I've heard some pretty sad excuses for AI slop (Shunned at a Funeral) but some very clever uses for it too (Amelia). "The best thing the government did...was invent me!"

As long as they're honest about it being AI I'll decide what I want to listen to. It's hard for it to show any creativity, but creativity is sorely lacking in all current music.

...laura

Y'gotta stop cutting education and vaccine funding.

Freedom of speech exists exactly BECAUSE speech is dangerous, particularly to entrenched powers.

The reason why it's enshrined in constitutions is because the people that wrote those constitutions wanted the citizens to be in charge, for them to push back and reform governments when they went astray. Protesting and reporting are usually especially enshrined because we know that without those rights, the people are oppressed. The first thing that goes when authoritarians come in is an abrogation of those rights, SPECIFICALLY because authoritarians know that free speech is inherently dangerous to their grasp on power. Only by keeping people in the dark and spreading propaganda can they retain their hold on power.

We saw it happen with Trump and Fox News and all of his toadies buying up TV stations and news networks. If speech isn't powerful and dangerous, then why are so many people concerned with the ability to control it?

And yet, even in these societies with free speech, there have also been limits put on it, because there's no way to run a society with unfettered free speech. We've long since decided that libel and slander are illegal, you can't make threats of physical violence to other people, conspiracy to commit [some crime] is itself a crime.

So I dunno man, how is it that you think that there's no such thing as hate speech? A violent threat can send someone into hiding very nearly as effectively as actually attempting the violence. It was just speech, but it still had an effect. Can you really possibly believe that words have no weight? That speech has no consequence? Have you never read any history, particularly of charismatic cult leaders or politicians?

People are spurred to action by words all the time, and you can't just dust your hands of it and say, "hey, I was just saying words over here that made them believe that that guy was coming to kill their kids in the night and poison their water and salt the earth. Of COURSE I was as convincing as possible and they believed me and attacked him, but that has NOTHING to do with the things I said!"

Your claim is absurd on its face. There's literal millennia of evidence.

My company instituted it because it was too hard to compete on salary alone. I make a bit less per year, but my hourly rate is now higher.

It's been an amazing experience. 4 days a week is more than 20% better than 5 days a week. I'm excited to work on monday, I don't feel like I've been through the wringer on thursday. I would guess that averaged over a whole year, I get at least as much work done on the 4DWW, though for shorter periods of time, 5 days WILL generate more work (much like crunch will also generate a lot of work in a short amount of time, but as it goes on, productivity drops).

But 4DWWs have nothing to do with AI. We mostly don't use it (I work in games; the discussion is fraught, so we mostly just don't use it at all, and most of us at the company want very little to do with it) and our productivity is just fine.

Something that I think a lot of people miss, particularly with programming, is that when you use agents, you effectively make programmers into managers whether they want to be or are good at it or not. Making programmers outline broad tasks and review the results and iterate without writing code themselves is manager work. It's all the worst parts of programming and none of the stuff that we actually like. And not everyone wants to be a manager! I'm a programming lead, and I enjoy it, but it's hard and it uses my brain in a completely different way that I would not have been interested in when I was 25. I may not have even been ABLE when I was 25.

AI doesn't relieve you of any work, it just changes the nature of the work away from the actual job description. Of course nobody's switching to the 4DWW--you just made everyone's job harder and worse, so everyone is always behind.

I work a 4 day work week. My pay is slightly lower than at my last job, but my hourly rate is higher. My company started offering it years ago because they couldn't compete on salary, but they realized that some of us would really just like a better life, and that was something they could manage.

The 4DWW isn't as transformative to me as remote work, but it's been so good for me. I'm excited to get back to work on Monday, and I don't ever feel like any part of the week is a slog. I'm happy to occasionally sit down and fix something on the weekend quickly because my brain happened on the answer while I was relaxing.

If we all must work in this capitalist hellscape, 4 days a week is much more than 20% better than 5.

There's a reason the aphorism, "the Pen is mightier than the Sword," exists. You cannot simultaneously hold that the only power is physical power but also believe ideas or ideologies are powerful. Of course they are. It's the basis of religion and politics writ large.

People can be convinced that an ideology is correct, and then do terrible things in the service of that ideology. It's not that complicated.

The reason why wealth itself is important is because wealth begets wealth. You're right that to some extent it's an under-consumption problem, but fundamentally, wealthy people use their wealth to accumulate more wealth.

And that sounds a bit tautological, but what I mean is: if you have a huge amount of wealth, the things you buy are things like property, stocks in other companies, natural resources, etc. Wealth accumulation accelerates over time. But there isn't an infinite amount of wealth to be had. There's a limit to how many homes there are, how many farms and oil wells and all those things. Governments are in debt and can't help their citizens because they no longer own big blocks of apartments, they no longer own productive land or natural resource companies. (Actually, some do, and you'll note that they're the ones that provide ongoing support to their citizens.)

Even with a little bit of wealth, you can anchor your whole life. Owning your own home is huge. Put enough money into investments, and there's a time at which contributions to your portfolio are less than the money the portfolio generates on its own. And of course, this wealth is both real and illusory; stocks have no value until you sell them, but they can serve as collateral for loans at lower interest rates, and you don't pay taxes on loans.

The rich DO compete with folks for real estate, they become landlords, which is an inherently parasitic position. Consider: a landlord buys a home and rents it out. They pay the mortgage and for upkeep, and they charge a tenant for their own costs, plus some amount of profit (or, occasionally, no profit, on the basis that land value goes up over time). If the tenant can pay this rent, that means they could own the property themselves, but there's an intermediary skimming profit off the top.

So more and more people are locked out of ownership, because the initial cost of ownership is too high, but we know factually that they could actually pay for and maintain that property themselves, because that's what the rent covers. Where does that extra money go? And what is it paying for? It's paying for nothing; the landlord is a parasite, plain and simple.

But anywhere that someone with tremendous wealth goes, the same story is allowed to play out. We've all seen the stories of these private investment firms buying up good businesses, saddling them with debt, taking all the good stuff, and then leaving the business to go bankrupt. It's wealth extraction that only rich people can do, and it destroys businesses big and small.

Ultimately, the accumulation of wealth is a de facto accumulation of power. Our politics is not SUPPOSED to be influenced by money, but it definitely is. Elon Musk doesn't need to be able to vote multiple times to influence the outcome of elections, he can just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at it--an amount he makes back in a trivial amount of time--and get the outcome that he wants.

You're right that the extremely rich use the same phones as I do, eat the same food as I do. What that tells us--what we all already know--is that they don't NEED to be that rich. They can live a life of extraordinary luxury with so much less. So my concern with wealth is that it is not created out of thin air, and there's a finite amount of it to go around. The billionaire class growing in number as well as their fortunes growing by huge amounts happening at the same time as governments running huge deficits and the middle class shrinking is not a random coincidence. One is the cause of the other. That's why when many of us talk about wealth, it's as a *transfer*, from one class to another. Billionaires are literally impoverishing the rest of us.

According the summary, they know they were caught by the spam filter, but then they pretend not to know why so that they can abuse various administrative processes...

All these people acting like they're fighting for world peace on this should ask themselves, what effect does it have on that bureaucracy to post abuse the processes with dishonest claims? Even if you like the person and think it's a great app, it was clearly spam. Self-promotion is one of the form spam takes. Everybody defending him already knew that. Why does there need to be a "what else?" If people think reddit is too strict on their anti-spam policy, they should just be honest and say so!

Also I could point out that most of the penis pill spams from days of yore were also "self promotion" by a small business.

Spamming should be a capital offense. There was a time when that was not a controversial thing to say on slashdot.

So instead of banning all spamming, you want them to carefully weigh each spam, and permit things you approve of?

Kyoko-chan, are you sure you really thought about that first?

I heard it was the new slashdot.

I also heard the place sucks.

I'm glad they're finally taking a stand against spam, though... their user will probably appreciate it.

None of the laws cited contain any language about not being able to ban spammers, or self-promotion being a protected form of spam.

Spam is shit. Spammers are shit. "Spammers I like" are not less shitty.

The industry is in trouble because mergers reduced the jobs, and the remaining jobs didn't go to the most creative people, they went to the people who were best at cultivating influence. Which is almost never the same people that do the quality creative work. They're driven by completely different fundamental motivations.

Further consolidation will just damage things even more, until finally there isn't anything to consolidate with to kick the can and the companies collapse, and then a new cycle can be started by thousands of small efforts since there won't be a funded boot to squash them.

The problem with moving isn't about relocating staff, it's all the network effects in LA that made the industry big in the first place, that made the output better than efforts elsewhere. Every consolidation destroys part of that network. Every outsourcing destroys part of it. Moving is a self-imposed maximizing of the problem, dropping network effect close to zero.

"Some wirbles are wobbles, therefore all wirbles are wobbles."

No, you're wrong.

That's how it happened here... the City Council saw how angry people were and realized if they didn't act we'd use the ballot measure, and forcing us to do that would probably get them replaced so they cancelled the contract. Half of them had to do a 180 for that, but nobody cares that their first statements were on the wrong side, since in fact they did the right thing when the vote came up.

Ballot measures are by far the strongest tool for Democracy. And in a Republic, it keeps those "Democratic Traditions" alive.