Lucas has never seen a technology he wasn’t willing to shoehorn and abuse in one of his films.

He’s like the polar opposite of James Cameron.

Isn’t this what Russia and China do?

It’s very funny to see people continue to compare these two countries in a single breath. Russia is far more in line with modern day Brazil, Mexico, Indonesia, or Iran, both in terms of its economic throughput and its level of domestic development.

China’s only real peers are the US and India. They’re operating with a fully distinct socio-economic goal and political philosophy. And their economy is 10x as large, never even mind the technological capacity they’re reaching.

It’s like talking about the World Cup and mentioning Japan and England in the same sentence.

“Have you tried voting?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, but have you tried voting harder?”

I mean, I saw 32GB ram sticks going for $1k the other day.

But you can get a Ryzen 9 9950X for under $700. The chips going up into the four and five figures are for very high end video rendering and machine learning.

Electorally of course, you psychos.

Or not, if push really comes to shove.

But you do have to recognize that you can’t just break the fascade of the machine to get it to stop working.

whens the last time you priced a “high end pc”?

👉👈 Maybe five years ago. Even then, I’ll admit “high end” is generous.

$800 is still a ton of money for an ugly pair of glasses with a gimmick nobody has implemented.

I’ve just had so many random bullshit issues with syncing my phone while using a VPN. I’m very reluctant to go to a new OS entirely. Maybe I can dig out an old phone and experiment. But I haven’t even set up a proper Arr suite yet. So I’m not in a rush to add another task to the queue.

The joke of Reddit is that it’s been decimating its real human userbase while it gobbles up investor cash and sells out wholesale to AI data harvesters.

For whatever reason, the folks with all the money don’t seem to care that they’re throwing enormous sums into a labyrinth of bot-farms. Tens of billions of dollars being pissed away on the Ur-case for Empty Internet Theory.

Tale as old as time

Song as old as rhyme

Fuck /u/spez

I dunno if it’s a pin or belt buckle or earpiece or what

I’ve heard demos on all of these. Bad connectivity, poor interfaces, prone to overheating, very limited use cases… All these gadgets fucking suck.

imagine such a thing with its camera always on, its microphone always recording and ready to talk back, plus whatever other sensors and data streams it has for “awareness.”

Your cellphone ALREADY DOES ALL THIS!

But because it’s a portable touchscreen online TV, it’s still got a few useful functions attached. None of these other widgets offer anything a cell phone can’t do better and cheaper.

I remember this media cycle from the GoogleGlass era. And while the initial reporting was “People are viciously attacking anyone seen wearing them!”, the business post-mortem was more that nobody was buying them to begin with.

These glasses are oversized, heavy, ugly, and pretty much useless for anyone who isn’t a pervert. The sticker price for this largely pointless gadget can go north of $800 retail. That’s a high-end PC or fully loaded PS5 for a small camera that sits on your face and some lenses that give you a Virtual Boy tier of AR overlay.

Who has time for this shit? There’s no use-case.

Unfortunately, this has a habit of becoming a self-reinforcing need for authoritarian policing.

“Flock camera destruction” becomes the rationale for more cameras and more cops and more draconian punishments. And this cycle continues so long as the public continues to send up corporate shills and industry hacks to fill the municipal offices.

Jesus, that’s a form of psychological abuse.

There’s a certain merit to posts with high interactions getting a higher priority to posts that were sent more recently. I didn’t enjoy the Facebook spam that started popping up as people gamed the system. 10,000 “Your friend is playing Fart Hospital! Your friend just pooped himself in Fart Hospital! Your friend has made an Epic Fart at Fart Hospital!” posts because someone didn’t realize the game they were playing was posting to their feed.

But they got the Reddit disease, where engagement was everything. And then you started losing sight of media you cared about under a pile of Shrimp Jesus clickbait.

I think, at the end of the day, the Facebook internal metrics changed from “Are our users happy?” to “Are our users meth addicts?”

There’s a (possibly apocryphal) story about Zuckerberg originally being very resistant to turning Facebook into another Yahoo or MySpace or similar ad-swamped interface, on the grounds that it would scare people away and create a drag on growth. It even got a send-up in The Social Network movie.

Whether this was an intentional business strategy or a second order effect, Facebook was originally one of the cleanest Web 2.0 sites. They did a genuinely pretty good job of focusing on media you were flagged as caring about and showing you activity of friends and family who you wanted to follow. More savvy early users even commented on how creepy Facebook could get, precisely because it could find your friends better than you could and bait you with interactions that drew people together.

The modern iteration of the company is so far away from what it was originally designed to be. The Shrimp Jesus clickbait era Facebook might as well make it a different website. I cannot imagine anyone seeing this site coming into college Freshman year and finding anything that makes it appealing.

Regardless, it should be fairly obvious that giving a company you hate money will not cause them to fail faster.

I’ll concede that trying to soak Altman for $14k/mo when he’s already hemorrhaging billions is a bit like pissing in the river.

I might ask what you plan to do with the $14k in tokens you’re burning. If you’ve got a material use case for them, and Altman wants to sell you $20 for a nickel, go wild.

But half the joke of AI is that you’re burning tokens to do nothing. That’s why businesses recoil as soon as they’re asked to justify at-cost AI spend.

Despite the popular fantasy, the rich and powerful are not stupid.

Uh… famously untrue. Mental illness has plagued monarchs, pharaohs, and caesers for millennia. That’s long before you get to all the quirked up white boys and trad rad girl bosses currently running things.

You don’t know more about a company or market from passively consuming headlines than the leadership of that company.

Okay, but you can review their balance sheets and their primary lines of credit. Case in point, Sam Altman is heavily reliant on three big financial partners - Softbank, Oracle, and NVIDIA. Two of these are - themselves - hemorrhaging money thanks to large capital outlays that have failed to produce substantive returns.

There are finance journalists who get out ahead of this and report their own analysis. And you can find that in a thousand different private journals, substacks, and podcasts. But you can also go do the grunt work yourself if you’re ambitious.

OpenAI’s financials have been disclosed already (although the official SEC filing is still upcoming). So… just read them if you doubt what you’re reading in the news. But it’s not some kind of secret that the business is operating at a loss, with a fixation on debt-fueled growth. The argument is over future projected revenue, which isn’t something business leadership can be any more certain of than a passive media consumer.

I definitely get the knee-jerk impulse to announce “business professionals know more about business than internet idiots”. Because, sure. True. But the idea that business professionals don’t routinely make bad decisions has some pretty historic well-established counterpoints.

“The business people know more” line is akin to saying “This used car dealer must know more about the vehicles on his lot than I do, so I can trust him”.

the Reason Is More Alarming Than Ever

the distinction between opinion pieces and news.

In fairness, media consolidation, rampant native advertising, and deluges of “infotainment” have made this distinction increasingly blurry.

I don’t know what to do about it, either, as people have shown they will always vote for the instant gratification of it

A lot of the information is pure junk, consumed entirely for recreation. What’s to be done with people who watch the equivalent of telanovellas labeled as Breaking News?

Even when information is ostensibly useful, there’s the endless debate of what to do with it.

I see this Shepherd’s Tone coverage of education and intelligence, as though highly educated and deeply curious people had some sort of profound influence over the world twenty years ago that we’ve lost today.

If anything, the endless “everyone is getting stupider (except you, sweet beautiful reader)” seems to play directly into the narrative that democracy doesn’t work and submission to authority is the logical choice.

Eh. Think about how Ayn Rand hated Libertarians.