Beefalo

I got to thinking about IRC some time ago, and how much creative time we spent solving the fundamental problem of how, exactly, to use the internet without needing some sort of middleman, like a crazy person hosting a server for no clear reason, so that we could all communicate together.

That and designing the thing so that even if the hardware in your closet got hammered with a bajillion visits it wouldn’t stutter because it was all too light weight for that. But also, fuck no I would rather throw myself down the stairs than arrange it so that I have to maintain it a lot. That type of thinking defined an era, and that’s why zombo.com still works.

I have to put more maintenance into my Gmail account than the zombo guy does into the entire website, is what I’m saying. Return to monke, is what I’m saying.

God I love shitty cosplay that still works.

Somebody shakes their head and says something about milk and pizza

He’s a survivor. He had a hunch and started walking casually toward the mountains, never to be seen again.

Please note that the prompt says “queens of England” very clearly, which turns it into a glorified Google image search, so the results are unacceptable trash, and vaguely leftist language about people being angry for the lack of racism are your problem, only. Fuck off, troll.

The real issue is that even with a handholding, direct and easy prompt, the tech cannot simply hand over pictures, even generated ones to avoid copyright issues, that come from easily discovered answers on Wikipedia and who knows how many other credible sources. The lineage of the British Royal Family is all but open-source data - probably is, literally - and your mom can probably name three Queens offhand though she’s Canadian. This thing completely ate shit on an easy, easy prompt.

I don’t know how many times now I’ve seen some YouTuber use “evil Jerome Powell” as a prompt for a thumbnail, and get a clear picture of him complete with devil horns, copyright be damned, so what the f? The AI isn’t this stupid, that means they’re nerfing it and screwing it up. You best believe they’re still selling it, though.

What other results will it comically fuck up, but you don’t have the knowledge to critique? You won’t see the results, either, somebody else will use them to judge your resume; IS using them, now. Fucking lazy hiring managers are going to just plug your name into this thing and ask for a synopsis of your life so they don’t have to work. It will just fill in missing information with lies, and they’ll eat it up. I guess you shot two people a couple of years ago and didn’t know about it. I wonder why you didn’t get the job?

People have been crazy dumb with this AI, meaning young, smart, tech-savvy people with heavy internet backgrounds who should know better than to trust keep treating it like an oracle, because they have some weird blind spot about this technology. Ignorant executives who think math is for slurs are going to make it do everything.

They’re going to use this technology to decide who gets an apartment, who gets arrested, and a bunch of other shit, save your leftism for that.

The stinky back of that poor tiger

The only time I get 10 hours and wake up tired is after a lot of drinking, so maybe you have other issues.

Try out Shreddit, it’s a web app for exactly this. It even lets you filter by post karma so you can keep your hits. I’ve never used it but that’s the name that came up over on Reddit from everyone talking about the announcement.

This announcement is just “oh by the way, the horse is now out of the barn. He left like 10 years ago but this is the announcement.”

Shout out to whoever dismissed the first AI writings with “It’s like a perfect Redditor. Totally confident and completely full of shit, doesn’t even know that it’s lying.”

That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens when everyone was already scraping the shit out of the site, at the very least.

This show is going to be a huge hit with line cook babydaddies.

This sounds like the battery and the charger’s problem to handle, not mine.

All this tech, all this automation for every damn thing, and people keep coming at me like I’m supposed to do everything manually with my fingers and eyes and maybe an alarm or something to keep me on schedule. No. Stop it.

Make the charger handle it, or shut up. Make the phone, the charger, and the battery handle it together, you know, with digital automation. Do not even mention it to me.

So are they aware that they’re trying to shame a joke account that’s already doing a bit?

Do they think they’re winning? Are they in on the bit? What sort of cataclysm has to happen for Twitter people to wake up and go “oh my god, I WAS THE ASSHOLE THIS ENTIRE TIME, WHAT AM I DOING HERE”?

I’m glad I get to wipe my ass with what’s left of them without having to touch their vile community, I’ll call that a win.

So what’s the verdict, are the electric unicycles cool? Have they broken the curse? They do look cool, and you better be wearing the full motorcycle getup if you know what’s good for you, because they’re fast as f too.

That’s my favorite Pixies album

It’s been very strange. When I was a child in school I was not well liked, I was fat neckbeard with no internet because late 80s. Truly I was a sad pile. They called me all manner of hateful things, but it never even occurred to them to call me short, at 5’7".

I rarely feel “short”, only average. Most men seem to be around my height. Some minority of men are taller. I still manage to tower over many women, because women be small, yo. A “tall” girl is roughly my height, so they’re either at eye level or shorter, with the occasional very tall woman in the mix.

I’m tall enough that other people ask for assistance with things on high shelves on a regular enough basis, mostly women.

There is a DRASTIC difference between how the world treats my height versus how the internet shitbag community does. Go figure, abusive people are abusive.

I can only pinpoint the 2000s, and online dating profiles where you can sort by height, plus many women having a height fetish in the exact same way that men will ask people their bra size, and the continuing popularity of the NBA, plus women wanting to have sex with the players, plus their truly freakish heights throwing off the populist curve so that anybody under 6’0 is teeny tiny. Somebody is gonna start squeaking about “6 foot is average” so sure, chief, you win. But there was a time when I just wasn’t particularly tall. Suddenly I am perceived as an actual midget.

It’s just another example of the way people constantly try to find excuses to treat you like shit over just about anything they can think of, it shows how they’re constantly inventing that. It’s one of God’s little reminders to not worry what happens to them.

Gonna smoke fat doinks and make a scene at some expensive restaurants

Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.

They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master’s Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we’d end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.

The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can’t pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don’t have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.

Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the “young people” in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy’s money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.

The target audience for ALL these articles is “daddy”, the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.

If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the “millennials” have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that’s why they can’t stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.

And that’s the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.

The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.

So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they’re “the help”, but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.

Nope. You’re “the help”. You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It’s a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.

So that’s why the articles are so “clueless”. The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.

They know why you’re poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That’s not news. They know why you can’t buy a house because they made sure you wouldn’t have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you’re fucked, because they’re fucking you.

But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they’re liable to read news articles about it. They don’t think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You’re the help.

Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, “knowledge worker” head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.

I’m not sure how many lost their jobs to the machines at all. At a glance there appear to be about 4 attendants per self-checkout area, which is at least a dozen self-checkout machines at our local Walmart, so they all stay busy enough what with telling the machine I’m old enough to buy beer and such.

Minus the self-checkout machines I could imagine 2 of the 4 clerks running the usual “not enough cashiers” play that stores got famous for, with the other 2 being sent to the back for whatever duties. Possibly they aren’t hired at all.

If my questionable observations are accurate, then that means that maybe Walmart is getting more throughput, with everyone ringing themselves up, but maybe they aren’t spending a bunch less on labor.

I can’t see anybody going back on the self-check machines, though. Not after all that money spent, and the decade that retailers have spent waiting for customers to learn how to do the job themselves, especially the older folks. That was a bitter change to buy, so it’s wishful thinking that we’re going right back to human checkout only.

Hell, Aldi just installed a couple self checkout machines here. They were the one holding out, too, since an Aldi cashier zooms the groceries through so fast it’s tough to justify. Oh, and they’re trying to have that one person, with shoppers in front of them, also be the attendant for the self-check machines. I double scanned something by accident and the clerk had to stop their own line to help me by pushing a button from way over there and then back to scanning they went.

Come on, Aldi.

Lemmy needs a community dedicated to pointless debate over which flashlight is best. I’m about to permanently borrow somebody’s ThruNite T1 but it’s too heavy, I miss the mini Maglite I used to carry. Phone flash is fine, yes, but I miss a flashlight/torch without a fucking login procedure involved for fuck sake.

There’s a fella on YouTube who talks about game development and stuff. He has a well-respected game out somewhere, and he dropped a bombshell that you probably need to hear.

They took their game, on a PC and consoles, out to some sort of convention to show it off and get some feedback from potential customers, namely, young children, Alphas, 6-12 ish.

He said that every single one of them ignored keyboards and game controllers, shoving them out of the way, not even understanding what they were for, and immediately started swiping their fingers on the screens, assuming they were touchscreens. So yeah.