In the lord of the rings mmo back in the day you could play an instrument and actually play notes and program songs to play them in game but most people would just post up at the inn, like dozens of people, and just play the most discordant faceroll shit imaginable to the point where you had to disable it in the settings.

Kinda broke the immersion a little bit, unless roving squads of bards performing the medieval equivalent of a yoko ono song in everybody’s face was a commonplace occurrence in those days.

I’m fine with capitalism when the responsibility and expectations are proportionate with the compensation for a given job.

The problem is they’re not, somehow the higher up the chain they get and more money they make, the less they actually seem to fucking do, and worse, the more insulated from their own decisions they become.

“It was a bad call, Ripley”

“Bad call!? 15 plant workers died because you denied a request for additional CO2 monitors in the processing shed!! What was your bonus for cutting that?!?”

Except unlike in Aliens, we don’t even get to enjoy seeing the xenomorphs eat the assholes at the end.

Dude, as someone that worked, briefly, in retail at a corporate level, the agreements between the major players like Coke and Pepsi and the big boxes are like some Van Halen “no brown M&Ms” level shit on both sides of the equation.

I have seen emails describing what happens when a coke representative walks into one of those stores and finds that their product is not merchandised within X feet of X aisle or is out of stock on the shelf and there are serious financial sanctions for that shit. Something is minor as a customer setting a 12 pack of 7-Up on top of the stack of Sprite has gotten escalated to levels that would be ludicrous to a layman.

Everything, every single shelf or peghook or rack in that store, has a dollar amount attached to it, and the sums of money being exchanged over whether your product is placed at eye level or down on the bottom shelf is unreal.

I was in the same boat myself about 15 years ago, and it was bad even then, I cant even imagine how it is now.

You know how we used to have to memorize phone numbers but then smartphones came around and now nobody can recall more than a handful from memory? I’m no better, I can recall my wife’s, moms, dads, and work, but I couldn’t tell you any other relevant number to save my life today.

Now take that paradigm and apply it to general thought. What happens when all our thinking gets reduced to queries and does not grow beyond that?

When I turned 30 I was quite ate up about it.

Now almost 20 years beyond that point, when a colleague turns 30, “oh whatever you’re still just a baby lol”

Funny how that works

That’s what I’ve been screaming about AI since the beginning.

Take self checkout kiosks for example. Anyone that is old enough to remember what the grocery store was like before the kiosks would know how much faster a human cashier was then the stupid fucking machine. There was no tabbing through 20 screens of fruit to find the plantains, there was no “sorry you have to scan every pencil individually and place them in the bag one by one because we can’t do multiples”, and there was never, ever, an unexpected item in the bagging area.

The doctor I go to has replaced all their front office staff with self check-in kiosks. You cannot check in with a person anymore. If you are unable to use the machine you have to press a special button and wait for someone to come from the back and press the buttons on the kiosk for you. The time to check in for an appointment with the person used to take under a minute. The kiosk takes 10+ and has a 25% error rate.

But none of that matters, because the machines don’t draw a paycheck, and they don’t care about anything else.

I hate this take, because it ignores the reality that this isn’t Europe and that you can’t even get sick in this country without health insurance with risking homelessness, let alone any massive coordinated action.

Like around here they’re always posting pictures of protests and you look at the people at the protests and it’s all retirees and college kids. Why? Because everyone else is at fucking work because if they’re not at work they miss a mortgage/rent payment and end up living in their car. The majority of US states have at will employment laws meaning they can and will fire you with no notice or even need to provide justification beyond the performative “this termination not due to you being a member of a legally protected class”.

Wage slaves are still slaves, and telling people today that their inaction means they’re complicit is no different then going back in time 200 years and telling the slaves on the plantations that they’re just as responsible for their bondage as the people that put them in chains. Fuck that nonsense.

“If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice”

~Geddy “the GOAT” Lee, Freewill

investors getting nervous?

It’s simply amazing to me that we’re going to have to start funneling people into Canada and Mexico again to escape this stupid bullshit.

This is basically Trump emulating Putin. 100% if Operation Epstein Distraction goes poorly, they’re going to pull the same shit. And we still have (theoretically) 2.5 years of this shit to go.

Working in IT, what I’ve seen so far has been terrifying enough on a technical level, but the effect on the way people think is so, so much worse.

It’s like the joke people make about how, before smart phones, you could rattle off a dozen phone numbers by heart, but now you can’t even remember your immediate families? You’ve offloaded that part of your brain to the machine. So have I, almost everyone has. And when you’re without your phone for whatever reason and need to get a hold of someone, you’re boned outside of like 1 or 2 people maybe.

But what happens as more and more of these tasks get reduced to queries and the thinking part starts to atrophy? As we offload more and more to the machine. Like why even read at all if you can just have the machine read it for you and you can listen in your airpods? And what happens when you eventually can’t even verify if what the voice in your ear is saying is correct and not just a digital hallucination?

Anyways, not trying to be argumentative, it’s just, through the lens of what I experience day to day it’s extremely concerning how quickly people are losing their ability to do things without leaning on AI, and more importantly, how quickly they’re forgetting how to do things without it.

Just wanted to add that you’ll pay out the ass for them compared to consumer trash, but there’s a reason for the higher price tag. They’re often made for heavy usage environments where they’re on like 24/7 for years showing slideshows and shit in office lobbies. Consequently, they often lag behind the feature set of modern TVs which may or may not be a problem (personally I hate all that image enhancement shit but everyone has their preference) and the higher refresh rate is not as big a selling point so not a huge comparison there if you’re looking to use it for gaming or something. They also have a much more clear repair path though replacement parts can be fuckin stupid expensive. It’s bullshit that the only way you can get around the enshittification of consumer electronics is by paying the enterprise tax but that’s how it is.

I work in IT and about once a year or so I have to spec out that sort of stuff for clients, and they’re always like “WTF?!” when they see the cost of some of that Enterprise/Professional grade stuff, but the difference is, the no-name crap they could get for $1499.99 from a big box is going to burn itself up within 18 months and be trash while the $5000 display will be humming along for as long as replacement parts are still available.

There’s a world of difference between having lessor skills or ability and offloading it all to a machine so you don’t have to be bothered. Namely, effort.

Its not the fact that people can’t write well that bothers me, it’s that people don’t care to even try to write passably almost at all anymore that bothers me. We’re going backwards, not forwards. This is not some niche skill, the ability to communicate concisely. This is a fundamental part of being a social animal. And people are leaning more and more on machines to do it for them.

At what point does the language start influencing the thought?

Every person that loses their job to AI is just another person with lots of free time on their hands and no means to support themselves and their family.

I truly do not know what their long term plan is, assuming they even have one (bold assumption, I know) but it seems to me that having huge masses of unemployed people with tons of motivation and nothing better to do is like, the last thing I would be pushing for if I was of the ownership class.

Especially with data centers…which need to be connected to the outside world with sufficient speed to be anything more than miles of copper and hot chunks of metal playing with itself. I bet a handful of guys with some shovels and a dremel could seriously fuck up the productivity of a data center pretty easy.

I have a Vizio TV I bought in the mid-teens that only lets you change the source and turn the volume/channel up and down with the remote. Everything else…the display/audio settings, naming the inputs, setting the channel names…requires the Vizio app on your phone. Literally no other way to access them. If I’d have known at the time I would have returned it immediately, but unfortunately I didn’t discover this for a couple weeks as it was on sale and I was leaving for vacation, so I bought it, dropped it at home, and didn’t actually touch it until it was past the point where I’d have been charged restocking fees so I kept it.

I guess my point is…I wouldn’t necessarily bank on that. They can easily just make the TV not fucking work without the account, just like some of the other brands I’ve interacted with that will not even let you bypass the initial screen when you power it on for the first time without entering an email address or else it gets locked in it’s demo mode.

Even if 50% of them get returned they’ll likely still be making money.

“I can only breathe with a mask on my face when im hiding my identity to beat up on people of color!!! Any other time though, fuck off!!!”

Perfect use case! Well, as long as the battery isnt compromised, I aint trying to die in a flaming plane crash lmao

I have so much random eWaste built up myself that Im like Oprah over here…“You get an old crappy laptop, you get an old crappy laptop! If it breaks who cares, I have plenty more where those came from, but dont use it for your tax documents because I will not be responsible” lol

I work in IT and deal with people spilling shit on their laptops all the time. This is precisely why I tell them that im not saying their shit is broken, Im saying they cant depend on it. Right now it might seem fine. Once whatever drop of liquid manages to corrode whatever random trace enough to break the connection, it wont. That day could be tomorrow, that day could be 10 years from now, or even never!

But the important takeaway from the conversation isnt that the laptop is broken, the key takeaway is when it stops working right, IM NOT PUTTING TIME INTO FIXING IT. Replace it, or dont…but dont call me on that day because the answer then is going to be the same as now…replace it. If you dont want to replace, goto 10. Thank you, have a nice day.

That being said, I’ll use those things for noncritical shit all day long. I dont care if it shits the bed…I just grab another piece of shit off the shelf and make that the new bed shifter. But my plex server taking a dump is not the same as your CAD workstation taking a dump mid project, obviously.

See this is why I just do what I do. My ticket is going to get punched regardless eventually, and if the trade off to claw back a few extra years at the end of the line is to be miserable eating plain cheerios and running on a treadmill for 3 hours a day, they can have those years and Ill just be happy while Im living.

Thus far…knock on wood…its served me well.

I usually opt for my birthday suit but last time I did that I wasnt allowed within 100 ft of the gas station up the street anymore