Spoken like someone who's never spent thousands of dollars and literal years struggling to get online records corrected to reflect an expungement. Fuck anything that makes that process even more difficult which AI companies certainly will.

Having spent more hours than I care to count struggling to control my facial expressions in client-facing meetings your assertion that that friction is unnecessary is highly questionable. Having a "face man" who's sufficiently tech literate to ask decent questions manage the soft side of client relations frees up a ton of engineering resources that would otherwise be squandered replying to routine emails.

dotcom implosion redux

It certainly feels that way. I was there. Fortunately had just waltzed into the tech side of things and scurried off back to my professional career for a couple of years.

I watched a lot of stuff burn. It was horrifying. We are nearly there again.

Yeah similar story here. I had to spend a couple of years painting houses before the local market recovered enough that tech jobs were a thing again. Shit was surreal. There was one guy I knew that went from building multi-million dollar server and networking projects for IBM to literally working as unskilled labor on a fencing crew just to make rent.

Problem is there aren't jobs where you can go and hide until the economy recovers this time.

For a time, there was a lot of good deals on nice used office furniture.

Yeah got a nice desk and a trinitron out of it. Covid got me an Aeron :)

You don't need a perfect oracle to win on prediction markets. All it takes is enough influence to tip % in your favor. Card counting is very effective.

Yeah, as long as it's reasonably reliable, compound interest also adds up to turn even small ROIs into big wins across multiple investments.

I don't think it would be reliable enough. Small odds in favor of you and large variations (due to small market cap) require you to invest only small amounts based on the Kelly criterion, and I feel like the resources needed to carry out these influence campaigns are much more effectively used for other goals like political maneuvers.

This is literally how the advertising industry works. Same mechanism, same results.

What part of an endless sea of SEO spam, AI slop, malware, polarized astroturf, and addictive-by-design walled gardens strikes you as the win? Seriously, where is the win?

But the internet is so much more than that, isn't it?

It really isn't. It was so much more than that but a couple decades of "innovation" and here we are.

It used to be.

Honestly, some of the shit with ClawdBot^W MoltBot^W OpenClaw and molt.church and molt.book has been some quality entertainment, enabled largely by the Internet. And it's AI slop but that only seems to matter when one of them gets miffed about its PR being rejected and posts an unhinged blog post about the maintainer who rejected said PR. And in a "comedy equals tragedy plus time" way, it's pretty easy to laugh at that, too.

You know there's individuals who will unironically defend any dark pattern one cares to point to so your take here is pretty unsurprising. I feel like this is getting excited over finding a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd.

I meant it more as marveling at the people who get excited at the undigested corn kernel and then make artwork about it, though not to knock participation in this zeitgeist. There really is something fascinating about seeing people congregate over something that excites them, regardless of the curmudgeons who denigrate it. Doubly so if I don't understand it. It doesn't have to be your cup of tea but calling it "a kernel of undigested corn in a random turd" is unduly hostile.

The only thing more predictable than the credulous defense of harmful technologies is the wildly fallacious "old man sneering at clouds". If there is hostility there's generally a good reason for it. Refusing to engage with that is an indication of arrested emotional development or maybe a massive ideological blind spot. It certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness.

This seems like a record for number of projections per sentence.

You do not have any reason to think I've (1) "arrested emotional development" nor (2) an "ideological blind spot"; (3) my "defense of harmful technologies" was not even presented, let alone (4) does it have anything to do with old men shaking their fists at clouds; and you do not have any reason to say I've (5) not been open-minded.

The only thing I said is that there have been some happenings to be entertained by, that is not exclusive to other feelings about them. I can think whoever set up MJ Rathbun has been irresponsible while also laughing at the dumb thing their irresponsible decisions caused.

These feelings are not mutually exclusive and hostility towards the ones I expressed because you made assumptions about other feelings I must have is an indication of arrested emotional development and certainly doesn't herald open-mindedness. Obviously (this is from my perspective, let's remember our emotional development and open-mindedness), you must fear these things in some manner and you are projecting said fears onto my statements in these comments.

Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.

Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.

$100-$200 an hour on average for hand work, more if I need to use an excavator.

What does the friction look like? Insurance, licensing, that kind of thing?

Very variable depending on a combination of local/state regulations and what kinds of projects you're willing to tackle. The bottom end of the spectrum is a $50 a month general liability policy.

Tell that to the tobacco industry yeah?

Yeah hospitals cost money

I highly doubt the best solution to this sort of problem is one size fits all.

Based on any evidence or just going with your gut on this one?

"The entire economy" here being a pseudonym for marketing and advertising?

Casually waiting for a legislative body to muster the courage of their convictions and just ban social media outright.