Another tech headline, another thing that would have sounded pretty cool 20-30 years ago but today sounds like an absolute nightmare to stay FAR away from. And this one more than most!

You mean to tell me that the people at the top, who confidently know they have already won, don’t run around like desperate insecure dickheads trying to prove that they are the most valuable worker bee?

On a more serious note, they represent and propagate some of the worst parts of our culture, especially in the US.

According to them (and most of my upbringing) the indicators of leading a good life include money, possessions, greed, excess, and dominating others.

Things that are actually good for us are seen as being crutches for the weak. You know, like community, healthy relationships, generosity, and fulfilling work/hobbies.

I would say it propagates conservative values like innate hierarchy and your worth as a human being equal to your economic output, but plenty of people who don’t consider themselves conservatives get wrapped up in it.

At this point I’m just trying to enjoy what I can in my immediate surroundings. When I am outside tending to my critters, I often wonder if today will be the day the sky is filled with a blinding light from the south then a very chaotic and consequential minute or two after that.

But deep down that is probably a fantasy. The world is not that exciting. Instead we get to slowly watch how many people the billionaires can starve as long as we still have a working internet.

It’s the dream. Imagine the reliable power & internet connections. Plus you could hang a sign on your door like:

"No Soliciting

Violators will be shot for reasons of national security"

Yeah! If there’s ONE thing lame-ass nuclear plants and their spicy rocks suck at, it’s making heat!

I need you to understand that I’ve tried AI for ONE task recently, just a few weeks ago to see how it did, and your comment so perfectly encapsulates my experience.

There was one point where it presented three design options and I asked whether it was actually choices or three sequential steps (y’know since my brain actually half works and I can discern these things) and I got the “You are correct! 😄” response almost to the letter.

So many comments about the power settings thing, but this isn’t about working effectively and efficiently.

You can take AI out of this article and it would be just as sad, but it wouldn’t get the clicks.

This article is either helping push, or documenting the push, that if YOU are a higher tier of worker bee that wants to prove your superior worth to your bound legal entity, AND you want to virtue signal having your head on straight to all the lazy selfish people around you actually being present in the moment, then YOU need ShinyTechBroProduct!

Ohhh all the cool parents are into ShinyTechBroProduct! All the other lame asses who PaId AtTeNtiOn To tHeiR KiDs aren’t going to be the next Elon Jobs now are they!

Yeah, I don’t do web stuff, but I use the browser every day for all the microsoft stuff my employer uses and it’s 99% LibreWolf and then 1% switching to Firefox ESR that cane preinstalled on debian.

If something didn’t work at that point, I’d probably fire up my Windows VM I use for testing before I’d install even chromium. I’ve installed it before but there’s just no need now.

You can’t take my ‘i’, we have been together.

No complaints about the comic here, but if I/we may go off on a tangent about the subject matter:

To what extent is “destroy the patriarchy” a red herring to get people angry at “men” rather than “sociopathic billionaires of all genders?”

Sexism is still a thing, of course, just like racism and all kinds of other awful shit. But those awful parts of our nature are often stoked by those in control to keep the attention off of them. “No war but class war,” as the Lemmings say.

In my little corner of the world, when I see memes about crushing/destroying the patriarchy, it’s usually in the social context of a sticker on suburban moms’ Stanley cups, or t-shirts, or even occasionally SUVs. They (mostly) hate Trump, sure, but they have no problem with J. K. Rowling or Kamala Harris.

We have two miniature dachshunds, and a 9 year old son. He will occasionally just call them penis dogs and think it’s hilarious.

I showed this picture to my wife just to joke txt here’s one to not show the boy. Good times. lol.

intergenerational prosperity

If I know my rich sociopath talk, this means “generations of MY descendants being old money rich and saluting the giant portrait of ME over their comically large fireplaces.”

I have a pretty old lifetime Plex pass that I got on sale.

I’m still 100% a Jellyfin convert. Keeping my Plex server while trying out Jellyfin myself lasted even less time than my Windows partition after I had linux installed.

Some of those are wild to see.

That shit would be forcibly taken from them so fast here in the US, thanks to eminent domain and the worship of corporations exploiting resources to the fullest. I think they’d get paid, just not y’know, have freedom and property rights and shit.

Better use the self-checkout while you still can!

https://www.gs1us.org/industries-and-insights/by-topic/sunrise-2027

Pfft. I’m in my 40s with an established engineering career and a small home that I’ve owned for 18 years now.

I am also not paying for any streaming services I can avoid, not buying many games, sailing the high seas, and our cars are like 13/14 years old.

Because shit is crazy, especially being in the US. I am keeping my world small and focusing on my family and my community.

I’d say do it, and put a lot of effort into the video but keep it generic and don’t mention the company or product by name.

Then in a few months when that shitshow goes under you’ll have the video ready to go for the next place!

I’m convinced that much of, if not most of, society sees technology in our personal lives as a way to (ideally) not have to learn anything or put in one bit of extra effort.

I’ve been getting my hands dirty and doing more things myself over the past few years, and ya know sometimes the journey is more impactful on you as a person than the destination is. Learning things and interacting with the world around you is good.

I’d argue that the rate of decay per atom is actually random, except that the probability per unit time is scaled according to how long the half life is.

You need a shitton of atoms so that you can average out all that randomness and find the emergent property that is half life.

Fortunately, any amount of radioactive material large enough for us to do anything with it does indeed have a shitton of atoms! Avogadro’s number is one of my favorite scientific constants because it reveals the crazy scale of the atoms we take for granted.

Like with U238 and its 4 billion year half life, one mole of just that atom would weigh 238 grams and have 6.022x10^23 atoms. A half-pound or quarter-kilo chunk of very heavy metal that fits in the palm of your hand contains over 602,200,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms.

Some of those atoms are going to decay today, and some of them will still be radioactive in 100 billion years.

Alarming, but not surprising.

The setup that works for me is LibreWolf as primary browser and Firefox ESR if a site doesn’t work.

I don’t do web development or anything, but I haven’t run into anything that hasn’t worked recently. Librewolf works for almost everything, but if some stupid login page doesn’t like some privacy thing that librewolf is doing, I’ll try one more time with some more loose permissions, then it’s over to normal firefox.