I see they mention translation, but that feels like a weird thing to want to do with a copy-paste. If I turn this on and copy some code from an older project and paste it into a new project, will it automatically refactor it into something that doesn't function but looks prettier? It just seems like copy-paste is one of the simplest, dumbest things a computer helps us with in a way that's unobtrusive. Is anyone asking for "smart" copy-paste beyond "paste as plain text?"

One can see a time when most web traffic is bot produced, and the only real income the upper echelon will see is the web advertising revenue, generated by bots, "viewed" by bots, passed between bots, and aggregated by still more bots. Who needs proles when automation can create a giant economic circle-jerk out of what was once an open network filled with easily accessible information?

Yeah, the only subtlety, and one I don't see mentioned at all, is that prior to the pandemic years, employers could get by with saying it's impossible to work from home. After a couple years of working from home, being told it's impossible is a tough pill to swallow, yet that seems to be the corporate stance. Mostly because managers don't know what to do with themselves when they don't have the opportunity to continually micro-manage the day-to-day interactions in person. It tells me there are a lot of managers that, simply put, are redundant, and simply occupying space when they don't have someone to harangue all day in the office.

Because any attempt to create a movement would quickly be flooded by highly motivated, much smaller, but EXTREMELY more well-financed groups to either shut it down outright, or infiltrate and cause them to look like whining morons.

We shouldn't have allowed these companies to gather data the way they did, but that's happened. Now they're massive economic players, as well as huge data thieves. The kind of economic players that can simply buy their way out of any criticism. And anybody not already on board with their agenda is simply a whining lunatic. There can be no valid criticism, for they have deemed themselves the creator of the new god. The one that will supersede their current god: Greed.

How am I supposed to recruit employees for my sweatshops now?

Can attest that autism is way, way, way more prevalent now than it was when we were kids. I live in Seattle, raised 3 kids here, and a third of their peers had autism, Asperger, sensory processing disorder, or something similar. It is more than just more frequent diagnosis, these kids were visibly different in ways that I did not encounter growing up. Never mind that they had food allergies at absolutely shocking rates. It made birthday parties a real landmine as food that at least two kids were not allergic to were rare.

I know shit about vaccine and autism links (knocks wood that my kids were all relatively healthy, by chance, not my awesomeness), and I have no idea what the cause of this massive epidemic is, but it is something, and it would probably help a large swath of future kids to know what that something is.

I call bullshit. You try giving a vaccination to a shark. I promise you, it will cause an attack.

That's an extremely odd way of saying you didn't understand a word I wrote. Was it the word 'nefarious' that threw you? That typically isn't aligned with positive thought.

Let me spell it out more thoroughly: The bad actors would see this as a benefit so that they can justify creating heavy-armor / more formidable versions of the same thing, probably with better offensive weaponry involved.

If you still see that as some sort of "I surrender" call, then I don't know what to tell you. Putting words in my mouth tends to rub me all kinds of the wrong way, and in no way at all did I imply surrender.

They may use AI to accelerate the enshitification, but it's ultimately the company decision makers that decided to expend more effort on forced features no one asked for rather than focusing on security and providing an OS that stays out of the user's way as people have been requesting.

There's the real question, isn't it? At one point, companies were attempting to provide customers with what they wanted, or at the very least, what they said they wanted. Now, especially in tech circles, companies are altering existing products and creating new products that end users are screaming bloody murder angry over, and telling us we should love it. It's more than just bad marketing, it's outright hostility toward customers. And then this motherfucker comes along and asks why we're not impressed when they keep shoveling shit at us we don't want, we've told them we don't want, we keep giving them "backlash over, and they're selling as a way to replace us all at our jobs and in large segments of what we do outside of our jobs as well.

Fuck this guy sideways. Sick to god damned death of the tech leadership not just being out of touch with the userbase, but outright hostile toward us and then surprised when we don't worship their every hostile move.

Proctorio sounds like alt-dimension Cornholio. Can you imagine if those two met up?

I AM CORNHOLIO! I NEED TP FOR MY BUNGHOLE!

I AM PROCTOIO! I NEED LUBRICANT FOR MY FIST!

ARE YOU THREATENING ME?

TP WON'T SAVE YOU NOW!

It's already happening. Our online world started breaking down minds well before the algorithms started shoveling political shit at us in favor of one candidate or another, usually whichever one increased engagement / enragement. If we hadn't let our minds begin to soften, we would have seen through the ever increasing cloud of bullshit surrounding online discourse and seen the ways it is manipulated to provide a few more pennies to the companies behind the technology that allowed that discourse to take place. Arguing with strangers, where some came into a conversation with the best of intentions, and some came in specifically to fuck with people, left people in a semi-shellshocked state of not knowing which part of which argument was real, and which part was completely fictional. As time has moved on, we're now at a point where no two people really believe in the same version of reality, and the divide between us continues to widen. We've let the algorithms dictate public discourse. First via online discourse, and then by letting "news" stations grab headlines from that online discourse, even when those stations know full good and well that their reaching their hands into a festering septic system and pulling out massive wads of half-rotted shit.

The "war" against the machines was lost a little bit at a time. And nobody seems at all interested in pulling us back a bit from that loss and reassessing. In fact, it seems we're rushing ever faster toward the very thing that's causing us to fall apart.

Game of Thrones wasn't a movie, it was a television show where the creators gave up on the concept part way through and then bum-rushed the finish line. But, to your point, *EVERYBODY* was critical of that, including the people that were actually involved in the scene.

That would be the oligarch level folks, waiting for their government handouts while the rest of us get hollowed out in the fall.

In the end? Into the pockets of the already uber-wealthy. The FED may not state that as their outright goal, but that's where it's going to go. And, when the economy inevitably "corrects," they'll find a way to grab great gobs of money out of the hands of the middle class to help extend that ever-escalating money mountain of the already wealthy so that they don't suffer any losses while the rest of us struggle to survive. That's always the end result of these economy-wide pump and dumps. Pump, pump, pump some more, and when the bottom finally falls out, throw taxpayer money at the top as a parachute so they can gently glide down over the refuse of the finances of the rest of society.

As massive as this pump cycle is, it's gonna be a harsh reckoning when it comes around.