You should read up on the history of the Tour de France. Those original runs were coke fueled insanity, with horse tranquilizers used so the athletes could sleep each night, only to wake up, suck up as many uppers as they could with breakfast, and do it all over again. It's amazing there weren't more deaths on the course, the way they abused themselves to pull off those runs.

The way these techbros behave, I wouldn't put it past them to offer prizes for fights to the death, gladiator style. They want to be god-kings, and god-kings watch people kill each other for sport.

Loser's daughters automatically become techbro sex slaves. For incentive. See? Win-win1

I was thinking the same thing on the average. I'm assuming executives will get the biggest share of that, while the common workers will get, what, say 10k? Not that that's anything to sneeze at, but let's not pretend the average low-level person is getting 340k.

At this point? Why the hell not? If we're going to create a dystopian hellscape, we just as well have some legit predators around that will kill indiscriminately. Think how entertaining it would be to turn on the news and see a "flock" of raptors storming Washington, D.C.

While they do have control of the media in a lot of aspects, the economic indicators have long been subsumed by whatever Wall Street happens to be pitching. And Wall Street right now is giddy on a scale rarely seen in the past, because AI has become a call-sign for "lowering payroll costs," which in Wall Street terms is P-A-R-T-Y time, because putting people out of a job is a MASSIVE win for the owner class and the investors, even if on a scale as large as we're seeing it now, it could cause widespread societal collapse via economic suicide. None of them have the forethought to realize that firing this many people in such fast waves may lower the ability for the public to purchase anything, while also lowering the amount of tax people are paying both through sales and through income taxes. Government becomes underfunded, and eventually even the highest of the high on the handing-money-up chain will feel that lack of spending power in the public.

Eventually, it'll all catch up to the investor class. That'll be when all the news will turn to, "In events absolutely no one could have predicted, a total surprise beyond the scope of any understanding, we've come into a recession." Nothing that happens to the general public matters at all until it hits Wall Street in the pocketbook. And while they can really blame themselves for the coming smack, I'm sure they'll find some way to twist it into being the consumer's fault. They always do. To justify the government handing them more money while telling those that have been fired that they should have planned better.

The answer is obviously yes. There are pennies to be fleeced from the masses, and not fleecing the customer for every possible penny you can fleece them for is the greatest sin a corporation can commit. Promises mean nothing in the face of profit potential.

My kingdom for a mod point. Have an 'atta boy' instead. I needed that laugh.

Despite economists and talking heads telling us otherwise, the stock market doesn't reflect reality. The stock market is literally a collective hallucination propagation machine. And right now, the hallucination of choice is AI. Look at how much the stock market thought All Birds, a shitty shoe company, deserved for putting out a single press release mentioning their interests in becoming an AI company. You think that bump was based on reality?

While everybody running their own would be incredibly stupid, not to mention increase power draw and resource usage by orders of magnitude if everyone tried to duplicate a search engine DB on their own system, I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen some form of cooperative / community driven web search alternatives pop up. Yes, it would likely be something people would need to chip in for, but I certainly wouldn't be opposed to tossing a fiver or maybe even more each month toward a shared web crawler with a decent front-end and a few folks to maintain it. If features were kept locked to a minimal working config, and there was no corporate mandate for feature bloat and shovel ads, it wouldn't need some massive ongoing team after the initial spin-up. I'm sure if it grew an appreciable community around it it would get the corporatists salivating over the prospect of buying it and shoving features and ads at us, so we'd have to come up with some form of covenant and legal protection from such actions. Which probably means a lawyer on staff. Which probably means an HR department to keep the lawyer contained. Which now means an accounting department to keep HR contained. Which probably means a physical presence somewhere. Which means a maintenance staff. Which....

Shit, seeds of a good idea instantly turned to the same old bullshit. Never mind.

You can turn most of it off, but apply a security update and it all mysteriously comes back on. I have a script I run after every update to turn everything back off, but it's a choice Microsoft has made, and they keep making it. The vast majority aren't going to dig into the guts of the system to turn all that shit off, and the corporate machine wants all that garbage in the user's face.

I have another theory. They know precisely how demeaning it is and that's part of the reason they so cherish the term.

Mostly all the bullshit bolt-ons they've been shoveling the last five years or so. Copilot, AI everything, advertising in the bar, forced news pop-up if you accidentally let the mouse contact the wrong part of the bar that refuses to go away no matter where you click, and all the annoyances of MS exclusive UI "improvements" over the usual shared UI elements.

Hush. Let them do the stupid thing. If they eventually price themselves out of the market because Windows needs the most powerful machines available when it's almost impossible to buy even moderately upper-tier machines, will that really be a loss for the general public?

We've all expected Microsoft Linux at some point. Azure is probably a good proving ground for them. And now that they've flat-out denied that there will ever be a Microsoft Desktop Linux, we can start the countdown until the release of that. My guess is it'll be the Explorer shell running on top of a Linux Kernel, because they won't give up that terrible UI they've invested so much in and the familiarity will be far more important to the corporate users than the kernel running under it.

As doomy as it sounds, I kind of wonder at this point if this isn't what some involved in tech circles are hoping for. If they can trigger complete social / societal collapse, it would be a *LOT* easier to convince the remaining government structures that the only possible solution is to hand the reins over to those that own the technology that "can save us all." Which is exactly the sales-pitch the AI prophets have been slinging since the start of the AI obsession. Maybe the end goal isn't removing the need for workers within the economy. Maybe the end goal is just to destroy whatever's left of society so that the haves can pick the bones of the corpse, and finally own everything, with no one left to fight for the scraps.