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Comment Every time you ask chat GTP a question (Score 1) 16

It uses about a bottle of water. I don't know how true that is but you can bet it uses a hell of a lot of water. Yes of course it's not necessary for it to use and dispose of water but it is much cheaper than having the more expensive recirculating systems. And AI is already on money loser so you can bet your ass that's one cost they will be happy to externalize.

So sure let's find a desert where water is scarce and build giant data centers for replacing white collar workers.

It really pisses me off the water and electricity I need to live are going to be taken away from me so that I can also lose my job. And the bastards are going to get away with it too because we are stupid and we're going to let them do it.

Comment Re:FIFY: âoeWe Got Rid of the Poorâ (Score 1) 59

Lots and lots of Americans cut everything right to the edge. There are lots of jobs in New York that pay like shit and people aren't forced to take and order to get enough experience that they can move somewhere else that isn't so fucking miserable to live.

So I can see somebody driving in not as some sort of status symbol but because they needed to being put off by this massively.

Remember an economist calling modern American Life a fragile existence. No safety no protections everything can come crashing down in an instant and then you just get replaced by somebody behind you in the line.

Comment Re:Strange what counts as "Restaurant" these days (Score 1) 37

The number of people who go to restaurants for food is vanishingly small. Most people go because they are either too tired to cook or they just want a place to hang out with friends and maybe drink some booze.

So while I certainly agree with you that to me it seems strange to spend all that money on shitty reheated food to most people it's the going not what do you get when you're there.

Also I have kind of a fucked up sense of taste and smell so my kid would pretty much take anything except what I cooked because I was in absolutely terrible cook, still am too.

Oh and sometimes it's just dumb memories. You grow up eating a certain type of slop from chain restaurants and you associate good things from childhood with it. Burger King might be terrible food but I have associations of eating it after seeing a movie or getting a new toy.

Comment Re:Troubleshoot Tree (Score 1) 37

So haven't done quite a bit of tech support I can tell you that there is no such app.

Many many years ago there was but companies decided to fire their local documentation teams and either insist the employees right to documentation in addition to their regular duties, which of course they don't do, or the outsource documentation writing to Indians who barely speak English but are super super super cheap

The result is if you are calling tech support you are almost entirely reliant on institutional knowledge.

Companies are trying to make it so that that institutional knowledge ends up in AI. I don't think tech support people are intelligent enough to realize that's happening when their knowledge is being plumbed. But I also don't think they're capable of writing documentation that would be useful to an AI.

It's possible that the companies will start to hire real tech writers again to feed the AIs and if they do that then yeah, you'll be able to just chat bought your way to fixing just about any problem except things that need to go to the actual development team.

The fun part is we are about to put pretty much every white collar worker on the planet out of work. And the blue collar workers will follow because the high earnings of high productivity white collar workers are what allow us to hire blue collar workers to do all the other work they do.

Basically the entire economy is going to collapse. If you've ever seen what Sudan looks like think of that but the entire world. A tiny amount of people living in God like wealth, a handful of people servicing them and then object poverty everywhere.

Oh and drones to keep the rabble in line.

It's called techno feudalism and I don't think we can stop at anymore. The only thing that could have stopped it was electoral politics and that has failed us. Violence won't work because that just turns into a right wing extremist government and they are going to maintain the status quo.

Comment I go to Florida 2-3x a year...you're wrong (Score 1) 17

Want to stop plastic into the ocean, talk to southeast Asia, China, India, and Africa. Seems strange that Florida allows plastic bags and does not have a problem. All this did was take more money from citizens to give to their government so they can have nicer offices and higher salaries. Govern me hard daddy

You're talking about Florida in the United States, right?...because that shithole has a ton of litter all throughout, especially in Central Florida, like along the I-4....much more so than in the communities I live in with bag fees and plastic bag bans. Sorry, your state may be cleaner than the poorest neighborhoods in NYC, maybe some abandoned rustbelt cities or warzone neighborhoods...but that's about it.

Comment Reusable bags are behavioral momentum conspiracy (Score 1) 17

By making you bring bags, you're more suggestible! Giving small commands make you more likely to obey larger ones. This is well established for special needs children and ABA. If you have a difficult child with a learning disability who doesn't want to do something, ABA therapists will give them a simple command first as part of behavioral momentum . So you want a kid to brush their teeth and they refuse?...try asking them to touch their nose first...then clap their hands...and weirdly enough, they're more likely to obey afterwards.

So if everyone else is throwing out conspiracy theories, I'll make up one...by telling shoppers they need to provide their own bag (in my town, you get charged a fee if you use a reusable bag), the retailers embraced this long before it was mandated by local ordinance because it is like ABA...Bring your bag...walk through the produce section to get to the dairy (you came for milk, but now you're thinking about fruit)...buy our special. My baseless conspiracy theory is that reusable bags make you more susceptible to following commands.

Comment Nah, you're just a snob (Score 1) 37

I may be old-fashioned, but points of sale for mass-produced stuff from factories are so much not what I would consider a "Restaurant". And in order to win me as a "repeat customer" I would rather like the Chef of the (unique, non-franchise) restaurant to prepare some interestingly tasting meals from fresh high quality groceries - without any computer or AI gimmicks.

The point of big businesses like this is they either charge less or are more widely distributed than superior local restaurants that use conventional food instead of partially processed foods. Few eat at McDonald's because they LIKE it more than a superior restaurant. They eat it there because they can't afford the places you prefer or none are around. Applebees and iHop are extremely inexpensive restaurants.

Everyone fucking knows fresh is better...it's just some can't the extra cost or don't know where they can find one when they're on the road and their kids are hungry. You're basically saying...why drive a Toyota when a Lexus is superior?

Comment I don't think that works anymore (Score 1) 52

If we still enforced antitrust law I think you would have a point but we stopped doing that 40 years ago.

So the way it plays out is right now if you're a large Enterprise VMware has you by the balls. As others have pointed out there really isn't anything that can scale the way VMware does and broadcom knows that which is why they're charging through the nose.

Smaller shops can and will switch to other products but like the grandparents is implying VMware doesn't care because when you can soak your big clients that hard you come out ahead.

Now 20 30 40 years ago if you did that then a competitor would use their access to smaller clients to climb their way up the ranks and then they go head-to-head competing with you.

After 40 years of zero antitrust law enforcement broadcom is going to spot that competitor coming a mile away, drop their pants on pricing for a year or two and run them out of business while poaching all their best engineers, and then buy up the skeletal remains to get the patents.

I don't think people realize just how much we have given up in the last 40 years to mega corporations. Especially as tech nerds because we are only just now getting put on the same menu that the blue collar guys have been on for the last 40 years.

Comment I've grown to hate the things (Score 1) 17

I started bringing reusable bags because they were insulated and it's summer. I keep a handful of the plastic bags from the supermarket around for emergency trash but I find that if I am not consistently bringing my own bags I quickly wind up with way way way more supermarket plastic bags and I can possibly use for emergency trash cans.

They're too thin and flimsy and full of holes to use for anything that has actual garbage in it. I don't eat out very often so the constant grocery trips mean that I end up buried in them if I don't just throw half of them out.

The only downside is it's made me picky about how my groceries get bagged trying to get the cold stuff in the right place with the cold packs I usually carry with me to keep ice cream from defrosting.

On the plus side just so I can really piss some people here off bringing my own bags let's be put the n95 mask I wear everywhere in public in the bag so I don't accidentally forget it and have to drive back home to get it.

And just to really confuse and irritate those folks I drive an SUV. albeit one I purchase from a mechanic I trust because it's what they had at the time and I needed a car. Also it's old and I barely drive it. I don't know how SUV owners put up with the cost of gas when you have an actual commute...

Comment You can get an AI to do basically anything (Score 3, Interesting) 45

Because llms are just fancy search engines.

There is a entire new world of lunatics and scam artists forming cults around various llms. It's becoming a problem because they will reinforce various mental illnesses. They are often tailored to encourage engagement because of course they are and so if you come at them looking for them to tell you they are God or you are God they cheerfully will.

The problem with these new software tools is we aren't ready for them as a species. Not in the cool killer robot way but in the incredibly stupid society not prepared for a 3rd industrial revolution way.

It's like giving a loaded handgun to a toddler. Only without even the pretense of adult supervision.

There's no taking it away though. And there's nobody to punish the idiot handing the toddler the gun.

I'd like to see us just grow up real fast so that we don't start shooting other people and or ourselves but I don't think that's going to happen.

Comment Musk owns Congress (Score 1) 161

The single biggest shift in American politics in the last 100 years happened while hardly anyone was looking.

Elon came out and said that anyone who crossed him in Congress would face a fully funded primary challenger.

If you're in the House of Representatives and your Republican that means Elon told you in no uncertain terms that if you crossed him he would end your career.

Primary elections usually have very little money in them relative to the general. Musk can easily fund 300 of them and completely replace every Republican in the house of representatives. It wouldn't even be a stretch for him to do the same in the Senate although that would be a lot more money.

It is the most naked abuse of the power of money we have ever seen out in the open and we all just kind of either didn't notice or collectively shrugged.

The majority party is basically owned Lock stock and barrel by one illegal immigrant. And it's an illegal immigrant who has already worked with our direct geopolitical enemies more than once...

The problem is we don't have a functioning news system or journalism anymore. The information is out there but it's not packaged in a way that people can consume and understand.

Comment That wasn't the problem (Score 1) 161

The problem was Tesla is collapsing faster than musk can pull out the value for himself.

Elon has a plan to get a 55 billion dollar pay package. When that hits, and it will he's just working on the paperwork and buying off some legislators to get laws to make it legal, when that hits it's going to basically destroy the company.

That is more profit than Tesla has made in its entire life. It's going to starve their R&d divisions when they are already struggling to keep up with newer electric cars from Hyundai and Kia and BMW.

The stock market has figured out musk lies. Also his self-driving cars don't work and that was fine when nobody had working self-driving cars but Google has them all over the goddamn place. So he can't use that as a hype engine anymore.

Musk politics were so bad that it was and continues to Crater Tesla sales. Europe is basically stopped buying them entirely. China was always going to go away for Tesla because they tend to only allow foreign companies in long enough to build their own local manufacturers and they are at that point already.

The kind of person who buys an electric car is often a slightly left of center highly paid professional of the shave the whales variety. Even if that's not the majority it's a large enough percentage that even in America his sales continue to drop. And the price of used Tesla's has absolutely collapsed. There's a YouTuber who went in the sell his because he wanted to switch back to a big honking truck and he waited two weeks after getting his first quote and lost 4K in value.

So musk is backing off of politics to try and keep Tesla alive long enough for him to kill and eat it himself.

All of this means that if you own stock and you aren't extremely risk protected you need to sell it now. It's not a question of if Tesla will collapse it's when and how much money Elon Musk will make off the collapse...

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