"It takes four hundred thirty people to man a starship. With this, you don't need anyone. One machine can do all those things they send men out to do now. Men no longer need die in space, or on some alien world. Men can live, and go on to achieve greater things than fact-finding and dying for galactic space, which is neither ours to give or to take. They can't understand. We don't want to destroy life, we want to save it!" - Dr Daystrom

If you ignore the plot of the episode (where M5 is doing buggy shit and taking Daystrom's sanity with it), I think his speech sums up my outlook on technological progress pretty well. If somewhere, someone is toiling, that's an error to be corrected. In a weird way, creating the fat slobs of WALL-E is, in fact, the goal. (Though for some reason, I prefer to picture Hedonismbot from Futurama as my true ideal.)

As for how to solve the resulting "finally, we can all afford to be fat slobs, so now we are all fat slobs" problem, I dunno, someone else can worry about that. ;-)

What you wrote reminded me of Barnett Newman painting Who’s afraid of red, yellow, and blue which definitely is not my style, and younger me would most likely written off as more or less nonsense, but watching the video Who’s afraid of modern art: Vandalism, video games, and fascism I learned that the colours used are actually hard to reproduce and requite some skill I was unaware of.

Still not my style, but I can now appreciate that other people might have it as their.

Self-hosted Atlassian products seem to be just fine.

As for what "they said", they also said this cloud shit would be cheaper. It isn't.

This is a plan intended to kill ad blockers. One of the major issues advertisers have right now is that they can't guarantee that their code will be executed as intended. A lot of ad systems now have anti-blocker technology that checks to make sure an ad loaded successfully, and if it didn't or if the dimensions are wrong or if the element is messed with, throw up a page-wide dialog to block access to the site. (Or do what Slashdot does at present, throw you into an infinite alert() loop.)

But that requires JavaScript to work. Block that JavaScript, and you block the ability to block ad-blockers.

Add in things to insure "integrity" of JavaScript delivered to the client, and you break that. No more blocking scripts, no more blocking ads - or at least, no more blocking the scripts detecting if you're blocking ads.

I am sure my dedicated 5080 with cuda can run circles around your mac

Grace Slick said the music of "White Rabbit" was inspired by Miles Davis' "Sketches of Spain." Ergo, not art. Copyright denied.

art is made by artists, not robots

Can a cyborg be an artist? Can photography be art, or does using a camera disqualify it?

I don't consider myself an artist, but I suppose I could be. Like a lot of other computer dorks my age, back in the day I played around with ray-tracing and the classical mirrored sphere floating above a checkboard plane. (You too, huh?)

Then I tilted camera a little bit, changed the checkboard into a colorful 'Brot. Then multiple mirrored spheres, and a sun-like light source floating above it all (actually many light sources, slightly offset, to give the shadow edges more of a diffusion), a gradually shaded the sky to look like a winter sunset (I remember many January evenings walking home and looking at Albuquerque's evening western horizon, and thinking about parametric functions based on the angle, to recreate that blue-to-green-to-red look), then added more complex solids as I got a little better at the math, sent 4 or 9 rays through each pixel and anti-aliased, and ..

.. then focus moved away from the composition to performance, where I had a whole Netware network of machines at my workplace (shh, sneaking in there at night) to draw in parallel, using record-locks to control which y values were done/undone. And some of the machines were 486s with floating point hardware(!!) (OMG so fast!), and then ..

.. ok, and by the time I got bored and moved onto the next thing, I'll admit that what I had was still a cliche pastiche that few people would call art. It was crap, but it was damn fun to make, and that was the whole point. And so ends my story (but not my rant!).

But what if I had stuck with it? What if I had something to say? (Which I didn't.) I didn't draw those pictures, but I "drew" the thing that drew them. I specified them, and there was no limit to the complexity that could have been taken on. If had kept with it and had made something good (which I didn't), but then someone said I hadn't been the creator of my images, or that they were unfit for copyright whereas someone's freehand-drawn picture was fit, I think I would have resented that!

Wouldn't you?

The guy in the story didn't write Midjourney, but if he had, I would totally support his claim.

And waitaminute, so what if I wrote the program? That part of my work was just in getting it to work, and then getting it to work faster, and that's when I got bored because Dammit Jim, I'm a programmer, not an artist. But the other part of the work was the composition, the arrays of "objects" (this was straight C and nothing about the program was OO) and their positions and properties. What if someone else took my program but then modified the arrays to model the scene to their specification? Would their work be unfit for copyright?

Wikipedia is an interesting concept and it works decently well as a place to go read a bunch of general information and find decent sources. But LLMs are feeding that information to people in a customized, granular format that meets their exact individual needs and desires. So yeah, probably not as interested in reading your giant wall of text when they want 6 specific lines out of it.

Remember when Encyclopædia Britannica was crying about you stealing their customers, Wikipedia? Yeah, this is what they experienced.

They do. And they always have. I don't know how to describe this phenomena to you in a way that communicates what this is like. For disclosure, I have three kids. Two are of high-school age and are largely too old for this particular meme. The third is in elementary school and that's where this seems to hit the hardest.

Those two numbers together is enough to get better than 90% of a group of elementary school students to reflexively shout "SIIIIIIIIX-SEEEEEVEEEEEN." You can punish them. You can deny them recess. You can tell them they get extra homework. They don't care.

Part of the reason they don't care is that educational philosophy doesn't allow particularly hard-nosed punishments for little kids. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. When I was a kid the principal was allowed to literally beat kids with a wooden bat which seems like maybe not the best idea.

But the other reason they don't care is that the meme is almost universally reinforced by people they like and care about: influencers and video content creators. That group is fairly rarified and the meme is extremely wide-spread so, while they're all engaged with personalized content, nearly all of it carries the meme. The people pushing against it are teachers and parents but part of the appeal of the meme is that it is absurdest (kids don't know what that means but they appreciate it anyway) and irritates parents/teachers/etc.

It's like the "jingle bells batman smells" song when we were kids, but not seasonal, linked to two integers, and ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE in media pitched to elementary aged kids.

And so it's really, really easy for it to cause teachers to lose control of a classroom. It's not that the content of the stupid shit that kids say is unique or different here, but that the level of disruption and the ubiquity of the issue is notable.

We are also (I assume) college educated professionals. Not the guys with hs diplomas being fired for being 4 minutes late from their potty break at Walmart where they are treated like kids and can't have their phones out etc. all for 35k a year.

These are American statistics of course. Terrible management who are a different breed rule blue collar jobs. It goes back to slavery and class structure for these roles.

Only 25% are college educated. Terrible work environments motives my education

Is it? Or were many wanting revenge and payback for increasing salaries since 2019 and doing remote work?

The frustrating thing is wages were constant from 2000 to 2019 for most folks. A few professionals they did skyrocket which skewed some data. As a system administrator 75k remained constant for 18 years! Now it is finally like 115k, but adjusted for inflation you are screwed if you tried to buy a home or rent today.

75k could get you a mcmansion in 2000. Today it is not enough for a starter home, even in an affordable area. It is 1 bedroom apartment only.

Meanwhile, CEOs and leadership are furious and think prices need to return not realizing at all that $ sign doesn't have the purchasing power it did for so many years. So yes people are angry at both sides.

You are in a minority.

Statistics I read is 75% of people hate their jobs. Be greateful!

I wonder if it has always been like this or were there times when that number was much lower?

It does impact these criteria as it shows bad leadership and management and culture.

If the culture is treating you like an assembly line worker when you are not, then that damages morale and kills loyality.

Employees who do not want to spend over 2 hours a day and $300 a month in gas just to join Teams meetings in a shared open office when they can do the same at home, so they can be watched by managers who do not believe in remote work or self atanomy and feeling stressed and disgusted by disrepect. SHOCKING!

Musk brought micro management and Style X Management from the 1950s back in style again, and away from Style Y and empowermment. It is all the rage now in leadership. Attendence, attendence, and attendence, and firing if you make a mistake. Forget about trying new innovative things and being creative.

THe pendelumn has swung back to the employers HARD from the employees and it is showing. I wonder if this is revenge syndrome from the C Suite who felt blackmailed to pay people more back when in 2019 they paid the same in 2005 and in office attendance where workers finally got a pay raise and gave the finger to in office work? Now the jobs are paying closer to 2020 levels.