You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems

It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.

Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.

Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.

At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing “dir” into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.

Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.

they apply the exact same argument to Jews as they use for pretty much every other minority

I think the glaring note is how they consider “Jew” a minority, despite largely being white.

Who does and doesn’t qualify as white is a constantly moving goalpost, depending on the attitudes of the current regime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionist_antisemitism

Zionist antisemitism or antisemitic Zionism refers to a phenomenon in which antisemites express support for Zionism and the State of Israel. In some cases, this support may be promoted for explicitly antisemitic reasons. Historically, this type of antisemitism has been most notable among Christian Zionists, who may perpetrate religious antisemitism while being outspoken in their support for Jewish sovereignty in Israel due to their interpretation of Christian eschatology. Similarly, people who identify with the political far-right, particularly in Europe and the United States, may support the Zionist movement because they seek to expel Jews from their countries and see Zionism as the least complicated method (vis-à-vis ethnic cleansing or genocide) of achieving this goal and satisfying their racial antisemitism.

…

The French-Jewish journalist Alain Gresh noted that the antisemitic right-wing politician and Nazi collaborator Xavier Vallat said that "Jews would never integrate into France and that they had to go to Israel.

…

The historian David N. Myers wrote that “Leading white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor liken their movement to Zionism, seeing it as a model for the kind of monoethnic purity they favor in [the United States].” Myers states that the “combination of pro-Israel and antisemitic sensibilities” is common within American politics due to the combined influences of the “Christian evangelical Right with its end-game theology”, “archly conservative” Catholics, and the political ideology of Donald Trump.

at least some of those at fault suffer

None of the ICE agents or their bureaucratic bosses are suffering.

Democrats who do politics (Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, AOC) don’t pander to the correct coalition of real estate tycoons and cryptocurrency brokers that Democrats who just want an cushy job and an easy paycheck (Andrew Cuomo, Henry Cuellar, Kristen Sinema, Bill/Hillary Clinton) need in their corner.

Democrats are unable to leverage this into votes

Not for lack of trying. Harris made repeated trips down to the boarder to play “Tough On Crime” dress-up for the conservatives. She even did the famous Do Not Come speech, aimed at Guatemalan migrants fleeing their own domestic (US sponsored) ethnic cleansing.

You’d think folks obsessed with “border security” would love Democrats, given how regularly they advance bills to harden and militarize the border. Unless of course… this isn’t about “security” at all. It is about white supremacy and the consolidation of power within a single ethno-nationalist party.

In that case, why on earth would white nationalists side with a party full of non-white people? Why do Democrats spend so much time and money and man-hours attempting to court their vote, while spending even more time and money and man-hours alienating the votes of people of color and left-liberal migrant families?

We still have to win elections with a large population of stupid people.

“Hey you fucking idiots, vote for me!”

~ Richie Torries, 2028

It’s extremely weird to see people fixating - laser like - on the tiny fraction of people who get reported as “Trump supporting” while seemingly ignoring the tens of thousands who were Harris supporters or (far more commonly, since they’re often undocumented or unhoused) completely cut out of the domestic political system.

As though these massive nationwide ICE raids conducting an ethnic cleanse are somehow the Karma Police and not just ethnic cleanse squads that happen to side-swipe a few conservatives along the way.

Americans: “Tragedy of the Commons proves that people are incapable of working together for mutual benefit, because personal greed will always lead to the devastation of the collective common good.”

Chinese: “Why do you not simply arrest and punish the bad actors in your society when they overstep and impede on the general welfare?”

Americans: “Because that’s fascism. Also, we’re arresting and deporting you for asking.”

Be less lazy

“Damn this sucks, I’m doing the thing”

“Hey you lazy stupid fuck, go back in time and do it sooner”

Why is the Internet like this?

Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.

This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts

Israel’s Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn’t work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as “terrorists” after the fact.

It can say it can, when asked by an investor. And really, what else matters?

If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.

Nothing to do but downsize and move on.

Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.

Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they’re treating as headcount.

Nothing however breaks because of AI

The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.

What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.

I think you’ve got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).

The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.

The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren’t outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.

News isn’t being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.

Biggest woosh moment on the whole history of internet!

Whistling past a few graveyards

The ship was never at that port.

Reddit was using bots and vote manipulators back to the Digg days, as well as scraping/reposting akin to what 9gag became famous for.

It would be nice if the focus was on personal comfort over some ideological crusade.

Bras, head scarves, makeup, skirts versus pants, hair dye, hair length, heaven help you if you’ve got a position on cosmetic surgery… Everything’s a fucking binary. Like, I get complaining about advertisement saturation and the endless suffocating waves of online influencing and even the social/family pressures to look or dress a certain way. But at some point its got to be about what each person feels comfortable with.

Not everything has to be a political position. It is enough to say you are self-determined.

JK Rowling in 2020: “I was the victim of sexual assault, so it’s okay for me to distrust and revile transgender women.”

JK Rowling in 2025: “Women need to commit more sex crimes against one another in order to feel safe.”