Beefalo

It’s gonna train the little robot dog, which they’re gonna put a gun on. And drones. It’s gonna train drones, he’ll sell it to anyone who’ll buy the data.

I think a lot of people need to learn the lesson that the commercial leftism they are responding to from online is completely worthless false politics and they are demeaning their own value by engaging with it. Imagine how you’d mock your grampa if you caught him talking back to Tucker Carlson on television like Tucker can hear him or would change his grift if he could.

That’s you. None of these fake-ass internet leftists are going to change, but they can waste your time, so they do. Cut them loose, forget about them, and start asking the people you talk to in real life if they intend to vote.

Also, I let go of the “fight against fascism” propaganda when Trump pretended to be shot and every nobody clown on my social feeds started whining their nonviolence bullshit. Sorry? I thought these were Nazis? I thought this was rising fascism? If violence is not appropriate, when will it be? Never?

Never!! Says the middle-class progressive with their nose in the air. They’re always able to slip away to another country when things get bad, what about you? They can hold their ruling class beliefs painlessly while the boots fall on your neck, not theirs.

I guess they were just winding me up, huh, and none of it was as important as their sniveling, desperate need for attention at any cost. When push comes anywhere close to shove, I guess you were playing, not a single shot can you bear to see. You made it sound life or death, when it wasn’t, at all. You lied. This election wasn’t that crucial. It’s not “the end of democracy”, or it would make sense to take up arms, like they are in Myanmar. But you lied, and it isn’t that important.

So I’m done letting e-hype decide how much I care about all this, and how important it is.

Judging by the reaction to Trump’s little near-miss, it won’t actually be a big deal if he wins. It will just be another shitty Republican that you’ve been overhyping as the devil for the last ten years, and I fell for it, like a rube.

Don’t get me wrong, I went and voted yesterday, and I intend to keep doing it every time they let me, but the attention farmers don’t get to decide how important anything is, ever again, not for me. I propose you also take a page from my book. More voting, less paying attention to social media.

If people don’t vote, it will be fine, things will be okay, shit will move on. Get offline, find living people to care about, and let these people scream into the void alone.

Damn I just eat these whole now. I guess it’s all about the presentation.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

I wonder if there’s a “This Side Toward Enemy” onesie you can buy.

So what’s the verdict, are the electric unicycles cool? Have they broken the curse? They do look cool, and you better be wearing the full motorcycle getup if you know what’s good for you, because they’re fast as f too.

For some reason they all come from Cleveland

This sublemmy has been a fascinating experiment into how your relatives “eat the onion”.

Yes, the tired joke is that reality is getting too ridiculous, but if you’ve been paying any attention to the AI music situation you have come to the glum realization that they can make Johnny Cash sing whatever the fuck they want him to, now. It’s very convincing. The “weird fingers” era of AI music was years ago, but people kinda missed it. Also, it sounded like Wagon Christ, so it didn’t matter. In hindsight, I hope that Bjork got a hook out of it.

Now we’re here, where they can make Johnny Cash sing a jingle for an insurance company if they can, and it just sounds like an outtake of his, maybe. For that matter, they can make your Mom talk, given a decent sample of her voice, and the sample is smaller than you might think. I would venture that a few minutes of her voice would do it. Black Mirror shit. It’s getting kinda hard to write scifi, lately, you have to pitch 1000 years from now and insist on FTL just to buy yourself some time.

This was your official warning, years late, everyone is paying attention to the visual results of AI, but the audio results got better, much sooner, and nobody really got hung up on it because we are visual monkeys, and it just did not strike us as headline news.

I feel like the automagic beat matching and tricks of something like Virtual DJ were part of the cutting edge of this “AI” thing that’s honestly harder to describe the better I understand the son of a bitch. The ability to speed up a recording without changing the pitch, ignoring the limits of vinyl, pretty much demanded making new material where the original artist just performed the song at a new tempo, in real time, on demand, but I was messing around with it as a hobbyist in like, 2015. I did not understand what I was fucking with, at all. I understood BTC well enough in 2012, but my time with Virtual DJ? I did not grasp it. If I had understood it, I would be much wealthier, only now do I understand Nvidia fanboys.

So now when they make Johnny sing, it sounds like Johnny. The only real tell is that it sounds like some old classic record of his, and not like whatever crisp thing it would be with his voice like old trees, if he was simply alive now and singing in 2024. But he always sounded like old trees. It just means they can make him sing Yellow Submarine, and you’ll be like shit, did I miss that episode of Sesame Street or something? This is great!

Nossir, I don’t like it.

It’s a graphic design thing? Tumblr and Reddit are kinda infamous for the thing where nobody reads screen names, so you end up reading a post from u/everythingipostisaboutpeopleatingshit so you get got every time you get most of the way through the post, and it’s about somebody eating shit.

Somehow my interaction with The Onion content had managed to slip through that perception filter. I tended to read The Onion articles by going to the website and reading the Sensible Chuckles. So they never really fooled me.

But aha. Reposition the presentation, and give us all a dose of Reality is Stranger Than Fiction, and suddenly here I am, going, yeah, that makes sense. I bet all the fucking phone calls came from call centers in India, kinda thing. Nah, bit right through the skin, like a sheep.

When interviewed he said, “how hard can it be, it’s just burritos, this is my retirement business.”

AH SHIT RUN FRIM THE LIGHTS

I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

Come on, Aldi.

It’s not my educate to job you.

Ah, the late 1900s when you could still pretend that Apple was the choice of the counterculture for no credible reason except for Apple marketing. Slacktivism, my dude. Worthless.

This meme is truly ancient. I bet those little iMacs go for a pretty penny on eBay now after everyone tossed them in the garbage circa 2003.

There’s a fella on YouTube who talks about game development and stuff. He has a well-respected game out somewhere, and he dropped a bombshell that you probably need to hear.

They took their game, on a PC and consoles, out to some sort of convention to show it off and get some feedback from potential customers, namely, young children, Alphas, 6-12 ish.

He said that every single one of them ignored keyboards and game controllers, shoving them out of the way, not even understanding what they were for, and immediately started swiping their fingers on the screens, assuming they were touchscreens. So yeah.

Oh well, I suppose everyone will lay down and die with no access to music. What will artists do without that all important half a peso for 5000 streams?

Cash money says there’s already a native competitor just waiting to get that money. If not there will be soon. Maybe people will just buy records again, shit. Uruguay isn’t doing half bad, financially, maybe they’ll bring tapes back.

It has been quite something to see American tech companies rolling out across the world trying to pull that same old “sign the EULA or lose everything” bullshit and it’s just not working for them. Too bad we can’t kick them in the dick like other nations can.

Every day on the internet, a lucky 10,000 get to learn “common knowledge” for the very first time.

Like everyone said 50 times, yar har be pirate, all that.

Or, buy hard copy, which is refusing to completely die because of this shit, right here.

BUT, you have to make sure the data is on the hard copy and that you can access the data (play the songs, watch the movie, etc) WITHOUT internet access, that is you have to make sure the hard copy of the media is really on the damn disc, and it’s not just a glorified access key to media that will then be streamed from their servers they control. If it is then do not pay for it.

This is honestly why vinyl is still a thing, once you rip things back out of the digital realm it gets a lot harder for them to pull bullshit, they pretty much have to put the songs on the wax if they want your $40, and they do, oh boy they do they want that money bad.

Piracy is always a bigger pain in the ass than internet techies act like. No, I don’t want to buy a Plex server and learn how to use it and learn how to make my own VPN and make sure the VPN doesn’t just report my activity to 7 Eyes or whatever that things called and and and and, and results like “my movie got unbought” are also unacceptable.

Yes, we know, there are “special” websites that you can just surf to and it’s like a janky Netflix that “just works” so long as you already know the name of the thing you intend to watch, otherwise it’s just a blank search bar. Also, you cannot tell other people about the website or the website gets taken down. Nothing is more useful than a website that you absolutely can’t tell people about, wow, what a problem solver that is.

“I want to watch a movie” is a very “This activity must offer zero friction, I will only accept push button get movie” kind of activity so, yeah. “Be pirate” is not that useful, it’s just the internet’s go-to answer, they always speak loudly for the tiny minority in this place.

What we’re actually doing is drastically limiting our spending on any of this type of thing, and never, ever pay money to “own” something digital. That era is over. It sucks, but it’s yet another shitty thing that would take bullets to change, and since it’s not worth bullets it’s not changing.

Honestly I doesn’t even take bullets but if you’re going to build the kind of political movement it would take to create change then all that work would be absolutely wasted on this problem while everyone eyerolls at you like you’re stupid and worthless for caring so yeah, it’s not changing.

So yeah, do not pay for digital ownership of any kind, ever. It’s only ever a lease with one-sided terms, at best. Amazon lost the contractual right to provide that movie, so you lost the right to watch it, and “buying” it meant buying a license to watch it on their terms, the end. Don’t pay for it.

I believe you can still get “dumb” flatscreens, but they’re getting rare, and they cost at least hundreds more than their “smart” brethren. So of course those sell very slowly.

The older I get the more I miss the sheer freedom that was built into our daily lives back when technology was just a notch or two less advanced. Phones that stayed trapped on their wall, not in your pocket, tracking you. TVs that were made of dumb stuff that could still pull free content from the air. You had to be part of a special “Nielson family”, fully set up with a little tracking box and all that, for the TV to tell anybody what you were watching.

People expected you to basically fall off the earth for 8 hours at work, and didn’t expect to contact you for less than a housefire-level emergency, which meant you spent most of the day free, and not just while you were at work. Nobody blinked if you stepped out for the evening to go shopping and could not be contacted for hours. Now people end up in screaming arguments because they didn’t answer that text fast enough. It’s misery.

I had a shock the other day, watching some YouTube short featuring a young woman (an adult, not a minor) complaining humorously about her mother, who always knows where she is, and thus has all sorts of unwanted opinions on her location. Mother always knows because of an app called Life360, which is basically the kind of spying app that an abusive spouse would hide on your phone. But it’s not hidden. You force your children to install it on their phones. It’s a leash. So now this adult woman, who of course cannot quite afford to leave home, because economy, cannot simply delete this spying app from her phone without consequences and arguments, so she has no privacy in her movements, from anyone, never mind the government and such. Never mind what actual minors are now putting up with.

We have officially left the era where the adults pissed and grumbled about them damn kids wanting them damn phones they don’t need, and we are now in the era where some kid has absolutely been beaten with a belt because he tried to leave his phone in the bedroom and slip out of the house in privacy.

Things like Life360 are normalized among children and parents, so other people will now expect to track you and treat a refusal of tracking as a violation of trust, and probably a sign that you are elderly, thus your rights are becoming debatable.

Again, 5 minutes ago this was evil shit that abusive spouses snuck onto people’s phones, suddenly, it’s normal, and people will just expect it.

I guess the ongoing shock is that we expected Big Brother to somehow slap a shackle on our necks that we can’t take off, but this is all worse. This is putting the shackle on your neck, every morning. It doesn’t even lock. You could, theoretically, throw it into the lake at will. Nobody would stop you. But you don’t. All the chains are made of other people. The whips at your back are the opinions of children, and what they think is normal. The surveillance cameras do not loom from posts in the sky, no. They’re in every pocket. They’re much harder to hide from than a security camera ever would be.

I hope I’m just melodramatic, or something.

That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr’s fields, as well.

Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn’t shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.

So that’s the issue we’re going to have, here, and I’m not sure if the “some guy running an instance for the fuck of it” model is prepared for it.