Meta should be broken up and its leadership barred from working in tech (or politics)

Conservatives should be listened to on nothing. They have zero credibility. A toddler would make better policy decisions

I think that’s the “two Santa” strategy https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/thom-hartmann/two-santas-strategy-gop-used-economic-scam-manipulate-americans-40-years/

they’re scum that should not be allowed to hold office.

If they were capable of rising above their quagmire of fear and hate, they probably wouldn’t be conservatives. It’s not about facts or consistency. It’s about feelings. Mostly fear of the out-group.

I don’t think they thought about it very much. It’s like that spongebob meme where patrick has the wallet. Or the Friends one that I don’t know the name of the template. You could go point by point building up a case for why there should be government regulations, but as soon as you say like “regulation” they go “Nope bad”

Though some people really do believe they as a rugged individual will be able to research and test all of their food without an FDA or whatever. If they buy bread that has sawdust in it, they’ll be able to tell, and somehow get a refund, or buy some other bread that doesn’t have sawdust. That seems like a lot of work and optimism compared to regulations and inspections by qualified professionals earlier in the process.

I was at a bar once that the men’s room on the upper floor only had urinals. If you wanted to shit or piss in some privacy, you had to go to the bathroom on the lower floor.

This guy’s videos are one of the few things on youtube (other than music videos) I’ll watch sometimes.

People are weirdly, emotionally, invested in meat. Like it’s part of their identity.

I enjoy the taste of meat but I recognize it’s not good for the environment or the animals. So I avoid eating meat. It’s not a big deal. But for some people they act like you’re going to eat them and bury their bones in an unmarked grave.

This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

https://xkcd.com/169/

Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.

If Biden had been up there saying that about a political opponent … it would make headlines all over the world.

It’s like the “only Democrats have agency” thing.

When Democrats fuck up we’re like wow they really screwed up, look at these bad choices, they’re fucked up.

When Republicans fuck up we’re just like well yeah that’s what they do. You don’t get mad at the sun for setting or a fire burning. Sometimes we act like they’re just immutable forces of nature instead of human jerks.

We don’t really hold Republicans to any standards.

It went basically like any reasonable person expected it to. Unfortunately many people in the US are unreasonable

Oh yeah that’s the Peter principle I think. Or closely related.

Someone is good at job A, so they promoted to B. They’re good at B, so they get promoted to C. They’re kind of bad at C, so they stay there.

Over time, all roles fill up with people who are kind of bad.

I’ve been stuck on this thought that people making decisions are often idiots.

We’re sort of told that management is smart. That big business leaders are visionaries. If someone’s the director of engineering they’re probably smart right?

No. They’re just people. People that have the skills to get promoted, but those aren’t the same skills to do anything else.

I think it would matter less if there was more competition and more stakes. If some business puts idiots in charge and the whole company dies, okay. But instead we have Google just shitting the bed for years, and there aren’t consequences.

This is a capitalist hell

MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.

Some people are just like that.

I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.

A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.

Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.

Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.

This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.

In my last game I sent him back to sanctuary and then could never find him again. I hope he’s happy.

(Among my other problems with Fallout4, it really hurts my suspension of disbelief when the dog like facetanks a mininuke and then is just… fine. I tell myself the protagonist is a synth and that’s why they’re nearly indestructible. Maybe the dog is, too.)

When people do try protests that are disruptive, people complain about it.

i think protests should be focused on stopping the machinery that’s grinding us all up. But if your protest means traffic or a closed Walmart then all the short sighted idiots and all the people barely holding on get mad.

I don’t think people are smart enough to deal with this world we have created.

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

There are credible allegations that the AI companies are not merely scraping publicly available resources, but are also consuming content in violation of the terms of use / copyright law. Like, a site has a robots.txt file that says “no scrapers” and they scrape it anyway. People would be mad about traditional search doing that as well.

Secondly, if a search service scrapes your site and then directs relevant users to it, that’s probably fine. Most websites want users to visit. A lot of AI stuff sucks up the content, and then the creators of that content get nothing. No users are sent there. The scraper hitting the site takes resources, and gives nothing back.

Google has also gotten some flak for putting stuff on their own site instead of sending users to the source. Like you do a search and get a snippet on the google page, and you never click through to example.com/cool-stuff. Well, now the owner of example.com/cool-stuff doesn’t get the click. If they run ads, they get no credit. If they have metrics, they probably don’t see any visitors. If they have like forums, people are less likely to engage.

If the “AI Search” includes links back to the source, that’s not perfect either. One, it’s kind of excessive to use an LLM to parse text when the origin site is already there and readable. If I search for “population of london”, you can just send me to a census website or even wikipedia. You don’t need to use a whole ass LLM. Two, as I touched on in the previous paragraph, users are less likely to click through if google is putting the core of the information right there (even if it’s not always accurate). It’s still lessening traffic to the origin site, and traffic is often the lifeblood of websites.

Lastly, a lot of AI stuff is simply inaccurate or misleading. We’ve all laughed at the “use glue on your pizza” stuff or the “there are two Rs in ‘strawberry’” fuckups. If traditional search was really bad, like you type in “cat food” and you got a webpage that was all jewelry and “buy gold” scams, you’d be annoyed, too. That’s more like how search was before old google came about. There were a lot more low effort “SEO” hacks like putting a bunch of keywords in tiny print to fool the search indexer. Now google is the shitty old guard, but they have too much money and power to be easily replaced.

That’s just off the top of my head. Scraping for AI isn’t the same as scraping to make a searchable index.