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 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

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

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!!!”

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.

Yeah but I can just not use an Apple device.

What is someone supposed to do when the only routers available from coast to coast are the ones made by the companies that gave Trump his 30 pieces of silver and allowed his regime to install their NSA backdoor so they can use all the new data centers they’re astroturfing the web in support of to create profiles of Anti-MAGA households for ease of persecution?

It’s the same thing really, but without the “negative” connotations usually attributed to atheism or atheists. “See, I’m not really an atheist but agnostic. It means I’m not to be expelled from this community as a heretic”

This, basically. At least that’s how I used it. As a kid living in the bible belt, admitting you were an atheist was, in their eyes, literally no different than being a cannibalistic devil worshipper. Agnostic was easier for them to swallow (albeit because odds are high that most of them didn’t even know what it meant, and figured it was some sect of Christianity they were unfamiliar with).

When I got older, and escaped the institutional bigotry woven into nearly every facet of society down in the bible belt…the lovely place where our biology teacher also headed the bible club and refused to teach evolution yet somehow still had a job as a biology teacher in the public school system, as a small example…that was when I finally gained the confidence to self-describe as an atheist.

The unwritten part is where Trump gets a free gold plated golf cart or some other stupid shit to sweeten the deal.

Its grift allllll the way down.

Thats the best part about AI…when it shits the bed no one is directly responsible. Everyone just throws their hands up and says “nothing we can do about it!”

I know this is going to age me, but I saw this happening with self checkout in grocery stores 20 years ago. Nobody remembers how it was before so nobody even realizes that the time wasted standing at a stupid kiosk that is freaking out about unexpected items in the bagging area wasnt a problem back when human beings were scanning the shit.

I do procurement to the tune of 10+ million per year and I have seen a 300% increase in order fulfillment time solely due to those vendors pivoting to AI order fulfillment.

My direct reps at all these suppliers are just as powerless as we are…they know how unhappy their customers are, but these decisions were made much higher up then them and theyre pretty much being told to stop complaining because the AI is here to stay, even if it sucks, because its cheaper.

Welcome to the new normal.