AngryDeuce

I read somewhere that the reason cats are so fickle is that they’ve been much more recently domesticated compared to dogs

my kitty crossed over 10 years ago now, but I served her faithfully for nearly 20 years. her behavior was atrocious and she whined for food like you wouldn’t believe but I still miss her and her five pointy ends a ton lol

I wish DisplayPort would become the standard already. It’s superior in every way.

HDMI is the microUSB of the video world and I wish it would die already in lieu of DP and USB-C/ThunderBolt.

Hell, even just having a completely different conversation can sometimes lead to huge breakthroughs! I’ve seen it happen!

“Look guys, the people are really all ate up about this slavery thing…I know, stupid…but anyway, what if we instead allowed slavery as punishment for a crime and then just started locking the poors up?”

“My god man, thats brilliant! Why, if we do that we dont even have to pay for their care ourselves! We can even put that expense on the poor people through taxes, thus increasing the chance that they will end up in jail and be available for slave labor!!”

“Dude, I know!! We wont even be forced to enslave people of a certain color, we’ll be able to enslave anyone!!!”

“But what if we dont have enough criminals to leverage?”

“Thats the best part! We make the laws so as long as we always have an easy way to lock people up, we’ll have more slaves than we ever had before the 13th amendment got passed!”

“God bless these United States!”

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.

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.

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 almost at all anymore that bothers me. We’re going backwards, not forwards.

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!!!”

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.

Dude in Philly when I was a kid it was literal prison food, it came on trays of individual meals that they threw into the oven for 15 minutes to heat it up before handing it off. $2.50 in 1989!

Or my personal favorite, when my son was getting a full lunch packed every day and also getting a school lunch on credit and when his mother and I said “uh, the kid has a lunch and we do not want him getting school lunch on top of his packed lunch because DUH” they straight up said they will not disallow him from getting a school lunch on top of it because he must be hungry.

Except plot twist! He admitted he was only getting the school lunch for the treat and the chocolate milk and throwing the rest away. Kid got cookies or a brownie or something sweet in every packed lunch, and ate them every day, ate his whole packed lunch, as he didn’t even like 90% of the food on the school menu.

Mentioned that to the school and was told that they couldn’t control what he does or does not eat. “But you can control him not racking up debt that we have to pay that we didn’t expect, can’t you?!”

NO.

And that’s how my wife and I together paid roughly $200 over the course of his first grade year for lunches that he largely threw out.

They need that money for the big interchanges they’re going to put in for the 10s of people working at all the new data centers.

Had to learn that lesson in 2000 when I voted for Nader. It wouldnt have made a difference since the Supreme Court got bought off to throw the election to Bush, but that was the last time I dared play the foolish game of voting my conscience in the failed democracy we call the United (lol) States.