I'm trying to go where commercial users are not, because I am not a commercial user and I do not like being their subordinated audience. Build your stupid little journalism career with somebody else's attention.

I like how the empty shirt has epically swollen freak beast traps

I'm kinda done trying to have some sort of anti-stance with this. AI reminds me too much of smartphones, where anybody who didn't have one was an asshole, ignorant stupid old person blah. I held out on a smartphone for something like ten years, just because they were pricey, I had my dumbphone and PC, I didn't need one. Eventually you just couldn't do adult business effectively without one and there I stood with an iPhone 4 when 3G was getting ready to disappear.

Everyone does nothing but piss and moan about their phones, now, all the "normal" people have been sucked into the vortex that created the "neckbeard", and we live in a dystopia where everyone can't seem to leave the house without their government tracking device. It didn't matter at all back when they were hot and new, every kid had to have one and now we're fucked.

It's the same with AI. People jumped on that shit scary fast, I think GenZ was desperate to have something that felt like "their" technology. Once I heard the scientists acting like people were stupid for being anti-AI, then I knew it was over. The upper-middle-class has spoken, all you can do now is decide to get treated like crap. Capital wants AI, and what baby wants, baby gets. They have learned to whip you with your own children to make you obey.

My favorite use for Copilot is using it to translate normal declarative sentences into that awful passive-aggressive language they use in offices because they just can't have the terrifying confrontation of, "I put all that information in the last email, please read it again." It's really good at that because it's been trained on everything you've probably ever sent though Outlook.

That shit's an arbitrary class barrier, so it's good that you can use Copilot to translate sentences into White Woman to learn office talk the way I can use SpanishDict to translate my English into Spanish and back. There wasn't really a way to do that before, and now you can study it and learn it so you can deal with the fucked up social requirements that go into a job that pays above the median wage.

Otherwise I have no profitable use for it. I desperately need to learn one.

So yeah, start using the shit out of it or get kicked out the airlock. Sucks for the artists but capital wants change and you've already lost. Yeah, I don't really want to get good at anything, either, if this thing's just gonna suck it up, take my skills and make me go work at McDonald's anyway after decades of dedication. Love how technology empowers like 2/10ths of the people and throws most of us under the bus, again and again.

Transport Fever 2, again. Still in the "where the f is my money" stage with this playthrough, dreaming of buying a whole entire train. Watching little horsecarts take 3 years to travel from A to B. I might be a bit too patient.

It's the same story as Sears. I can't find the actually knowledgeable person who broke it down but in the case of Sears all the obvious stuff you thought they should do, they either tried or couldn't have managed for some good reason. Near the end there was a lot of debt stopping them from getting creative. Many of the typical Monday morning quarterback ideas wouldn't have worked.

Come on, bro, these guys sat around in board rooms and meetings racking their brains about it, hiring consultants and probably fielding wacky ideas from people's kids, anything, and they did it for years but couldn't save the company. Your casual ideas from years later weren't it.

We've pretty much lost our local mall, and a lot of them have closed, not because people lacked ideas, but because fundamental shifts had happened in the market, and the problems that the mall solved no longer existed or were solved better. I noticed that we have quite a lot of thriving retail around the mall, it's just the actual mall seems to no longer make business sense.

Radioshack is probably the same. I'd imagine that what really killed it is Amazon's network. Maybe you don't really want that many diodes, but all 500 of them cost little and will last you years, while Amazon allows you to summon them to your hand like Thor's hammer.

Radioshack seemed to thrive the most when PC's cost $4000 for a cheap one and there weren't that many places to buy one in retail stores. I think all of their strongest product lines and best ideas have just been whittled away somehow or another, with lots of markets shrinking. They sold a lot of random electronics, like clock radios and cheap stereos, all of which have ended up in Walmarts and Targets and such. That handful of electronics parts was their true business, the demand went away, and there was no good pivot.

Cellphones? Who *isn't *selling those? They couldn't have become a core business. I get my cellphones from ebay ffs.

Honestly losing consumer demand for a couple of diodes is a big deal. The beauty of selling things like that is that it can cost you 3 cents, you can charge the customer 50 cents, the markup is ridiculous, and the customer doesn't bat an eye. Bolts and screws are similar business. But sell them something for $3000 at a loss to get them into the store to see the shiny thing and they'll try to bargain down every nickel.

Nah, I think they were just done. It's a shame, and I'll always have fond memories of the stores and the Christmas catalogs, but I think it's over for them, through no great fault of the company.

It's gonna train the little robot dog, which they're gonna put a gun on. And drones. It's gonna train drones, he'll sell it to anyone who'll buy the data.

I think a lot of people need to learn the lesson that the commercial leftism they are responding to from online is completely worthless false politics and they are demeaning their own value by engaging with it. Imagine how you'd mock your grampa if you caught him talking back to Tucker Carlson on television like Tucker can hear him or would change his grift if he could.

That's you. None of these fake-ass internet leftists are going to change, but they can waste your time, so they do. Cut them loose, forget about them, and start asking the people you talk to in real life if they intend to vote.

Also, I let go of the "fight against fascism" propaganda when Trump pretended to be shot and every nobody clown on my social feeds started whining their nonviolence bullshit. Sorry? I thought these were Nazis? I thought this was rising fascism? If violence is not appropriate, when will it be? Never?

Never!! Says the middle-class progressive with their nose in the air. They're always able to slip away to another country when things get bad, what about you? They can hold their ruling class beliefs painlessly while the boots fall on your neck, not theirs.

I guess they were just winding me up, huh, and none of it was as important as their sniveling, desperate need for attention at any cost. When push comes anywhere close to shove, I guess you were playing, not a single shot can you bear to see. You made it sound life or death, when it wasn't, at all. You lied. This election wasn't that crucial. It's not "the end of democracy", or it would make sense to take up arms, like they are in Myanmar. But you lied, and it isn't that important.

So I'm done letting e-hype decide how much I care about all this, and how important it is.

Judging by the reaction to Trump's little near-miss, it won't actually be a big deal if he wins. It will just be another shitty Republican that you've been overhyping as the devil for the last ten years, and I fell for it, like a rube.

Don't get me wrong, I went and voted yesterday, and I intend to keep doing it every time they let me, but the attention farmers don't get to decide how important anything is, ever again, not for me. I propose you also take a page from my book. More voting, less paying attention to social media.

If people don't vote, it will be fine, things will be okay, shit will move on. Get offline, find living people to care about, and let these people scream into the void alone.

I bailed on Netflix when I realized that damn, I'm going like a month with this on my phone and haven't really watched much, maybe one anime? Can I get something other than shitty anime, Netflix? Fun action flick from the last 5 years maybe? No? Never the good one, always the knockoff, the shitty sequel, nothing at all? Canceled Mindhunter? Because of course. Okay, no more pay money, and then I didn't miss it. That decision took a shameful amount of time to make.

This was way before the password share thing. I don't know what the rest of you are even doing. Stuff for the kids I guess.

I guess I do this bullshit, now, for entertainment, but this Suuuuuucks with a capital S, so the next step is to find the government chip that makes me scroll and metaphorically remove it. Fuck socials, too. Fuck all this shit anymore.

Okay, goddamn, I'll tear these old motors apart and get them to the scrapper

The thing about that era that nobody seems to remember for some reason is that 4Loko made everyone crazy because there was pseudoephedrine in it. It's an upper that's used as a decongestant, but it also makes people feel like they can do 100 pushups easy when they can barely do 5.

The stuff was in everything. It's WHY "Red Bull gives you wings" and Red Bull has never been the same since it killed some kid who wouldn't stop chugging Red Bulls at a rave, and they had to take it out. The stuff was legal enough to serve in cans at the gas station, you could buy the hell out of pseudoephedrine products of every kind, even if you weren't old enough to drink alcohol in the US, it wasn't really controlled at all, so it was the secret engine behind the Scene Kids, as well.

It was in EVERYTHING. I have a story about being at work with a miserable flu, dragging complete ass and wishing for death, but then lunch came, and I took some TheraFlu that I had, only to spend the rest of the day gacked out of my mind like "let's get these fuckin NUMBERS bro!" Ridiculous.

Dumb old caffeine doesn't hold a candle to it. The real reason pseudo was taken away was because all the tweakers were doing kitchen sink bullshit with stolen cough medicine to make crank and then selling that shit to Indiana truckers, it was crack for people who couldn't get crack. You could already fly off a can of Red Bull, but they had to have more. It was bigger than 4Loko, it was a hell of an era. Motherfuckers were crawling on the roof. Everyone's mom was flipping off of stuff at the drug store that she innocently enough bought for a cold. It explains a lot about the 1995-2005ish era.

There were a lot of different options on the booze racks next to 4Loko, I'm not sure why people latched onto that one brand so hard, probably because it was cheap, or maybe it was the first of its kind. Red Bull doesn't have booze in it. But that's why Red Bull and vodka became a thing, as well, but that drink was a bit too classy to earn the ghetto legend status. For me and my crew, it was Dragon Jooz, which my roommate had to ban from the house. Same shit, though, it was a 4Loko copycat, there were a bunch of them. House parties were nutty for a little while. It was a real obnoxious era for the party people who only smoked weed and had to put up with it.

But the era came to an end. They took the pseudo away from the public. 4Loko and Red Bull both got severe downgrades to "just a bunch of caffeine and maybe booze." A lot of the 4loko copycats vanished forever without their real star ingredient. TheraFlu is probably just aspirin and dust now, or discontinued. Party's over. Thank fuck.

The strange part is how the pseudo wiped everyone's memory somehow. To this day, I still hear people talk about this era like the energy drinks just had a lot of caffeine in them and that's why things were all crazy. No, bro. No. You are missing the most important Horseman in this apocalypse, come on. I think a lot of people weren't all that aware of the ingredients in the can of cheap swill they were pounding, so that's probably why.

Resident Evil 5 x The Internet

They can absolutely kidnap you though

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.

Sorry, I haven't been stealing from Tumblr like I should.

God I love shitty cosplay that still works.

Generally the true problem with trailer parks, and the reason they're so associated with rural white poors (and Hispanics but they never get in the photos) is because these areas just do not have proper rental housing of any sort.

The towns have single family homes, maybe one or two small apartment buildings, if any, and that's it. So if you're too broke to chase a house, but need to hold down a job, there's no place to live. So they build trailer parks, which are dirt cheap from the landowner's perspective, you can get away with a dirt road or two and some concrete pads, the plumbing is probably the most expensive part, but it's going to be greenfield work. The land is going for a song. Everything else is the trailer owner's problem. No building, no building permits, no proper construction, and you can make them mow the damn lawn for you, too. They don't know any better. People with apartment experience know that you're supposed to be maintaining your own fucking property, landlord, but they don't live out here.

A piece of land this size in a proper city is too valuable for this use, though there are still a lot of them in proper cities, it's just that out in Bumfuck Indiana they have no intention of building proper rental housing, and the trailer is a bad investment that poor people don't understand, or worse, they do, actually, but it's this or nothing.

I'm sure this book says much the same. I'm a trailer park kid so I can anticipate what's in it. Hopefully it acts as a useful historical record but that's all it's good for.

Yeah, and I've heard plenty of "Biden sucks but I'm voting for him I guess I suppose since everyone's twisting my arm FREE PALESTINE" type shit so what?

It's that type of election.

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.