The position of the Luddites was that the gains from increases in productivity from automation should not accrue solely to the already wealthy, but should also benefit the working class. Rather than only making the rich richer, they should enable us to work less and benefit more.

Fast forward to today. As worker productivity has increased, the workers' share of the profit has decreased, and this has enabled the owning class to dominate every aspect most people's existence by controlling government through capital, exactly as predicted.

Trump is obviously senile. He doesn't understand anything except the hamburgers that get put in front of him periodically.

Our country is run by the heritage foundation not by Donald Trump.

Because it means the American empire, which is propped up by the dollar, will have gone down the drain completely and we will still have the ridiculous military and we will use it.

Failing empires will inevitably invade other countries and loot them in order to fill their coffers. And we have a growing Christian nationalist movement and things we are literally protected by God so the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't going to be a deterrent. Jesus will just swap those pesky icbms away.

They will probably ship it by rail, while still not allowing us to have rail for transportation, or for most goods. Just like when the auto companies (etc.) attacked rail transport in the forties, and shut down profitable private rail lines in order to promote their products, but they kept rail lines running to their factories so they could bring in steel and export autos. But even those trains will still run on diesel, both so they can profit from that, and because it's a much better fuel for that purpose than depending on hydrogen. It gives great energy density with very high reliability and low volatility.

They've spent a lot of money on it, and it's not doing that thing you say they were trying to do, so they are incompetent at best. I agree they're not dimwitted, but hydrogen really isn't slowing down EV adoption anywhere. The same people who would buy EVs are the people that would buy HFCVs.

What the hell are you talking about? If my net worth is $100 million and it drops by 90% I'm still filthy stinking rich and will never have to work again unless I blow through the money on extravagant spending.

And those numbers get a hell of a lot worse when you take into account billionaires.

This is before we talk about nepo babies and contacts and networking that you get to do when you're a member of the ruling class. The ruling elite have class solidarity while anyone that really works for a living does not. They take care of each other. We eat each other alive at the slightest provocation.

I will never understand people that defend the ruling class. It is just the most bizarre thing to me. I can empathize with most things understanding the underlining emotions even if I don't feel them myself but that's one that is completely alien to me.

And telling people they can unionize if they want is like telling Jews in Auschwitz they can go find another job. The people running the camp might have something to say about that...

Again I will never understand why people pretend we don't have a ruling class after they've been told and shown that we do. I get the people who never encounter that information, it's not exactly talked about, but I don't get the people that have the information and just pretend it isn't there.

Just a reminder that the steam machine won in the end.

We do know because "AI" tools have been used for a long while. They weren't LLMs, but rather other kinds of guessing tools. There are a bunch of them regularly used in CG. That's why I scoff at the idea that this is a new problem, as it certainly is not, and this industry is responsible in large part for promoting the use of these tools.

I don't mock the actual problem, though. It's a real problem, it is just the same problem as every other automation problem. The scope has been creeping since the original examples of it. We accept it because it increases productivity, and we demand that for its own sake. And we do that because we've been brainwashed into thinking that productiveness is next to godliness. But what is the point of increased productivity if it doesn't serve humanity, but rather only the least human segment of our population that would just as soon see the rest of us dead?

So is any economic system based around not only enabling but promoting selfishness. And here we are, watching it happen in realtime.

PR for selfishness.

The point at which they might actually have to act like they care, yes.

BTW you're wrong, that was not their position.

You don't understand the import of your own argument.

Nice solidarity there bro. Shame if something should have already happened to it.

It's the problem, not a problem. As long as you only care about you, and not about anyone else, there's no reason why anyone should care about you. In fact, it's actively harmful for them to waste time caring about you, because they're not going to get that care back.

Microsoft is "interesting" when it comes to UI because they are both co-responsible for the dominant paradigm we all know and use and are used to and hey, actually works... and have gone to shit since.

Microsoft was part of the Motif WG, Motif implemented much of IBM's CUA, and to this day Windows and all popular Unix DEs both still do. But on the other hand, Microsoft's greatest independent contribution to UI remains the start menu, which isn't even something they really invented; its best-loved form (From Windows 7) is basically somewhere in between the NeXT Dock menu and the later versions of the Apple menu. And the new versions of it suck.

Thanks for getting it. This is what the Luddites were saying, and why I like to invoke them despite it making people mad because they've been gaslit over what their message was. It wasn't "smash all the things", it was "everyone should benefit from the things, and if not, there is no reason we should not smash them". They were people with nothing left to lose. Continuing automation will make that of virtually all of us, and certainly every one of us here. If we were important enough for it not to, we wouldn't be here.

I'm not even close to being against technology, I have been enamored of it and computing in particular since I was a child. I'm only against it making the entire world a holocaust. As long as we allow it to be controlled by capital, that's exactly where it will go. The plebes are no longer charming when they are unnecessary — that is, when we are unnecessary. And as long as we keep fighting over who deserves to eat instead of fighting for everyone to be able to eat, that's exactly where we're headed.