It spreads blatant lies. Not all rumors are lies, though.

Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.

At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.

As an old person who knows a lot of old people and has to deal with a lot of other old people, you’re in a bubble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and you may already be aware.

By and large, early gen X and older have a very difficult time discerning what materials are AI generated. Then when you get to a certain age range, maybe 70+, AI to much of that crowd is just another buzzword they know nothing about.

Now, in the pedantic sense of the word “increasingly”, if literally one more old person is against AI or doesn’t trust AI compared to last year, then that’s increasing. But on the whole, I’m not seeing it. In fact, as AI gets “better” and harder to detect, I’m finding that more people just go with it. You basically end up with camps of “the person who accuses everything of being AI”, “the person who has no clue what’s what and doesn’t care”, and “the person who can’t tell if something is AI regardless of how obvious it is”.

AIneOneOne: I understand your concern that you had an accident and hit a tree — a lost limb hurts, but did you know that oak trees are are hosts to more caterpillar species than any other species in North America?

So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.

First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.

Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.

Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.

Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

I can’t view the article, so I have a perfectly valid excuse for living my life like a Redditor – making a comment based on the headline only.

I don’t know if I’m one of those netflix viewers who has abandoned shows after one season. I’m not even sure how I could know. Netflix is by far the worst of the major streaming platforms in terms of obscuring their library. Their user experience choices are so heavily focused on making sure everybody’s watching the same 20 or 30 movies/shows that they tune literally everything else out. I’m not on Netflix 24/7 and I don’t tend to keep up with showbiz news. I know lots of people rotate streaming services. It’s very easy to see why folks would not be aware of additional seasons of a show being out.

The other issues that stifle my interest in shows applies to other services as well. The modern era’s long-ass gaps between seasons kills the inertia. Sure, I liked the season that came out 2 years ago, but I hardly remember it and I just don’t have time to try and go back to catch up. Of course there are recaps, but those by nature leave stuff out. Most likely unless that first season was really damn good, I just won’t bother.

Even so, it seems like a lot of these shows peak in their first season, lose the plot in the second, and then by the fourth or fifth season you’re essentially watching a headless male mantis clinging to life just long enough to finish the job. So, a lot of times if the first season isn’t absolutely stellar, I end up putting the show on my abyss of a watch list, likely never to return.

Another power issue in some areas is that these and many other enormous energy hogging facilities get cheaper power rates than residential customers.

They should be paying at least as much per kwh as I am, and in fact, I feel like they should be getting charged way more to encourage them to reduce their power consumption and/or convert to renewables. And in the meantime, use that “way more” to lower my bill or offer real financial subsidies for residential solar installations.

So here’s the thing. Right off the bat it’s hard to take you seriously when you don’t even seem to understand how the pre-order works for the Steam Machine – and that’s even with me agreeing with at least some of your overall sentiment. What compelling reason would they have to shut down the pre-order page earlier than advertised?

Honestly, none of us really know for sure 100% factually whether the Steam Machine will sell out or not, but it’s hard to take your questioning of it seriously when your understanding is so limited, and that’s the nice way of putting it.

Personally, I won’t be surprised either way. I suspect it will sell out, but like you, me, and millions (billions?) of other people, I also know that the price is laughable when appraised only by specs and anticipated performance metrics, so it also would not surprise me if they struggle with sales.

I think there are still “read-only” clients. I haven’t looked in awhile, but I know there were some available via F-Droid (alternative app store) long after the API was cut off. I assume they use standard web scraping for grabbing content.

Also, I’m not sure if it still works, but I think you can still use open source clients that rely on the API, you just have to compile/build them yourself using your account’s own personal API key.

I haven’t looked into either of these in a while and definitely not an expert on the topic, but I’m sure if you’re interested there’s enough info out there to find a solution that works for you.

Why would they need to block that kind of content to begin with? Wouldn’t the Christians using their network simply not even try to access that material? It’d be like me remodeling my house to keep great white sharks out of my bathtub.

I’m getting Faces of Death vibes from that music in the video (at least in the tent scene).

That’s not the face I make. Usually there’s more eyebrow commotion going on as I try to figure out why it’s taking so long to load the video or why I’m getting some random error message that means nothing to a rando trying to watch a video on their phone.

Bee extinction means drastically fewer crops and less pollination, but not no crops. It would be devastating, but there would still be agriculture. Lots of staple crops are wind pollinated and don’t rely on insects at all. But for the rest of our food, that would all become very expensive and widely unavailable.

I’m sure things are different in different parts of the world, but where I’m from, pretty much none of the big crop farms let fields lay truly fallow. Most of them plant various cold season cover crops that include things like clover, brassicas, and legumes like vetch. Those all produce lots of flowers that feed the bees in the off season.

The issue with wildflower meadows, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that most of those wildflowers bloom at times when the fields would otherwise be needed for crop production. Of course, there are farmers who skip planting at all some years, but in my neck of the woods, nobody does that. They plant every year, at least once, they just rotate different crops in and out. Corn one year. Hay then soy, the next. And so on.

Very coincidental timing on this. I was just eating at a restaurant and saw a woman that had the “Mar-a-Lago face” cosmetic surgery look. Despite being in the south, I don’t actually see a lot of these people out and about in daily working-class life. So, it’s still pretty jarring when it happens.

Seems like most people who get elective cosmetic surgery (especially on their face/head) prefer subtle adjustments that would otherwise go unnoticed. Then there are those who want it to be clear and obvious because it’s a status symbol, which demonstrates they have means to afford it.

In a way, that does sort of track with the idea that conservatism is about in-groups (laws protect but don’t bind) and out-groups (laws bind but do not protect). It’s important that people clearly and easily see you’re wealthy and privileged, so that you don’t have to worry about those pesky rules applying to you. What’s the point in spending car loads of money on your face if people can’t tell?

Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.

Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.

Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.

And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.

I haven’t read the article yet, so apologies if this is addressed.

Bluray has always been a niche product in many/most parts of the world, DVD is ubiquitous.

It pains me to say this, but people generally just do not care about the difference in picture quality between the two formats. At least not enough to pay the Bluray premium.

The equipment itself is more expensive, as are the discs. Your subjective “not even much more expensive” is very dismissive of the economic situation for huge numbers of people around the world. It’s often $3 - $4 more per disc in a retail setting, sometimes higher. And DVDs go on deep discount far more often in my experience, furthering the cost divide. And the bluray players aren’t just more expensive, they’re way more troublesome, slower, clunkier, and many/most/all require a stable internet connection (at least periodically) or you’ll be locked out of watching your discs.

The money aspect isn’t a concern for wealthier households. But, wealthier households tend to have higher adoption rates for stable, reliable, unlimited, high speed internet. They’ve largely switched to streaming only, and have little to no need for discs and players. They’ve also got many other entertainment options. They went from DVD to streaming, skipped Bluray.

Poorer households are far more likely to have no/less reliable internet, let alone unlimited data. If you don’t have internet, you will be locked out of watching at least some of your blurays. You certainly won’t be streaming, at least not regularly and reliably. That $3 - $4 difference in the price of each disc is money for gas or a loaf of bread. The $50 difference in the player is potentially a big financial blow. If you want to watch something cheap, you can find a huge selection of DVDs at the thrift store or even rent for free from the library, or you can pay a little more for the one bluray they have for sale (it’s an Adam Sandler comedy from 20 years ago where he dresses up as a woman) and does funny voices.

That show/video made me feel uncomfortable things that I don’t even have words to express and I loved it. I didn’t technically see it live when it first aired, but most have seen it not long after on the internet. It always stuck with me and helps me to understand that even if I don’t understand the appeal of any specific piece of art work, that those pieces of work speak to other people in the way that Too Many Cooks spoke to me. It made me feel things that are indescribable.

There was another show called “Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared” that presses the same buttons and causes similar emotional responses from me.

Dunno why but I can’t get enough of this shit and I want more.

On the one hand, I loathe feeling that way sometimes. On the other hand, for the better part of the past decade+ any criticism I had about Amazon was met with victim blaming white knight replies and basically no support. At best I’m probably more on the ambivalent side of things than the no sympathy side, not that there’s effectively much difference.

And then there are actual good developers who could or would tell you that LLMs can be useful for coding, in the right context and if used intelligently. No harm, for example, in having LLMs build out some of your more mundane code like unit/integration tests, have it help you update your deployment pipeline, generate boilerplate code that’s not already covered by your framework, etc. That it’s not able to completely write 100% of your codebase perfectly from the get-go does not mean it’s entirely useless.