous.
3. There are enough pro gun Americans and money in the gun industry that every change will have loopholes you could drive a semi truck through

So the cost benefit just makes no sense. As a political issue the cost is enormous and the realistic potential benefit is basically nothing. I wish we had a population that cared more about this, but from a pragmatic point of view we simply don’t.

I think it was sandy hook that really cemented this for me. If a grade school full of children gets shot up and the reaction from a significant portion of the population is apathy or to double down on gun rights, that’s not an issue you are winning.

Board of Directors shocked, absolutely shocked, that they were supposed to be directing the company. When reached for comment several wealthy looking people were seen with dictionaries in hand looking up the word “director” looking absolutely aghast

The title in the image

American checking in, this was also how I was taught to pluralize throughout my education.

The usage in the post title seemed correct to me fwiw

The heat generated by a dumpster fire would not be good for forging steel.

Forging steel requires a minimum temperature of 900F

This scam ad is also something that if you showed it to anyone that knows anything about metallurgy would get you laughed at.

Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.

Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.

The mathematics I’m speaking of is that first past the post voting mechanisms result in two dominant parties and third parties being non viable.

You might not like that FPTP results in this, but that’s how math works.

Formally it’s called Duverger’s Law so if you don’t like it take it up with him.

That’s the neat part, if you aren’t American you can agitate and tell people “don’t vote, voting for the lesser evil means you end up with slightly less evil and that’s bad, instead you should not vote or ignore mathematics existing and vote third party which is a fancy way of not voting” and then suffer no consequences.

Tell people not to vote and the party that wants to “hurt the right people” gets into power, doesn’t matter, those policies don’t touch foreign agitators.

I’ve been in the depths of the leftist circle jerk about this. You see if we all sat home on Election Day reading Marx, then the oligarchs who rule over us would see that no one is taking part in the charade anymore. Then those oligarchs who wield tremendous wealth and power would just give up, you know, the turnout too low. All those people refused to endorse the democratic farce any further and so clearly those with power would be so red faced with embarrassment they would voluntarily give up that power and abolish capitalism.

Those oligarchs certainly wouldn’t be delighted by the fact that the population is even cheaper and easier to control because people are sitting out. Nope, we will certainly show them by allowing them to dominate us with even more ease and at bargain prices, certainly that will end the system.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

Really enjoyed Farcry 5 but Farcry 6 was ok gameplay wise but the story was really underwhelming especially with the amazing talent they got in Giancarlo Esposito.

The real problem with Ubisoft games is that they are all 95% reskins. If you’ve played one farcry game you’ve played most of every farcry game, same with assassins creed, etc.

Now those games often end up having relatively fun mechanics so when another farcry comes out I’ll still play it because it’s a fun game to me.

I do wonder how much they are just hitting a saturation point where the same couple games reskinned over and over are just underwhelming

If I can’t take things I see on the internet at face value then I’ll also have to discount your completely unsupported assertion that “someone just slapped a caption on this picture”

So did this guy just blast his own legs with shit to own the libs?

Very on brand for the conservative brain trust

I think it’s a shame that when we figured out skyscrapers we didn’t start doing that with the dead. Catacombs in the sky reaching to the heavens.

I’m gonna go pay my respects to grandma she’s in the towns bonescraper. Smash cut to a giant tower made of skeletons.

Aliens come down to that kind of society, they’d want to party with us because that’s metal as fuck

I gave you 3 concrete examples of things happening right now. I put them in the context you asked for. You said I’m over pattern matching the past, which tells me you got to company towns and quit reading.

Feel free to respond but know that I’m done engaging with you. If you can’t engage in good enough faith to read what I wrote then I don’t really feel the need to humor you any longer.

Your brilliant solution is to remove zoning laws and building codes. As an engineer I can tell you those codes are written in blood, they exist because people were hurt or killed due to some home builder thinking “do I really need to ground this, I could save a 50 cents and I would really like 50 cents”

You are sitting there thinking you’ve cracked the code and if you could just get people to understand you’d win. I understand your point just fine, it’s just wrong headed.

What do you think they would do with less government? Do you think they would be benevolent titans of industry and not hurt you if it meant greater profits for them?

It’s not like we have to wonder. There is plenty of history to go read about what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would do without any restraints on their power. Factory towns where workers are paid in scrip and kept in effective indentured servitude were a real thing that happened.

What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government? Look at what the free market did with respect to Amazon. Investors are happy to play the long game, they bank rolled Amazon for 9 years to compete against retailers, when the locally owned hardware store has to turn a profit to keep the lights on but the capital class says Amazon can sell hammers at a loss for 9 years, then at some point the local hardware store goes out of business. An enterprise that doesn’t need to turn a profit can out compete one that does.

Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years? Because they knew that once they crushed the competition, they would have a bunch of people locked in, habituated to using Amazon and they could slowly decrease quality while increasing prices and make a return on that investment. They created a machine that destroyed jobs and businesses and for a while the consumer got a great deal. Subsidized high quality goods conveniently delivered to your door.

That isn’t a gift though, it’s a Trojan horse. That subsidy stops at some point and Amazon has a nearly impenetrable moat. Every year they can increase the cost of prime, increase the cost of goods, and now half the search results are some jumble of letters company that was just formed to shovel low quality goods at you.

The end result is harm to you as a consumer, a worker, and a taxpayer.

Those retail jobs are gone, instead of dozens of local business each with a workforce in every town, there can be one mega warehouse with a couple hundred people serving a huge swath of customers. This is great for amazons bottom line but if you need to work to make money to buy food and shelter, it means fewer jobs. The law of supply and demand works for the labor market just like it does anywhere else, if the demand for jobs is the same and the supply is lower then the glut of workers means employers can pay less. If there are enough unemployed people they will be willing to accept lower pay, they will be willing to accept worse working conditions, and if they aren’t there’s a hundred more unemployed people willing to take that spot. Those are direct harms to people.

Those locally owned businesses use to make up the tax bases of communities. Now instead of buying that hammer from your neighbor, you are buying a Chinese hammer from Bezos. Towns still need fire departments, police, roads, so your taxes go up because it has to come from somewhere.

Now when you go to buy a product you get whatever you get from Amazon. Enshittification is a real thing. And people can’t compete with Amazon, with their scale and their reach and their logistics. The best you can hope for is that people will try to sell through Amazon, but amazon in control of the search and there are thousands of dropshippers working to get their slice of the pie pushing quality down down down as they import cheaply made goods from alibaba and resell it to you at a mark up.

So no, the price of necessities being high is not good for me, but the government isn’t doing that. Capitalism is about the accumulation of profits to those with the capital, and more money means more ability to buy the market. There’s a reason that monopolies form in capitalist markets. Greater profits allow for greater market capture which leads to greater profits which leads to greater market capture and so on.

Competition isn’t sufficient because nothing stops people with a lot of money from going “outcompete them for a while by selling at a loss, we can do that longer than them and then we can jack up the price once our competitors exit the market.” This is exactly what investors did with Amazon.

So yes, they have the power to hurt me and you. You keep talking about less government, ok fine, what part? Which function of government would you remove that would improve the situation? What mechanism replaces that function and how does it work?