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

We don't have to imagine, we have an apartheid regime including ubiquitous tracking and an ongoing genocide which we can just look at.

Some of them will. Some of them will have absolutely no clue, just like now.

To thinking people, yes. A lot of people are listening to podcasts to figure out what to think.

Bro, have you heard of the greenhouse effect?

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.

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.

At this point, there is probably nothing that can rescue either Microsoft or Linux from the hordes at the wall. Both are performance-first operating systems. There's nothing surprising or unusual about that; this is the dominant paradigm. Windows NT made at least some attempt in the other direction until version 4, but then they prioritized UI latency over memory security. LLMs apparently don't have to be able to think to recognize patterns which indicate vulnerabilities. If having closed source is even still a benefit in hiding failures, it won't be for long.

On top of that, the hardware isn't secure enough either and both are going to have to be addressed to reasonably secure our systems from this new threat. They were never really secure, humans could find the same vulnerabilities, but there weren't enough humans looking. There's lots of compute hours being spent looking.

This isn't limited to Windows and Linux, every vaguely common system has the same problem. None of them were built for security first, because such a system would cost more to operate and almost nobody has been demanding to pay more for less performance in security's name. But many have long predicted we'd get to the point where we start to spend our performance advancement budget on security because some development will necessitate it, and it seems like we might have arrived there now. There are and have been more secure systems, but the home PC is going to have to become one of them because otherwise we won't be able to use them for anything other than getting pwned.

Ever tried running Windows Vista on a minimum spec computer? Painful doesn't even begin to describe it. That's where we're at right now with Windows 11 but at least in the case of Vista they were doing a bunch of fancy modern operating system tricks that brought new features, albeit stupid new features but still they were genuinely trying new features. The hardware at the time couldn't handle that, you really need it about four times as much RAM and an SSD to do what they were doing and that was just too expensive for oems at the time so when does Vista crawled on anything but a high-end gaming PC.

With Windows 11 we've got all that shit performance but absolutely no new features except the operating system spies on me now and feeds all my data into Microsoft's AIs so they can sell co-pilot to my company after firing me. Or at least that's the goal it's debatable whether or not it's going to work out for them but in the meantime my computer runs like shit unless I run Linux or Windows 10 and both of them have issues with games and other complex software...

That would make it easy if the legal system didn't make it hard.

That's a typically shit take, because both of these business guys have proven repeatedly that they are both hot garbage as human beings. It on brand for you to ignore that.

And unfortunately, it does. The corporate world has already satisfied all of the relevant if statements. It works to some extent if you are willing to accept massive failures — the industry has proven that over and over again by rewarding failures with sales, they will buy proven trash before paying for quality; they will accept "good enough for right now" and kick the can forever; they will rewrite entire products and discard years of both development and goodwill just to look like they're forward-looking to idiots, because nobody ever went broke assuming there'd be no shortage of them.

If you're willing to accept shit results because you have no pride then AI is good enough. And... *waves around vaguely* ...people should pay attention, because that's the dominant paradigm.

It's hard to prove that Microsoft cares less about security than other vendors, without a bunch of information from Microsoft and other vendors that we're not privy to — not even shareholders get to know the full risks involved in the products upon which their dividends depend. But it's easy to prove that they will happily lie about it.

The basic idea, which their own people have admitted, came from a old Japanese live action TV series called ultra 7 which is in the Ultraman series.

So it's patently ridiculous, pun intended, for them to be trying to get patents on something they didn't come up with on their own. Never mind the obvious ridiculousness of everything about this.

You start out doing it to others; but the empire always comes home in the end.