All of those kinds of communities, where people tell anecdotes about their lives, turned into creative writing excerises for wannabe authors long before we had to worry about AI slop. TIFU, AmITheAsshole, RelationshipAdvice, etc. were all getting pretty derivative and sensational for clicks long before the exodus. Now they’re all either that or illiterate attention seekers showing off the results of their latest LLM prompts. I liked those stories too, but I don’t want anything to do with any of those communities anymore. It all just turned into a training ground for LLMs generating engagement. YouTube still tries to force those dumb AI story voiceover videos to me constantly. We used to joke that “nothing ever happens”, but everyday that sentiment feels a little less cynical and a little more real.

Can you still buy a star? Obviously dubious that you actually own it. But certainly bigger than anything on earth and a bit tricky to deliver.

He was TOO good at the satire. On the left dum-dums thought he was actually right, while on the right dum-dums thought he was on their side.

Also, I think people are hitting their limit of joking about the collapse of democracy and civil society. I know I am. I know there are now movies, TV, and books that I might have found interesting in less interesting times; now it all just hits too close to home. John Oliver can hit those “too close to home” topics and move on to other things. But it always felt like when Colbert was doing his conservative pundit schtick, he was trapped in it. It was harder to laugh along with him about other things that weren’t specifically about that kind of satire. He might have had some more material of a particular idiom if he’d stuck with it, but that idiom can wear thin.

Aggressive is modifying “virtue signaling”. I guess I could have been more clear by adding an “ly” to make it clear that aggressive was an adverb.

But, honestly in my experience there is ALWAYS someone finding some new way to understand your comment so that they have something to argue with. I was both making a joke AND making a point. Complicated, I know.

And it is something to criticize: OP asked about “X”, commenter replied about NOT “X”.

I downvoted your comment because it’s doesn’t really add anything to the conversation, it’s just aggressive virtue signalling.

Oh yeah, I’m aware. I don’t really disagree in general, but that dependency on devices is problematic. Also, I think that dependency is almost entirely a fiction. The only vendors I’ve ever met that don’t take cash, weren’t selling anything I’d generally need in an emergency or miss if I couldn’t get it immediately, e.g. craft/art fair vendors and fly by night food trucks. And I mostly managed to navigate everywhere without a map, even though I kept one in the glove box. The U.S. (I assume we’re talking about the U.S. because carbrained) is fairly easy to navigate without either as long as you can find a highway and you can read road signs. Maps helped sometimes sure, but the lack of one never made me feel unsafe. Sure, things can go badly, but that’s due to a lack of ingenuity and knowledge (street smarts as we used to call it), not the lack of a phone. In fact, I’ve gotten just as lost while looking at a map and trying to follow a friend’s directions. Maps, physical or digital, are almost always wrong or outdated to some degree.

You’re only as dependent on your phone as you make yourself. That crutch is the real danger.

It’s amusing to me that the very idea of leaving the house without your cellphone is seen as very dangerous. But I guess payphones and landlines at every tiny shred of civilization aren’t really a thing anymore. Nobody could track me and I could get genuinely stranded occasionally for the first few decades on my life, but I never felt that lifestyle was dangerous. Just raw dogging life before it was cool I guess.

Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.

It’s not a completely different thing. They were both trying to fully integrate the operating system and the web browser into one monolithic and inescapable thing: Windows XP + Internet Explorer to squash competition on the desktop; Linux + Chrome to squash competition on laptops; Android + Chrome OS to squash competition in the mobile space. The money to be made on operating systems is trivial in the consumer space compared to the power of control over platforms (like web browsers) that deliver advertisements and harvest data from comsumers. M$ saw the writing on the wall way back then in their fight with Netscape Navigator. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

I feel like I’m talking to an AI chatbot completely unable to reason abstractly or consider the full context of the conversation.

Why bother commenting at all if you’re going to be proudly ignorant AND a jerk?

Who’s talking about Windows 8 or 2012? I said 2 decades and meant it. I wasn’t talking about the same time frame, just pointing out the history we are repeating. I was talking about “United States vs Microsoft Corp.” (2001). That would have been regarding Windows 98 and Windows XP. Internet ExplorerEdge is still an integral and unremovable component of Microsoft’s operating systems to this day and I guess everyone really has forgotten about Netscape Navigator.

Two decades ago people would remember when M$ decided to do something very similar on the desktop. Nothing has changed.

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Because stunt people never get injured right? Is that the point your trying to make?

If we’re ranking shit by smell, then carnivores are the absolute worst, omnivores are a close second, and herbivores are a distant third. Everything excreted by a big cat (Lions, Tigers, etc.) is so so smelly, and it seeps into everything. You can smell the big cat zookeepers as soon as they walked into the room.

Omnivores excrete stuff that is almost as smelly as those cats, but at least it’s familiar. Maybe that makes it worse. Admit it, your own farts are never as offensive as someone else’s. Raccoon poop, especially the dried out and dusty kind will straight up kill you though, so watch out for that. Primate fluids can pretty risky too because of their similarity to us.

Herbivore shit is fucking perfume compared to the others. Horse shit doesn’t actually smell that bad at all unless there is something wrong. The ammonia from their piss is something fierce and awful though. Mucking horse stalls is like scooping a litter box for a cat the size of a horse, but the actual shit is the most pleasant aspect. Elephant shit is the most pleasant shit I’ve ever had the pleasure of shoveling. It’s like wet dead grass with a hint of musk.

Yes. Mayo is a key ingredient in so many picnic dishes. Dishes that people regularly prep for BIG family gatherings where everyone brings home leftovers. Potato salad, coleslaw, and pasta salads made by the gallon. Sure, some people eat way too much, but sharing and sharing big is kind of the whole point. If someone shared food with you in a park, you’re family now and will be expected to bring your weight in your other family’s traditional recipe of something next time.

Value was making value as you put it, long before rapid trading. Speculation and arbitrage are like the first two things that develop in any economy. Any entrepreneurial grade school child trading candy, baseball cards, pogs, hotwheels, or whatever the hot new thing is has probably seen both first hand.

Tell us you don’t have a clue how the electoral college works without telling us.

Somehow I think the national lab test company’s lawyers have got them covered. This wasn’t exactly a fly by night, no name company. Having in known third party send you a medical bill months later is pretty fucking common place. This was just one anecdote of many, not an isolated incident.

The best part is the random bill.

• Go to the doctor. Get blood drawn.
• Doctor send the blood to a lab for the test. Doesn’t tell me who. I don’t care who. It’s their subcontractor, let them worry about it. *Go back to the doctor or get a call for results. Pay the doctor the standard co-pay. *Months later a random company sends me a bill. This is a company that I have never interacted with or entered into any contract with, for work that somebody else (presumably my doctor, but who the fuck knows for sure) asked them to do for them, sending the results to that other person and NOT to me.

The system is broken. If any other company subcontracted a part of their work to a third party, you as the client would reasonably expect that work to be paid through the original contract, not get a bill directly from the subcontractor. I didn’t hire them, the doctor hired them. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the doctor’s subcontractor and their debt, not mine. I paid the doctor already.

Or another variant.

• Go to the emergency room.
• Get separate bills FOR THE SAME SERVICE from the hospital, the doctor, and somehow the hospital again but this time it’s the emergency room (which is somehow separate with a different billing company).

The system is not just broken. It is designed to fleece us and train us to always accept whatever debt the institutions decide to levy on us without question.