We should popularize using the guillotine as a symbol of the common man

Fixed that for you.

Well I guess it’s true what they say. You really can’t go home again.

Nothing broke. It’s working exactly as intended.

There have always been two distinct economies.

• There is their economy (meaning the billionaires economy of venture capital, real estate investment firms, speculative markets, etc…) It’s a market that exists on paper only. Theoretical billionaires with assets instead of bank accounts, capital instead of paycheques. Money isn’t a real concept in that economy, it’s simply a measure of profit and loss. It’s just a score keeping device and something used to leverage power.

• Then there is our economy. (meaning the rest of us, who get a paycheque, spend that paycheque, etc…) Maybe we’d be able to put something aside for retirement or college for the kids. . Money itself has a real, tangible impact in our lives. It’s not theoretical.

Maybe we have enough to play in the paddling pool of the speculation market, telling ourselves that “we’re shareholders!” like our 10 shares means squat against the 10,000 shares owned by the investment firms and LLCs run by the billionaires. Employers like to do things like offering you stock options, selling it as “you’ll be an owner and have a say in the company”. Yeah…no…you’ll have a piece of paper and a sense of self-importance because you “dabble in stocks”.

The idea being that if we invest hard enough, and risk enough, we’ll make enough to jump us from one economy into the other. But we won’t. That’s the lie they tell to keep us mollified.

Because the truth is that their economy, only works at the expense of our economy. Profit in their economy, only comes from loss in ours. A corporation can’t make more profit without taking it from somewhere. And that somewhere invariably is us; our health benefits, our cost of living, the quality of the products that we use, our lack of raises, etc…

So you’re telling me that Illegal immigrants from America are crossing the border to work in Greenland without the proper visas?

How interesting.

I moved to a safety razor a few years back and love it. Took some getting used to when using it on my head shave, but once you get the hang of keeping it at that 30 degree angle, it takes no pressure at all and I (almost never) nick myself.

Zuck and the rest of the 5-meow-meow-bean possee is just hoping to distract us long enough with bullshit to get their private compounds ready before all of us 1-meow-meow-beans drag them from their homes and hang them upside down in city squares.

Spot on. Very well said.

And that’s precisely the over-arching problem in the modern world.

Civic duty, not just for Americans, but for everyone is that if they see an interaction happening with any sort of law enforcement, stop…turn on your phone’s video camera, and record it. The more citizens record every…single…interaction with authority, the harder it is for them to keep the story hidden.

I get zero fulfillment from manually solving merge conflicts, setting up someone’s fragile idea of a config, or other tedious stuff like that

For sure. And it’s tedious crap like that where A.I can have a limited scope of usefullness. I WANT A.I. to handle all the boring shit so that I can get on with doing the creative side of programming. But CEO’s want it exactly the other way around. Rather than A.I. being your assistant, you become its assistant, it’s proof reader.

I will happily plug a snippet of code into an AI if it’s not working and I need a second set of eyes on it to see where I missed a goddamned colon. But that’s as far as it ever should go. I don’t want it writing code for me, but it can make a pretty good proof-reader so that I can solve an issue and get on with writing faster.

I don’t think this is morally right but this is the wider problem of which overreliance on AI is merely one expression I think

Oh absolutely. Corporations shoving AI down our throats is a symptom of a much wider problem for sure. It’s just the latest tool in the age old mantra that states that “In order to increase profit, you can either make more or spend less.”

Somewhere in around the 80’s, corporations realized that labour was their largest expense, and from that point on, employees became just another line item on a spreadsheet. Something to be managed and minimized as much as possible. They try to squeeze that labour metric down as much as possible to achieve more profit without having to increase revenue at the same time, thereby making the stock price rise.

Humans stopped being an equation in business a long long time ago.

100% I believe the exact same thing. If a person commisions a painting, but the painter is a computer, it doesn’t transfer the title of “artist” onto the person who commisioned the painting.

They want credit for their “creative work” when really all they are is a middle manager with no actual employees.

How long do those middle-management chucklefucks think it’ll be before CEO’s realize that they can just ask the computer themselves?

Than it’s the deadlines that need to change. I’ll happily die on that hill.

Quality over Quantity will always win the race in the long run. Ever tightening deadlines is responsible for the enshittification of everything.

My favourite thing to do is to order a bowl of spaghetti in a restaurant, and then loudly take credit for making it because I instructed the chef to add more garlic. After all, the Chef is just a tool that I used to make that spaghetti.

Why is it so hard for these idiots to grasp that the process of actually making something yourself IS THE FULFILLING PART.

It’s not the end result that is where the fulfillment comes in when I’m programming something or writing something; it’s the knowledge that I MADE IT and as a result I have now accomplished something. If you tell an LLM what to do and they do it, you haven’t accomplished anything. You haven’t earned it and you have no right to be proud of it.

Hell, if an LLM came about that could mow my damn lawn so that I could spend more time writing and programming and 3D modelling and video editing, etc… than hot damn…THAT would be something I would pay for.

At what point did the adage “It’s not the destination, it’s the journey” cease being meaningful to these morons?

Musk failed to realize that the kind of people he was catering to with his “anti-woke” alternative to wikipedia aren’t the kind of people who can actually read.

His lawyers and he know exactly what kind of sham trial the prosecution is planning on behalf of their corporate oligarchs. Making it completely transparent is the only chance they have.

Impossible to answer. There’s a lot of different variations of “Favourite”.

• Favourite comfort show: (ie…rewatchability) Star Trek: TNG. Honourable Mention goes to Quantum Leap.

• Favourite Drama to rewatch an entire series once a year of so: Battlestar Galactic Remake.

• Favourite Comedy of all time (similar to comfort show…what’s the comedy I can just pop in a random episode of and enjoy): Night Court (The original one) with honourable mentions to Community and How I Met Your Mother.

No one of those three beats the other two. They just exist in different worlds.

A man can dream.

• Syndicate (loved), Black Flag (Fun to be a pirate, fun story, but again…that same gameplay loop)

• Original Assassin’s Creed (I recognize its groundbreaking nature for its time, but found it kind of underwhelming),

• Rogue (got it for free at some point…don’t know where or when or how. But found it similar to Black Flag; fun to be a pirate, but the same gameplay loop)

• When I had Game Pass, I also took stabs at Origins and Oddysey.

I think anyone can recognize the loop I’m talking about. Go into an area. find a point that let’s you sync a bunch of little mini games (in AC it’s syncing from high points, in Watchdogs it’s hacking towers, etc…) Then you just randomly do enough side-plot and main plot missions and kill the sub-bosses until you “control” that part of the map and then do it again. Every game. Every Franchise. They all follow the same loop.

It’s only when a game adds something somewhat different to the equation (a grappling hook in Syndicate and a train that is constantly looping through the city or sailing a pirate ship in Black Flag) that it has any sort of novelty for me.

Those cheeky buggars have made the same basic game for over a decade just by changing time periods and art assets.