Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, hear the lamentation of their women.
I didnt get lactose intolerance until I was in my 30s. So weird that my body just decided “Nah, Im good with dairy products” all on it’s own.
Really wish I would have discovered that earlier in life, before I developed my crippling cocoa pebbles addiction.
Brian Regan called them “Me Monsters” lol
I fucking hate that shit lol
My last house bordered on a big undeveloped green space; we had , as we called them, ‘owl years’ and ‘bunny years’. You could see the pattern clear as day and predict it to a certain extent. If there were a ton of bunnies out in our yard at dusk in the spring, the following year was going to be an owl year, ostensibly because the eating was real good. If there were hardly any bunnies out there, the following year was almost definitely going to be a bunny year because the owls moved on or starved over the winter.
But there was no balance, that’s the weird thing. It was almost binary…but it wasn’t directly cyclical. We would know by early spring if this was going to be one of those “we need to put fencing around every single flower and plant in our garden” years, or if there were enough owls around to eat all the bunnies and give our garden a break, but it didn’t alternate in any pattern we could tell. We just had to wait and see how many bunnies we had out there at dusk. There were far more bunny years than owl years, but whereas in owl years you would hear them out there hooting all night long, in bunny years…nothing.
Tangentially…it was always a squirrel year. IDK if the owls didn’t care for squirrel or what but only the bunnies and the owls were locked into this relationship…the chipmunks and squirrels were unaffected. The owls just really only wanted bunnies I guess lol.
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 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
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
It truly blows my mind that people need to use AI to write coherent sentences with proper punctuation at all. The shit that I receive in my inbox from people making far more money than me, that have multiple advanced degrees no less…it makes me weep for a future where no one is able to function without a computer holding their hand through the entire interaction.
We’re going to get to the point where its all AIs talking to each other and humans are merely pressing the send button.
Im sure a fair number of reps would do it for the promise of a board position once theyre done slumming it in public service.
The chipmunks were cute and didn’t hurt nothing (though their pre-dawn chittering was fuckin loud for how little they are, would wake us up even with the windows closed) but the squirrels were true assholes. We invested lord knows how much money into squirrel proof feeders and they would retaliate by eventually getting around the defenses and then knocking the shit down on the ground so they could empty our feeders in an afternoon. They would rip open the suet cages and just drag the whole block up into a tree and gorge themselves on it, and if they couldn’t open the cage they’d steal it in the cage lol
Even my wife, who is like a disney princess and wants to go find a clearing and sing and cuddle all the animals, would chuck hickory nut shells at them whenever she was out there so the birds got something.