It’s not we that have become evil. I think it’s imperative that people properly consider who is doing the evil shit.

Many years ago I was visiting some country in Central America, and they were not angry that I was American even though the American government had done horrible things to their country, because they knew that I had no control over what those crazy motherfuckers did.

And that doesn’t mean that everyone is powerless, that we shouldn’t try to make a difference. That’s a different conversation.

When you say most countries, which countries are you talking about?

And if you’re wondering where the US goes for help, I’m not sure what you mean, but there have been a variety of peacekeeping missions and wars over the past few decades where other countries worked alongside the United States. Whether you think those military operations were justified is a different question, but if you’re looking for which countries worked together, you can easily find out by browsing Wikipedia for 20 minutes.

I love the blind comment by the guy. He says people are sick of drama about what’s happening inside the DNC. Obviously almost nobody in the country gives one flying fuck about that. We all care what the DNC does, not have they have little power disputes.

To be more precise, we care that the DNC doesn’t give a damn for the average American, and they’ve shown no signs of improving for the last 20+ years.

That’s what they’re banking on, but we know that eventually they will f*** it up and lose everyone.

Right, and on the other hand they are risking state prison.

If they are acting illegally, they could in theory face state charges for assault and battery. In theory. Because they have no arrest powers. Maybe. Right? That’s the tricky point.

So they would have to be super confident to not find out the scope of their authority.

The article is also full of bullshit and it gets basic history wrong. The agreement was never made, but to the extent it exists anyway, it was never supposed to be about a monopoly that’s destroying shit. Once upon a time, not even very long ago, there were competing search engines.

I know tech writers want to write stories that sound fancy, but if they don’t know the facts and the history then they need to find someone to proofread their work more carefully.

Protests turn into riots when the police wanted to, exactly then, and very rarely before that point.

We can blame the officials. Don’t let the heckler’s veto work. It’s murder of course, but it’s also bullying. And capitulation only makes it worse next time. They’ll always have lunatics with guns.

qpdf is handy for merging PDFs. Command line but quick to learn for most usage.

I don’t think we can accept your argument, because in point in fact Hong Kong was an independent country. Certainly trying to disagree but now we’re getting into a definition question, but if that’s going to stop us from applying the proposed principle, then we can do that in every situation.

Well no, it’s not, because they have multiple monopolies. So we should blame them and blame government for not stopping them.

Obviously the situations are different. We all know that. The point is that it’s hypocritical of a company to say hey, let’s ask our employees to do more by throwing AI at them, and then getting pissed off when potential employees do the same thing.

Although I think it’s more funny than anything else. The company found out that people are gaming the system, which means they have a really shitty system, and rather than change how they interview people or what types of questions they ask, they’re just acting obstinate.

I think we’ve seen enough changes in social media platforms over the past few decades to say that your claim is true until it’s not. As payments to content creators fall, and as garbage postings increase, the actual value to the average user of the site is clearly decreasing. So we’ll see how long YouTube is relevant.

So you’re saying that other options do exist but some companies don’t want to use them because Microsoft is very popular, which is kind of a circular thing, and I understand, but it’s a sign of laziness, not quality.

I have to quibble with you, because you used the term “AI” instead of actually specifying what technology would make sense.

As we have seen in the last 2 years, people who speak in general terms on this topic are almost always selling us snake oil. If they had a specific model or computer program that they thought was going to be useful because it fit a specific need in a certain way, they would have said that, but they didn’t.

One of the problems that the major news outlets have is that they repeat each other. It’s not merely an issue of AI compiling news stories, but that on top of the fact that all of these newspapers are doing hardly any research. For example, if you live in a town that’s not too large, there might only be one local paper, and they might send out reporters to local events. Obviously you would then go to that newspaper if you wanted to learn about local events, because they are adding explicit value.

But if you’re trying to read about national politics, a lot of the information is going to be the same in a lot of the newspapers. Which means nobody cares about the newspaper itself. And this is a creation of the newspaper’s own decision making over the past few decades.

Right … except for all of the poor Boomers out there … let’s just forget about them. Let’s forget about all the Boomers who tried very hard to stop the wealth shift to the rich. They don’t count; they don’t exist.

You decided to blame the old people instead of … checks notes … the rich people. That was a bizarre choice. Meh.

I would qualify your first point. Parkinson’s Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they’re working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors’ supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.