You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems

It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.

Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.

Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.

At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing “dir” into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.

Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.

Be less lazy

“Damn this sucks, I’m doing the thing”

“Hey you lazy stupid fuck, go back in time and do it sooner”

Why is the Internet like this?

Always worth keeping in mind that these fuckers are selling snake oil to one another under the guise of national security.

This technology is dangerous not because it works as advertised but because it creates a vacuum of responsibility for when the very manual killing starts

Israel’s Lavender AI is a great example of this in action. It doesn’t work in any meaningful way. All it does is label casualties in a bombing run as “terrorists” after the fact.

It can say it can, when asked by an investor. And really, what else matters?

If the AI cannot run the business then we must conclude that the business does not produce anything of real value.

Nothing to do but downsize and move on.

Microsoft is in the process of downsizing to the tune of 3% of its global workforce and rising.

Could be they really are unironically cruising towards a CEO overseeing a bunch of spam bot email accounts they’re treating as headcount.

Nothing however breaks because of AI

The trajectory is the same, but AI put more gas in the tank in a machine that one might have assumed had reached its limits a decade ago when outsourcing had played itself out.

What NYT and other legacy media is mostly worried about is that with AI psyops and fake news is becoming more and more democratized instead of an expensive top-down ordeal and for making harder for anybody to trust anything anymore, a trust that they relied on to control the narrative.

I think you’ve got it a bit backwards. The NYT operates as a paper of record in large part because it emits a signal that echoes through downstream media. And that stems from the general trust the paper has cultivated (undeserved trust, but welcome to the dictatorship of the bourgeois, folks).

The implementation of AI as a system of record is replacing the NYT as a trustworthy source, in part because the NYT has finally degraded its own credibility. And in part because why would I go fight with a bunch of paywalls and pop-ups and ad banners on the NYT when I can (seemingly) get the same information from a nice clean OpenAI / Gemini / Deepseek prompt.

The expense of setting up a system of record is still enormous. The catch is that the AI companies have more money to propagandize their own reputation. Meanwhile, the NYT and the WaPo and the cable news channels have been suffocating in comparative obscurity when they weren’t outright touting AI venues as alternatives to themselves.

News isn’t being democratized. Its as horded as ever. These older outlets have simply become vectors to send people to the new and far more efficient Consent Manufacturing Machines.

I mean, this is the same guy who said we’d be living on Mars in 2025.

However you want to phrase it, they’re very different problems with different solutions.

“Someone picked the lock on my door and got into my house” is meaningfully distinct from “Someone stole my keys”.

You can keep your nasty chips

You can argue it’s a classic ID-10T error in your workflow.

But nobody has discovered a security vulnerability within the system architecture. This is the system operating as designed, abet with the wrong person standing in front of the terminal.

I don’t know how we got from exploding pagers to space lasers.

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Proximity to the equator and high elevation make for ideal launch sites. Then eastward facing, because you want to run counter to the earth’s spin as you launch and be out over open water if something fucks up. One reason why Kenya, Brazil, and Indonesia were floated as a high efficiency international spaceports decades ago, when efficiency was considered more important than inflating a billionaire’s ego.

I mean… its a big deal if you’re anywhere near the launchpad. Or, in or around South Padre Island.

Also can’t help but notice that Starbase, Texas is practically hugging the US/Mexico border. Almost as though Abbott didn’t want this shit landing in his own backyard when it failed.

Heavy Lift drones can carry upwards of 55 lbs. And there’s no reason you’re limited to one.

We’ve been busting through constitutional amendments with abandon. I don’t think you could point to one that this administration would honor or respect.

none of the checks and balances have any balls

Trump took full control of the DHS and the FBI, staffed it with loyal goons, and is actively arresting/assaulting anyone who stands in his way.

This isn’t a matter of “no balls”, its a matter of Biden handing Trump’s biggest supporters a bunch of money and guns back in 2021 and Trump telling these guys “Arrest all the Bidencrats” the moment he took office.

Dafuq is any judge or legislator supposed to do in a country when ICE can kick down your door?

They fucked up thinking they’d never lose power. Now its too late to politics their way out of the mess.