Productivity did soar, by rather quite a bit. But companies did not use that increase in productivity to offer the same stuff with fewer employees, they used it to offer ever more complex products and services, while keeping them affordable.

Did you understand anything in that marketdroid BS? I didn't.

All this screams to me is: avoid - avoid - avoid.

Industrialism has added decades to the average human lifespan. We shouldn't be blind to the ill effects, and be open to improving things, but let's not focus on only the downsides.

and summer is ultra-messed-up too here. We've had 2 days at 64 degrees this year, but otherwise it barely goes above 50. It's really rare here to have such a long, sustained bout of cold weather around midsummer.

Musk certainly is overly optimistic regarding timelines, but "move fast and break things" (for lack of a better term) has been proven to work in space, by SpaceX. It gave us a launch system that was cheap to develop and cheap to operate. Everyone in the business was laughing at Musk for keeping "breaking things" and crashing rockets while trying to land one. Then he did. And got good at it. Now they only make the news when one of their (many many) boosters fails to make a soft landing.

As for Starship, I've no idea what kind of data they have and how they are acting on it, but from a distance it does look like there are some major problems to overcome, and making a few changes before sending up another one might not be the right approach. The idea about "move fast and break things" is not to design and test until you are 99% sure, you spend a lot less effort in getting to 90%, and hoping that a failure will point to the error(s) you missed. But Starship smells like it's at 70% right now (or whatever the number are, for illustrative purposes only)

Then why the eye-wateringly high bills for SLS and Starliner? They got to build on the exact same body of knowledge available to SpaceX.

Another great example of garbage behaviour being the result of employees gaming garbage metrics.

The tech world isn't the "intellectual" class. It's the crass profit-at-all-costs business class. That's why they market AI: they know perfectly well AI is shit and nobody but corporate bean counters want it, but corporate bean counters is where the money is.

It's becoming a selling point.

Hell, I even watched a video leaked from some OnlyFans account that had the preamble "This content creator prides herself in making her own content herself entirely: no AI bullshit involved!" If the porn industry rejects it, you know it's bad for business.

That's what I use AI for as well: a first step. The biggest difference AI and regular sources, is that the latter give you a lot of clues regarding the accuracy of the information. The source, the website, the way the information is written, context like article titles, all of these give some hint about how well the author understands the material, and if their answer is even relevant to your question. The AI however will always appear authoritative, even if they are obviously wrong, and with important context stripped out. Sometimes you get an answer that looks plausible, but is invalid, or about a different version of the gadget you are asking about.

AI has been great for generating artwork, logos, sounds and so on, for small personal projects. And I've use AI deepfake voice generation to provide voice-over for game mods (some of the voice actors have given modders explicit permission to use their voice like that). It lets me do stuff that was completely out of my reach just a few years ago, or things for which I have zero talent.

I don't want AI slop in the kernel I rely on for work. Fuck that guy.

Sadly I run Sway.

As for RDP, if your internet is speedy enough, it's fine. I work remotely regularly and I RDP into my Linux box at work no problem.

So when Lindsey starts reading from her AmEx-approved script, callers are infuriated by what they perceive to be another machine.

If she's accurately executing the programmers' script, I'd say she is a machine. Somebody port Doom to her!

This is a fuckin' awesome idea, but there's an easy improvement over the red rectangle and block symbol. Seriously, dude, you gotta use the sign images from They Live (1988). You know you want to.

If people don't have a government-granted monopoly on their features, they'll have no incentive to have any features at all.