Linux is free, for a trivial counter example.

I don’t think there’s less stuff. I think there’s more slop and trash, so the percent of good stuff is lower.

When we’re constantly ‘killing time’ on our phones/screens

Reminded me of that quote from House of Leaves

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

Forums were cool. They often had their own culture and in-jokes. People would become well-known on the forum. There’s a couple names I recognize on here, but it’s mostly transient. (On the other hand, I’ve probably had a vicious argument with someone and then a nice chat with them later, without realizing it was the same person).

Most internet users seem bland, and just congeal onto youtube, discord, twitch, and other nightmares.

There was a website where users could request something or other, like a PDF report. Users had a limited number of tokens per month.

The client would make a call to the backend and say how many tokens it was spending. The backend would then update their total, make the PDF, and send it.

Except this is stupid. First of all, if you told it you were spending -1 tokens, it would happily accept this and give you a free token along with your report.

Second of all, why is the client sending that at all? The client should just ask and the backend should figure out if they have enough credit or not.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat

People are being ground up by capitalism and it’s easier to just look at tiktok or play Baldur’s gate than actually engage with a messy person.

I try to stay in touch with people but it’s hard. I’m also kind of an insufferable asshole, and I think some people leave because they’re tired of “capitalism sucks” coming up

Of course people are using AI. It’s the default behavior of Google, the most popular web search. It confidently spits out falsehoods. This is not an improvement.

And there are definitely people “needing to convince others to use the tools.”. Microsoft and Google et al are made of people. They’re running ads to get people to adopt it.

Buying stuff online and email are useful stuff in ways LLMs can only dream of. It is a technology nowhere near as good as its hype.

Furthermore , “the general public likes it” is a dubious metric for quality. People like all sorts of garbage. Heroin has its fans. I’m sure it’d have even more if it was free and highly advertised. Is that enough to prove it’s good? No. Other factors such as harm and accuracy matter, too.

This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.

It seems to mean people who don’t consume AI content not use AI tools.

My hypothesis is it’s a term coined by pro-AI people to make AI-skeptics sound bad. Vegans are one of the most hated groups of people, so associating people who don’t use AI with them is a huge win for pro-ai forces.

Side note: do-gooder derogation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation ) is one of the saddest moves you can pull. If you find yourself lashing out at someone because they’re doing something good (eg: biking instead of driving, abstaining from meat) please reevaluate. Sit with your feelings if you have to.

Trying to get people to use signal. People don’t care about ideals or principles or future problems, so it’s a difficult sell.

Lack of money is certainly a chilling factor. Went bowling the other week, and it cost like $30/person. That’s pretty cheap, but not if you’re dead broke. Went out for brunch and a short bar crawl this weekend, and they cost like $50/ea for food and a few drinks. Not that expensive, but also kind of a lot.

You can socialize for cheaper. Had a little get together the other week- I spent like $40 for pizza and snacks, but could’ve probably gone cheaper. The real limiting factor is getting people who will show up.

I imagine it’s hard to bootstrap that, if you have no friends or only sad-sit-home-alone friends.

The problem is most people are lazy and don’t understand anything. They just use the app they know, even if it sucks.

If you got it to be popular it could work , but I don’t see how you could.

6th grade is reading for plot. It’s able to read the story and understand that the hobbits brought the ring to Mordor, and Aragorn fought in Gondor.

Anything about symbols, themed, subtext, unreliable narrators all comes later.

Managers are often idiots in over their heads. AI is really aggravating that problem.

“I’m a Grok guy,” said Vance. “I think it’s the best. It’s also the least woke!”

What a fucking idiot. Really wants everyone to go back to sleep

Being an adult in the sense of being responsible, feel pretty good about. Pay the bills. Feed myself. Go to work.

Being an adult in the sense of having no fun, or tightly restricted fun, not so much. Still go see live music and play video games.

Business Idiots. Ed Zitron wrote a whole thing about how many business leaders are out of touch with users and their own products. They live in their own little pocket dimension with each other, and only really care about shareholders.

Yeah, display port worked fine. It was when I plugged the second monitor in to HDMI I realized the problem. And then couldn’t get online to search for issues.

I had to tether the desktop to my phone over USB to get a network connection.

I later installed pop!_os , tested all that stuff, and it worked out of the box.

After booting, test WiFi, BT and audio functionality.

This is an important step. One time I boldly just installed without testing anything in the live session, and discovered that HDMI and Ethernet didn’t work. Woops.