I think it’s a tool, but a tool that has been weaponized. I think “AI” (I use quotes because we are really talking about LLMs primarily) have some fantastic applications for automation, things like dictation, pattern recognition, etc.

But unlike non-AI tools that can do similar tasks (linters, non ai machine translation, dictation, hell even search engines at this point) AI does the task with the confidence of an expert, speaking in a confident voice, to people who generally don’t know if the information is accurate. It’s being sold as a knowledge hub, when in reality it is a tool, one that can be wrong and does not think. And the marketing is agressive. They want you to forget how to think for yourself so you have to pay a subscription for thinking.

AI psychosis is real, I’ve seen it happen in real time with my coworkers. The quality of our new hires has gone downhill because none of them seem to know how to solve a problem. I often hear “Claude thinks this” in response to issues that are just barely above basic level. There is no longer a desire to find knowledge or puzzle out a problem when it can be cognitively offloaded to the llm. There is danger in the very service that the llm provides - reduction in friction in your daily life also equates to a reduction in learning. Which sucks because noodling out complex problems with an llm as a rubber duck can actually be a great learning experience in situations where a product expert isn’t around to bounce off of. But it comes with the caveat of knowing how to check the answers and having the curiosity to delve into those answers and dig through them yourself. Without that crucial step you are just offloading your brain to the computer to think for you and you learn nothing.

And I can’t blame the AI psychosis on stupid people. It’s being marketed as an all knowing infallible assistant. Yet tangibly many every day people find their lives made worse for it. AI has been shoved into everything when it isn’t even as good as the thing it is replacing, or it fails more often.

Then we get to the actual generative functions of ai. Generative art, be it picture or text, is trained without permission or compensation, on the work of millions of artists, with the goal of making those artists obsolete. As an artist I’ve seen every single artistic industry be hit with this, from stock photography to furry porn to high budget movies. And much like the previous use cases of AI replacing currently existing software, it’s replacing artists with less quality products. AI art is recognizable because it is homogenized by default. And sure it’s tweakable, but by default it is recognizable as this uncanny homogenized “good enough” picture to get an idea across. And much like everything else it’s being used as a way to capitalize on industries, because at the end of the day the only reason to use generative ai for art is to make it faster and cheaper. Every single person that uses it that I’ve seen has used it for the same reasons. “I don’t have time to learn x” or “I need an idea out now” or “I can make more by doing this”. Its because art has become completely monitized. People don’t create for the sake of creation now, it’s for a job, or for a deadline, or for clout. Artists who love their craft and are not bogged by deadlines or bills are overwhelming against AI in general, as artists are some of the most vocal anti generative AI crowd.

When we look at all of this, AI is a tool that has some great localized use cases, especially in pattern recognition, dictation, language, etc. but it’s been coopted as a brain subscription by the people in charge of training it and selling it to us. It’s been shoehorned into every aspect of our lives, made everything more expensive, made people dumber, collectively destroyed the lives of artists off the backs of their work, and enshittified almost every single industry.

The tradeoffs aren’t worth it.

Edit: also forgot to add the privacy nightmare that comes from AI surveillance

Exactly, sick of the fuck you got mine mentality. There is enough in the world to go around for everyone, it’s the uneven distribution and monetization of basic resources that makes it so some people in some countries starve.

So many if the world’s woes today come from people vying for money, and for land and resources to…make more money.

If someone is sick you treat them. If someone is hungry you feed them. If someone is thirsty you give them water. I don’t care what nationality they are, what country they are from, what language they speak, what gender they are, what sexuality they are, what disability they have, if they are a human being they deserve basic dignity, respect, and basic needs. Borders are arbitrary.

Its a baby fucking donkey not a wild animal

Had a coworker that was the weird bigfoot man. Every time he came to the main branch it was a whole lecture about bigfoot. He even gave marketing a recorded speech he did about bigfoot for a local bigfoot convention and demanded they publish it internally. When he retired they put bigfoot on his retirement party cake.

My homelab is a learning tool that became useful enough to keep some things alive. It started with a raspperry pi and docker and has evolved to multiple systems with backups and some decently complex networking.

Ive always seen a “homelab” as different from a “home server”. Homelabs are meant to be fucked up as you learn things. Have a home lab long enough and you end up with a test lab and production environment.

I dont know how tech saavy you are so apologies if this is an oversimplification but:

Matrix is a protocol. Think of it like a language. There are different matrix backends (synapse, continuwuity, etc) that run the server, which speaks the matrix protocol. Anyone can make a server and host it. They can open it up to federate, which lets other matrix servers talk to that server.

To join matrix you pick a server (matrix.org has one but there are many more. Some fediverse servers like bark.lgbt and blajah.zone have their own matrix servers under the same name). You sign up for that server same way you did for lemmy.

Then you pick a client. Element, cinny, sable, fluffychat are a few. These all “speak” the matrix protocol, the way something like the voyager app speaks activitypub, the protocol for lemmy. They all have slightly different features so use the one that has the features you like.

I love matrix. I self host my own but started on matrix.org. ive migrated my D&D group and friend group from discord to matrix.

if the server you join supports it, you can also bridge discord, telegram, and other chats to matrix. I still talk to some people on fisvord through a bridge.

My mother in law actually surprised me by asking if the family group chat could switch to signal. I wasnt going to bother her about it because i assumed shed hate it since shes bad with technology. It was a pleasant surprise.

I watch videos on 2x speed when they are instructional.

If its artistic, a process video, or commentary i watch on 1x

dealt with tis with my husband. He doesnt use any of the stuff i put together. I had a talk with him and he admitted that he was happy i was playing around, but none of the things i was “fixing” were broken in his eyes. For eample i put together mealie for recipes and to him that wasnt any different than the recipe books he normally uses, or his head.

What he did want though, was a way to share his commissions with his clients. But he hated nextcloud because he was always having syncing issues. So ater talking with him i set up a samba share to my server that he could drag his commissions to. That golder rclones to nextcloud. Its not what i want, but he doesnt have syncing problems and hes more than happy with it.

I set up immich and he never used it. He just preferred manually browsing the photo directory. So i use immich and he manually looks at things.

We eventually came to an agreement, i work on the stuff i want to work on, and if it would affect him he and i talk about what would work for him, and i work around that requirement. It makes the project into a fun problem to solve and he actually uses the thing in the end.

No amount of “but this is better” would shake him because it doesnt feel natural to him

It sounds like tis cat might have had food scarcity issues in the past. Are they overweight? If dry food was left out for grazing would they gorge themselves? Sometimes cats that are extremely food motivated will calm down with food that is always available to them.

Another thing that can help is disassociating you with the food. There are wet food auto feeders, which can help associate the machine with food instead of you, and stop them from harrassing you.

If they are food motivated, and have “no personality” you may have an opportunity to teach them tricks. A good one to start with is shake, because having something like a churu in reach makes then want to paw at it. Say shake, intercept the paw, and then give a lick of the churu. Repeat at the same time daily and you can keep upping the difficulty. This helps you bond with the cat, and you’ll likely see some of the missing personality shine through.

The fact that this is not already happening sucks. Why wait

Matrix is what I moved to. To make transition easier for my core friends I wrote a guide with step by step instructions and pre-made a replica of our discord server. I got probably 70% of them to come over.

The real hit was large communities. For roughly a month I came in daily letting my communities know about what was happening and that I was gonna switch so if people wanted to find me here is where they could find me. I got 3 kinds of replies:

1. The nihilistic “I’ll never escape it, everyone already has my information, why fight it”
2. (In reference to the ID verification) “I’m not American so I don’t care if people have my ID because my country doesn’t have the problems America has”
3. “Moving is too hard and I use one specific feature the other apps don’t have and my friends are here so I’ll move when they move”

Moving to the new platform, giving a grace period to friends, and then moving and cutting contact with the platform had the highest success rate. People that want to talk with you will move, even if it’s just to only talk with you. But the hardest thing is accepting that some people just don’t care about their privacy and want the easy to use features enough that they are willing to lose contact with you.

It doesn’t because people into those things should usually understand the basics of consent, and also don’t generally want to be treated that way by people they aren’t fucking.

My coworkers use Claude like an actual brain subscription, and I have started to write off everything they say as if it came straight from the AI. They have gained so much unearned confidence about shit they have no idea about, and have even argued with the development team about it.

I got into an argument about how in band and out of band DTMF work with one of them for a solid half hour before they finally admitted they didn’t actually know but were going off what claude said.

I wanted to punch them for wasting everyone’s time. If you don’t understand stop answering definitively like you’re the expert.

Some customers have switched to using AI emails too. Customers that used to ask extremely low level questions will now submit a 2 page long email with action items and explinations about why our product does X, Y, Z, and I have to read it twice to figure out their problem isn’t even in the action items because the AI hyper focused on the wrong thing.

Like ok thanks you dumped the entire app log into Claude and asked it “why no work” and Claude read an error message that’s benign and now the customer is demanding fixes for something that is not and never has been a problem and won’t actually solve the root issue.

Yakuza kiwami 3!

I’m a badass but I’m gonna get cancer in about 15 years

ITT: characters furries find conventionally attractive

When I was in college and on my own for the first time I tripped on the stairs and tore a ligament in my foot. I thought I’d broken something and the school called an ambulance. The ambulance drove me 1 mile to the hospital, where I was given an ice pack and crutches and then turned out with no way to get home (I had to hobble my way to a store to pull out cash to take a bus home).

This entire ordeal was $3000 after insurance. My mom then called me and removeded me out for not taking a taxi.

My whole life has been a weird back and forth of this. I grew up in a hyper conservative household and lived in a hyper conservative town, but I wanted to go to art school. So I moved to Seattle.

Fast forward I was a conservative in Seattle of all places, and racist af to boot. Being 18 coming off the heels of my family meant I had no original thoughts and just repeated everything my mom taught me.

I quickly learned better, both through college education but also meeting the people I’d been brought up racist against. Being in a multicultural hub like Seattle means having to see the charicatures my mom had painted for me live, breathe, and talk to me, and it’s hard for anyone with 2 braincells to run together to keep thinking those things when you interact with the people daily.

I stayed in the area after college and became increasingly more leftist. Then at a point I ended up moving to a small conservative town again due to financial issues.

Here I faced the flip side of what I’d experienced in Seattle. I’m white so everyone would try to pull me into conversation about immgrants or people on welfare or LGBT people and I was the sole voice against those views. I tried to reason with them, provide an alternative perspective, and over the years I’ve had mixed results. But the thing I’ll say that was different was the amount of violence and threat I’ve felt being the outsider in these communities.

I said some straight up racist shit when I was younger in Seattle. I lost friends and reputation over it but I never felt afraid. In the small town though, I lost jobs, was threatened, flipped off, verbally abused… I never had anyone physically attack me but it came close a few times. And the only thing I said in those areas was things like “they aren’t bad people because they are Mexican, they’re bad people because they did X to you, Debra.”

The racism and homophobia was the biggest hurdle honestly. People in that sphere dont think the things they are thinking are wrong. Often they only know what they have somehow been slighted, and they misatteibute their frustrations to race or politics. “I can’t afford groceries because so many (insert race) people are on food stamps.” No, you can’t afford groceries because your work isn’t paying you anything but beans and Walmart is the only grocery store in town. There are so many people on food stamps because they are socio-economically disadvantaged. Perhaps if you can’t afford groceries you might also qualify for food stamps."

But that’s hard to quantify, it’s easier to blame the have-nots as being morally lacking than it is to be mad at systems that are hard to quantify.

Genshin impact. I heard about how it was a “Zelda clone” and full of predatory gacha slop and I refused to play it. Then during the pandemic I saw an AMV someone had made of a bunch of the cutscenes and I was impressed by the cutscene quality. I was also broke and had too much time on my hands, so I installed it intending to stop playing when it hit a point where I couldn’t progress without paying to win.

6 years later and I’m still playing, with hundreds of hours of gameplay into it and a mostly free to play account. Occasionally I’ll throw $5 at it, but the hours of gameplay to money sink ratio is far less than almostany other game I’ve played. I’ve probably spent $100 total on a game I’ve played almost daily for 6 years.

I’ve had my ups and downs with it, but it’s for sure a good game, and it’s shaken up a whole industry of games to force them to do better.