There is a massive automation push going on. And it's naive to think that it doesn't work at all.

At the very least you can use it to get quick answers that would normally require more skilled googling than most people can do.

Those kind of productivity boosts quickly turn into layoffs and reductions in force.

And remember good enough is always good enough when you have no competition because you haven't been enforcing antitrust law in decades. Yes the quality of AI generated products might be shit but you're going to have to buy something at some point to live and you're going to have to buy it from one of seven companies because they own basically everything.

And if a competitor does start to come up they will either be run out of business or bought and there's nothing anyone can do about it because we're not going to start voting for politicians who will enforce antitrust law. Even if you do your neighbors don't.

Both the theme of the story and the AI brain fart. And I suppose the suckers who voted for the YOB, too, while I'm at it?

*sigh*

s/This is/These are/

"These is not the wild coincidences you were searching for."

Not finding any funny, so forced to look for the low-hanging fruit? "Today's Slashdot: These are not the jokes you were looking for."

That's it? All the funny that Slashdot could handle these days? This story had great potential for laughs, but...

But not via Facebook or the cesspool formerly known as Twitter. Assassinated and left, respectively. Slashdot used to be a pretty good source of Funny, but that must have been before the AI sock puppets took over the Internet.

Just kidding. Most of the sock puppets are too stupid to be AI-based slop. But they are apparently giving me a fixation on or some kind of obsession with their vacuous enshitification?

Even though I don't even know what sort of humor I was hoping for on this story, I'm sure AC's brain fart was not it.

Just read another book with something about why anonymity encourages people to become worse people over time... Must have been in the Facebook-related stuff.

Me? I didn't even want to use GitHub but Claude.ai made me do it.

And it's happening whether you want it to or not. It doesn't matter whether any of it works because they will make it work. Over half of Americans are white collar workers and the prospect of replacing them with automation is to tantalizing to give up.

Even if only a third of this crap works you're looking at permanent 20% unemployment on top of the typical 5% that the economy floats around. And that's pretending we are at full employment by pretending gig work is full-time work and ignoring underemployment and the millions of people who just gave up looking for work and the ever-increasing number of homeless people.

As a reminder world War II started with 25% unemployment.

I don't think there's a solution. We are just going to put too many people out of work and we're not putting everybody out of work all at once. This means the people who still have jobs are going to fight it out with the people who are now completely economically useless to society. In the middle will be the trillionaires consolidating their power.

I suspect eventually we will hand the nuclear launch codes to some religious lunatics and then it's game over. It is possible the trillionaires will simply create their techno feudal nightmare as well.

But I do not know how you overcome the concept of, if you don't work you don't eat. That is so deeply ingrained in people and there's nothing more infuriating than watching somebody stay at home playing Xbox drinking beer and getting laid when you're putting in 60 hours a week at a shit job you hate. No amount of logic or reason and no amount of telling you to start asking why you're working so hard for so little will change the emotional knee-jerk reaction or the ability for those trillionaires to point you at the unemployable and get you the fight with them crabs in a bucket style.

And this is before all the other social problems with employment collapsing, like how men traditionally are valued as providers and that role is becoming obsolete or how we have tons and tons of people who are just not ever going to be able to hack it academically but that we have absolutely no use for... Especially in a country that refuses to fund infrastructure which is pretty much all countries.

If somebody wants to suggest a specific way out of this trap besides just dismissing this as Doom and gloom I would be happy to hear it. I have noticed that people have stopped accusing me of being a luddite. It's too obvious that the storm is coming at this point to pretend it's not.

Everyone just seems to be hoping they die before the shit hits the fan. But I think it's coming too fast. Even some of the baby boomers aren't going to escape it anymore. You can't have shit like a data center in Utah sucking down more electricity than the entire state and not have consequences that are immediate and devastating for the surrounding communities

It's a question of what you traded that money for or what your neighbors traded it for.

So when people go to vote they have a hierarchy of issues they use to pick what's most important to them.

This is why you have Trump sitting at a 40% approval rate in polling averages but a 70% disapproval rate on the economy. People prioritize different issues or just confidence in the man versus what they can see happening day-to-day with their own eyes...

The most common and Stark example of this are people who prioritize moral panics over economic issues. So somebody who votes for a political candidate who is going to cut services they desperately need because that political candidate promises to protect them from trans girls in sports or ethics in game journalism or the woke mind virus or whatever the current mortal panic is. Back in my day it was violent video games and before that satanic rock music... Kind of miss those days.



They also have a hierarchy of information. Everybody hits an information limit at some point. I haven't dug into the particulars of how the Democrat party apparatus works for example although I know I should because it's important to understand. Compare that to a much much lower information voter I'm better able to make informed decisions.

So the basic problem is people will trade money and privacy for addressing moral issues and that people have varying amounts of information they have access to and can process.

Fundamentally improves education with an emphasis on critical thinking would fix this but the problem is parents don't like that. Little Johnny gets taught how to dismantle arguments and systems and he comes home and points the skills that whatever sacred cow the parents have, most commonly religion but also a variety of incorrect political views or moral views.

Parents want their kids to have enough thinking skills that they can get a good job and avoid being scammed but not so many that they can no longer relate to their children. They don't want schools creating a generational gap. In some extreme cases like the Jehovah witnesses they have traditionally stopped their members from going to college at all because they lost them so quickly. One of the quickest ways to leave extremist American evangelism is to sit down and actually read the Bible critically...

So every time you see something like this you have to stop and think how did I vote in the last election and what did I trade and what did I get for that trade.

You might say that you did all right but the problem then becomes your neighbors.

And that was the reason why they were pulling them, not the desire for exclusivity.

Pulling them off of PC is actually a problem for Sony because modern AAA games are so expensive to produce that it's difficult for them to be profitable on a single platform. Even when you have the most popular platform out there like Sony does.

I don't think helldivers was ever really designed to be a PlayStation exclusive. Also don't think it was meant to take off like it did. It's closer to a AA game in scope. When you play something like the Horizon games with all the voice acting and cut scenes and incredibly elaborate animation and dozens of different features and options and hyperbalanced gameplay you are looking at something that had a ridiculous budget.

So something like helldivers 2 had somewhere around 50 to 70 million dollar budget versus the 200 million they spend on Horizon Forbidden West.

Also the hell divers games were in development for 8 years, a lot of the budget was just development hell where is the Spider-Man games or the Horizon games cost that much even when the games were making solid progress in development because they were just so freaking huge in scope.

Sony came to the PC hoping to make enough money to make the games themselves profitable or at least break even. It doesn't seem like a modern single player, triple A game can be profitable. Even Grand theft Auto needs to rely heavily on multiplayer content to do it.

JUDGE: The jury has sent a question and the answer is no, the death penalty is not "available for both sides" please return to the jury room and limit your consideration to civil damages.

JUDGE: No, a “light maiming” is also not acceptable, nor is “getting medieval on their asses.” Please constrain yourself to statutes approved by this court.

JUDGE: A further follow-up question from the jury, and no we cannot 'dunk them in a lake and let God decide, like they used to do with witches'. That has not been considered a valid means of determining guilt for several centuries at least.

JUDGE: The jury has sent another question and the answer, again, is no. "Excommunicado" is not real - that's only a thing in the John Wick universe. Civil penalties DO NOT encompass revoking all protections under the law for Mr Altman and Mr Musk.

JUDGE: Court reporter, please note that the jury's latest request, quote, can we let them hang by their thumbs for a few hours, end quote, is also denied.

How do you know they exist in the first place? Start menu is a copy of the Apple menu as enhanced by an ancient shareware utility called "Hierarchical Menus". That add-on does exactly what the start menu does, allowing shortcuts to be grouped in folders etc. and for nesting of folders. It predates the Start menu by a few years.

One of the points was to be able to organise by category. I might not know what the thing-to-set-up-a-disk-partition is called, but it's probably in a menu hierarchy called "Utilities" and I can go look. It's discoverable, and it should be there.

Pinned things? Probably a set of defaults that are easily removable would be my preferred answer (which is what they do), but I could also settle for none until you put it there. But I very much disagree that nothing at all should be in the Start menu except your own choices.

I mean - the Apple's "Microsoft - Start Your Photocopiers!" definitely applied to the start of the Win 7 era. It was pretty much a straight lift of Aqua, ironically (given this post's subject) with more flexibility on positioningthe task bar vs the Dock. Certainly Windows didn't introduce pinning apps.

By the end of it though, I thought that Win7 had better actually window management than the Mac did, and even with the split view stuff etc. that's been introduced since I still feel that in order to get the same flexibility of window management that I get in Windows I need to install 3rd party stuff on the Mac.

Admittedly I haven't sat down and done a feature-to-feature comparison for a while there, but yep: will definitely give MS the edge of the ability to re-arrange your windows on the screen.

Yeah, but I heard exactly the same thing about Windows 7 (although admittedly never about 8). If you're using Windows, you will eventually move for something. Whether it's hardware, or some new app you want...can't predict it. Just that looking at the pattern over many years, you will.

I have an install of it. I don't use it, I'm Mac for my main platform and Linux for my gaming. But I still have a Windows partition, and it's Windows 11 too, mostly to handle odd manufacturer firmware update programs for external hardware. Even I moved to 11, and eventually people will do need to do so if they want to stay on the Windows platform. In my case, even if they don't want to stay on that platform in fact.

There aren't a lot of AAA PC games these days and Sony's releases were some of the few we got and they were all the very high quality.

But this isn't because they're trying to be evil or anything they just aren't selling enough copies to justify the ports.

If the cost of a PS5 was low I could see that because people would just buy the PS5 and not bother with the PC version but with a PlayStation 5 pushing $700 for the base console that doesn't seems like it wouldn't be the case. I don't know the demographics though but the facts of the matter is they aren't selling enough units for anything except the Spider-Man games.