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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

    For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

    And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

    As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

    Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

    And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

    DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

    Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)




  • Not true. They voted, and THAT legacy will be with us for a LONG time…

    And sadly, I don’t even mean DT - there’s Ted Cruz, Moscow Mitch, the whole cohort - along with all the international agreements that we’ve already pulled out of and so on.

    See, they left us something after all?! :-P This economy, lack of access to healthcare, and so much more!?

    Btw, I don’t know about you, but I have a retirement plan for my old age. I plan to die. :-P

    In fairness, it is less that they are “selfish” and more that they are “clueless” (to the point of obstinacy, outright refusing to open their eyes) - b/c as you said, your mother didn’t inherit anything, and yet THEY are fine, so why wouldn’t you be, with nothing left to you either? (remember as you think this through to remove all of the actual “facts” first, and add the layer of Faux News Nostalgia factor)



  • Learning about the philosophy of the Stoics (which frankly was not enough for me), plus this quote (which also was not, but the two together… that did help!:-D), something to the effect of: “Strong societies beget weak children, who then grow up to create weak societies, which then beget strong children, who then grow up to create strong societies” - and the cycle continues. i.e., Boomers mainly did not fight in the wars, just grew up hearing how Great America was, without having to experience first-hand the blood, sweat, and tears that made it that way (to the extent that it ever was that way ofc). Well, now things are changing in the direction that they were ALWAYS going to have to changed in - b/c evil people gonna evil it up, no doubts about that - and eventually, sheeple will get sick & tired of being sick & tired and rise up, to change things. Until then, we suffer, but not needlessly.

    In other words, we’ve gone through the stages of denial (climate change / economic downturn / wage slavery / cultural insensitivity / whatever is NOT happening), anger (okay so it’s happening but what are you going to do about it), bargaining (he tells it like it is and big daddy will fix everything & make it all great again! ironically this holds true for both Obama and Trump, loathe as I am to have ever uttered such a sentence), and now we are into the depression era.

    Next comes acceptance, and that’s when the healing - and the beginning of lasting change - can truly start.


  • I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

    One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

    Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

    Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

    The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

    TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

    (though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)


  • Welcome to late-stage capitalism, where companies sell what you do not want to buy. e.g., no wired connection has ever once had this problem, but they had to sell more thingies, so now everything is bluetooth, whether it should be or not, plus it seems like nobody ever bothered to finish implementing bluetooth - e.g., this exact issue you are having, which surely could be fixed except… why bother, when you (& your neighbors) have already bought all the thingies?


  • Nobody “never gets mad”, they just deal. But your issue speaks to something bubbling underneath the surface, it sounds like (obligatory caveat: I am nowhere near a professional). Figure that shit out bc it’s not going away.:-(

    Maybe you are worried about your job or partner or something, and this little stupid stuff is just how it comes out, bc you won’t allow yourself to be mad about the REAL reason you are currently unhappy. It definitely sounds like it is yourself that you are mad about… but even that could be a smokescreen or like projection or some such, if it were not okay to be mad at someone/something else.

    Therapy could help if you could afford it - even just the time bc there are like volunteer orgs that lower the cost - but you can also do a lot on your own, like try to create a safe space where it is okay to be mad about whatever, even if it seems “wrong”. Stupid dog tracking stupid dirt on the stupid carpet… why can’t I ever do anything right? (Like: I could not even marry someone who I don’t highly suspect is cheating on me… WTF!? Or maybe not that, maybe it’s a midlife crisis with career, or children, or who knows what else). Eventually your brain will allow you to know what is REALLY bothering you, when telling you that fact will cause a lesser amount of pain than doing so right now would.

    IMHO, start with: you are not okay, this is not normal, and things can get much better (REALLY!), but it will take effort and possibly time (depending on how deeply ingrained whatever it is turns out to be).



  • The title used by the reporter:

    A Popular Sweetener Was Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice

    The title of the original publication:

    Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression

    I did not read the latter so I cannot vouch for it, but the former is most definitely click bait, through and through, from title to content. I mean, here we are talking about it and sharing the link so… they accomplished their purpose, and why should they care what happens afterwards?



  • Porn will train the next-gen AIs and, since AI cannot tell the difference, in the future 90% (-99%?) of all language will be based on porn, just as (looking back with 20/20 hindsight) the proportion of the current internet would imply must have been true of today’s culture.

    “Yes spank me harder daddy” will come to mean “I would like a promotion in my place of employment, so that I can take on exciting new challenges in this fast-paced, team environment”:-)

    Ofc, “help me stepbro, I am stuck” will still mean the same thing as it always has.

    spoiler

    the joke here is that the change in meaning has already occurred

    Future generations are going to be so confused… :-P So exactly as we are now, I guess? :-D



  • I thought originally it meant like Merry Christmas + Happy New Year, bc professionals might take that whole week off so like “see ya next year Bob, enjoy your holidays!” (plural)

    Then some people started using it to throw in like Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Eid al-Fitr / end of Ramadan, plus there’s Buddhist, Hindu, Hispanic / Latin American (Las Posadas), Scandinavian (Lussinatta), German (Krampusnacht), Chinese (Dongzhi Festival), and in UK/Canada/Australia/New Zealand. there’s Boxing Day afterwards, etc.

    Okay so Diwali is a bit of a stretch, being more than a month earlier but it still feels like it fits:-). The rest all occur within about a month of one another, so saying “Happy Holidays” is by definition inclusive of others who may or may not share your particular religious belief structure.

    Which ofc is why Faux News had to go to war against it, promoting instead the Christmasgasm that Jesus most definitely invented (/s btw bc rather, everything He ever said or did goes directly against what they are trying to claim it is all about). But fuck Fox, do what you want, and I wish you Happy Holidays (whatever form they may take for you:-).