You’re right to feel insulted. LLMs are verbose and unreliable often enough that you have to check any work that comes out (or be negligent).

So what’s usually happening is someone is saving their time by spending yours. They saved the time normally needed to write a thoughtful reply by shifting the time and cognitive cost of reading and verifying to you, with AI as an excuse (often not without condescension, which is a type of “virtue signaling” driven by c-suite AI boosting). The slop output looks like “work product,” but is neither - it took no work and is a facade of a “product” because it’s unverified.

They are being selfish, and it is objectively an insulting act.

It’s been said many times, but to say it a different way: the government and Camacho in Idiocracy were much much better, since they immediately elevated the smartest person they could find to a cabinet-level post and accepted help rather than just lied about the problem.

Literally thousands? Have you tried bookmarking things after they’ve sat unused for awhile?

I typically just periodically save my browser windows with a tab manager extension. I just say because thousands sounds like way too much to keep track of…

Funny story, they actually did this to me before this all happened, and I was on a “I’m never going to update again” beta firmware that they gave me a link to, when the forced-update happened that broke my wifi. I didn’t disable any ADB-level processes, and I don’t think the system let me disable updates.

I mean, that’s great in theory. But the amount of manufacturers of non-smart TVs is tiny, and if you are interested in the best panels and display technology, refresh rates for gaming, etc (even removing affordability), it’s very very hard to just boycott if you want to have a modern TV at all.

Yup, really a core monopolist mindset. Money is a way to avoid competition, not win it.

Unfortunately the firmware was the issue, not just OS software. So factory-resetting didn’t help us. But yeah, that definitely radicalized me to the “never connect it to the internet” camp for future TVs.

I outright told them it’s illegal, since they are unilaterally altering the terms of any T&C agreements when we started using the TV and materially interfering with our ownership and use of the TV we purchased. They didn’t care. I then sent it to our state attorney general and nothing happened.

Would have loved to. It was just over one year (right after the warranty ended as well), though.

Zuckerberg more than any other tech CEO uses acquisitions to either adopt or strangle any potential competitor in the cradle. But he isn’t a visionary, he doesn’t actually know what technology will be useful. This is a perfect example.

Relatedly, Hisense also forces updates and disables use of the TV if you do not accept the update (via a full screen non-cancelable prompt).

I learned this the hard way after Hisense broke my TV via an update that I didn’t want and then refused to fix it even after 6 months of escalations and emails.

Them hosting their own archives of copyrighted articles would need to be non-public (for citation verification only), since if they did an archive.today-like public service, it would certainly get them sued by a constant carousel of copyright owners until they run out of money.

Archive.org might be a sign that most would look the other way, but given how tight Wikipedia’s funding is, I don’t think that’s a good idea.

I propose there is a final step in Cory Doctorow’s enshittification theory, which is one step past the company collecting rents from captured business and customer bases: the CEO leading the enshittification push collecting exorbitant rewards for facilitating the process.

I used to spend a lot of time on tech sites, but tech in general has all become such an evil enterprise. I remember back in the '00s looking forward to the next Android update or even back when a new Windows was going to bring improvements (even if just to fix the bugs). Now every update to every service or hardware is enshittification and SaaS.

I’m sorry. Recently laid off myself and management avoided directly saying AI was the reason, but other statements (C-suite talking about whether AI can do other work months before the layoffs, in front of me) convince me that was the reasoning.

The alternative prediction is that this is in fact sustainable and AI companies will in fact have revenue to keep the bubble inflated for a lot longer, just in the worst way - by extracting the value of human-created reliability and trust from the market:

CEOs have also bought into AI almost to a person, and are using it to replace workers, results be damned. AI can’t do the things they believe it can, but to them, if they can fake satisfying a need with AI for $5, that is preferable to actually satisfying a need with a real employee for $10.

The CEO is happy because his company saved $5 and he’s met his stock option incentive target, the AI companies are happy to pocket that $5 instead of the employee getting $10. Maybe they even raise the customer’s price to $12 as AI rent-seeking starts rising, and both companies get $6 each. Win-win, life will go on, just worse for everyone else.