I used a few different OSs before Windows 95 and I have also used a taskbar for the past 30 years. It’s just a design that I like. It’s like I feel grounded or something.
I just use a single taskbar at the bottom of my left-most monitor though. I ain’t all fancy like you!
That would be a humongous world-changing announcement in a sane timeline. Half the people in our stupid culture wouldn’t even register it as a blip though.
In situations like this I like to think of the history students a thousand years from now, assuming the earth is still habitable, etc.
"So humanity’s first public recognition of extraterrestrial life only happened when it did to distract from the fact that the Big Country at the time had reelected the planet’s worst person AGAIN and they needed to delay justice until they died for… let me double check the text… they needed to delay getting in trouble for being at the top of a global human trafficking and rape operation?
And I am supposed to believe these people had running water, airplanes, internet, and space programs? They lied about every other damn thing!"
The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I’m a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore’s law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.
But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.
I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.
I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don’t have tap to pay then oh well I don’t think I care.
It’s much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)
Works fine in the model home.
Git gud.
Closed.
Damn it, I was just getting ready to sanitize my light year of lead and now I cannot find that damn thing.
Yeah, they seem to think we are like the drug addicts who will seek out the batch killing people with ODs because it must be strong.
Should we tell them that the free first hit is supposed to make the user feel GOOD? Meh, let’s watch how much money they can burn before it all crashes down.
I mean, if you have enough hardware in the form of giant power-sucking data centers in every town, the latency could get pretty low! /s
Oh touche, not Michael Woolridge! The technology has created an entire segment of the economy worth many trillions of dollars based on NOTHING BUT promises! We are living in a promise-based economy!
/s but not really
RAG-AI doesn’t place weight on some sources over others
I had to smile reading this because doing that is why google exists.
Oh no. We can’t have enshittification cross over into our actual shitters!
With the stupid numbers being thrown around in the AI “industry,” buying up a company like Toto to harvest its organs seems run of the mill stuff for private equity.
Yeah, don’t compare them to the ideal in your head. Compare them to the best their competitors have put out there.
You know, like the assholes here in the US that would just have humans remote control them from the next room to get worse results. And yeah of course China can lie and fake shit too, but I think this would probably be just as impressive if they were all mimicking the movements of a mocap-suited athlete off stage.
In my anecdotal experience, the more Trumpy conservative somebody is, the more they are already miserable and complaining about everything all the time. If things get objectively worse for them then they might not act any differently day-to-day. The only question is how far things have to go before they will blame the correct people, if that is even possible for many.
Oh they do care, just in the wrong way.
In the business world “benchmarking” basically means “let’s copy what the successful people do, so that line go up”
In their robotic, amoral view of the world, they see one of the most successful people on the planet (according to their definition of success) constantly spouting obvious lies and being surrounded by sycophants while getting elected twice and grifting billions and facing no punishments. Maybe if the tech CEOs get rich enough and their companies get important enough, they can join his club.
Ohhh, and they must be how we get oligarchies!
I think it’s a combination of that and the worry that there will be one winning ubercorp that practically merges with the US Government.
I mean, they are all pushing all their chips in at the same time. It’s like they know it’s now or never.
I think the green specks they mentioned ARE the parts where it didn’t work. It was not like an analog issue that might tint the color of all the pixels, it was a digital issue where more than 99% of the pixels were the EXACT correct color and then a handful of spots had corrupted data which manifests as green specks on that monitor.
I don’t know what the specifications say should happen when data loss happens, but I’d much rather my screen show a random spot rather than refuse to display anything that’s corrupted.
you can think of the units of measure as multiplying and dividing sort of like the numbers themselves.
So if the nuclear battery continuously delivers 1 watt…
In one hour it would have delivered 1 Wh or watt-hour, because 1W * 1h = 1Wh.
And it works in reverse. If it takes 2 hours to deliver that 1 Wh? That’s 1Wh per 2 hours or 1Wh/2h=0.5W!
ahkshuallly, don’t you mean a capacitor?
Well maybe this time the new battery tech can be real and gay!
This is where the information economy starts to eat itself. If every message arrives pre-saturated with irony, critique, and self-awareness, then no signal can rise above the din. Warnings, reassurances, satire, and sales pitches collapse into the same register. The audience isn’t persuaded or misled so much as numbed.
It sounds like you are describing an unfolding future where all communication us ultra-processed.
I have posted about this a couple times, but ever since I saw Jon Stewart a while back describe modern propaganda as ultra-processed speech. It’s engineered for reaction and engagement. It’s like you said, everything collapses into the same register when there’s a BOMBSHELL headline every day.
But the ultra-processed thing has been reaching much further into our media and culture than political speech for a while now. Like I dunno, everything that has half the people’s faces buried in their phone in public.
That seems like one of the more reasonable scenarios to expect “AI” to thrive, actually.
You have dozens to thousands of people doing the actual work, then you have one CEO or owner that asks the AI to summarize what all the workers have been doing and communicating. It then presents them with a list of suggested decisions with some metrics tied to them like chance of success and Net Present Value (NPV).
The AI wouldn’t even have to do a good job! It would just have to get things wrong or make up bullshit whole cloth as much as human middle managers, or maybe even less!
I think this is a possiblity not because the AI will do a good job, but because the ONE thing that LLMs seem to be good at is mimicking what a random human might type, including humans who are often ignorant or wrong.