Similar story for clothes dryers:

My parents’ dryer had 2 knobs for temperature and run time, and a start button. Ran forever and dried clothes.

My dryer has like a dozen programmed cycles that rely on a moisture sensor that doesn’t work and leaves clothes damp unless you use the manual time & temp settings, which takes several capacitive button presses on a circuit board that is likely to die before any of the actual mechanical components of the dryer. Also for some reason it has Wi-Fi.

That’s true, I don’t mind people being paid at all. I’d rather that than some dodgy AI.

I still found it funny that Amazon was implying this was some kind of technology marvel when it really just boiled down to webcams.

Reminds me of the Amazon Fresh “just walk out” grocery shopping experience where the store is packed with cameras monitored by “advanced ai” that would tally up the total of the items in your cart.

It would take a few hours for them to email a receipt to let you know what you’d spent and the advanced ai turned out to be low-wage workers in India watching the video feeds.

So maybe this explains why Windows takes 20 seconds to find Notepad when I search for it on the Start menu.

Sometimes it’s like “Notepad? Never heard of it.”

Developer: here’s a fun little thing people will be excited to find!

Player: I will never trust anyone again

The idea of LLMs putting coders out of work at a large scale seems inherently self-defeating.

The LLMs needed to ingest a massive volume of code to get to their current level of proficiency. What will happen if they put all the coders out of work and Stack Overflow is down to just a small number of hobbyists? Will the LLMs just stop advancing?

I’m sure Sam Altman would say they are just about to have reasoning capabilities that will allow them to improve. But Sam Altman is not credible.

I agree on the double standard. I also think there’s an element of Cory Doctorow’s point that “it’s not a crime of we do it with an app.”

Running an unlicensed taxi service or hotel business? No no we’re not criminals, we’re disrupting stagnant markets!

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/25/potatotrac/

It’s basically a blanket pass for tech bros to bend and break laws

Apparently not!

https://futurism.com/neoscope/human-intelligence-declining-trends

Thank goodness we are finally hiring based on merit!

Gonna miss out on those sweet hamberders

Have we reached the point where we don’t even bother to make up a fake crime or improper behavior the official is supposed to have committed that justifies their impeachment?

He should just be impeached because he ruled against Musk doing what he wants? I guess I appreciate the honesty.

A man like Trump only gets more unhinged as tie goes by and his increasingly insane behavior goes unchecked. We utterly failed to stop him in the US. Having completely conquered America he is now setting his sights on the World. If he knew history I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him comparing himself to Alexander the Great.

His past aversion to military adventures in the Middle East was literally the only thing I appreciated about him, but now that’s gone by the wayside.

Buckle up, world… Don’t underestimate him.

I have been watching Conan Without Borders and just coincidentally watched a 2019 episode where he goes to Greenland to arrange for its sale to the US. This was from the last time Trump was making noise about wanting Greenland during his first term.

It was pretty funny. Needless to say the people of Greenland were less than jazzed about the prospect of joining the US.

No, that’s fair. Annoying but not difficult.

This is also 99% of Windows users

But then you have to wait 45 minutes for Windows update to spin, and potentially hang in the middle

The “to dispense” instructions are interesting. Put a tube 3/4 of the way into the water, pinch it, and then “pull downward 12 to 18 inches”… good way to create a vacuum and start the siphon action without putting your mouth on the tube.

I think you’re mixing two different things here. Discussions about unions, working conditions, workplace policies, fairness, etc. have a direct bearing on the workplace and the people in it. Yes, these things are political but they also directly impact the workplace and the people in the organization. I think these topics are all fine.

That’s different from Pam in HR reminding you that she Stands With Israel when you work in a company that has no connection at all to Israel, weapons manufacturing, etc. Or maybe they want to harass you for your own views or trade in conspiracy theories. Their co-workers are a captive audience for these rants because they have to deal with these people to do their jobs.

To me it’s not about loving capitalism, it’s about not wanting yet one more sphere of life to be a stage for performative displays of tribal affiliation.