Kinda on topic, but imma give you some perspective into what it’s like to be a liberal leaning person in a deeply red county. Half my friends are independent or republican, all my coworkers and my boss are republicans, and even my dad is straight up MAGA. I’ve always voted third party because I hated that Democrats never get anything done, but I did vote heavily democrat this past election because I knew how fucked everything would be.

I would say 99% of people do not care or don’t think it’s a big deal. The ravenous Trump supporters you see on the internet and in videos are more of a minority than the norm. There are definitely some hardcore MAGA here but most everyone is just regular everyday people that are just carrying on like nothing is different. Most of them don’t spend much time on the internet and they hardly watch the news. I was talking about the tariff situation to a cashier at a gas station just this morning and it was the first time they were hearing it. And with the news not even covering half the shit that’s going on they probably never will. My roommate works downtown and he didn’t even know about the protests at the Capitol until I mentioned it to him 3 days later.

I guess my point is that the average person isn’t even informed. Not everyone spends a lot of time on the internet so they don’t even see what’s going on. They decide to vote specifically because the candidate says “Republican” and that’s the furthest thought that goes into it. Everyone talks about “this is what they voted for” as if any more thought went into their vote for Romney or McCain than their vote for Trump. And I don’t blame them for it because as far as they know, this was just like any other election. They’ve been bamboozled by local news to think everything is still exactly the same as they slowly pushed the Trump agenda onto them. The hardcore MAGA are definitely fascists in every sense of the word, but these regular everyday people are not fascists. They were just voting for the party they always voted for and were just expecting the same kinda shit from Trump’s first term, and the local news didn’t tell them anything different.

I’m running out of healthy and productive ways in which to express my anger and I don’t like it. Humor is keeping me grounded.

And Airbnb. Fuck that company and the people that buy houses and use them for this. My parents live in the mountains in a popular spot for vacations and camping. Nowadays they are the only house on their entire street that isn’t an Airbnb.

You know what’s horrific and evil? Cutting Medicaid and social security for millions of people because your billions of dollars isn’t enough money to make up for the fact that you’re a giant man baby.

If this is their way of making AI, with brute forcing the technology without innovation, AI will probably cost more for these companies to maintain infrastructure than just hiring people. These AI companies are already not making a lot of money for how much they cost to maintain. And unless they charge companies millions of dollars just to be able to use their services they will never make a profit. And since companies are trying to use AI to replace the millions they spend on employees it seems kinda pointless if they aren’t willing to prioritize efficiency.

It’s basically the same argument they have with people. They don’t wanna treat people like actual humans because it costs too much, yet letting them love happy lives makes them more efficient workers. Whereas now they don’t want to spend money to make AI more efficient, yet increasing efficiency would make them less expensive to run. It’s the never ending cycle of cutting corners only to eventually make less money than you would have if you did things the right way.

Technology in most cases progresses on a logarithmic scale when innovation isn’t prioritized. We’ve basically reached the plateau of what LLMs can currently do without a breakthrough. They could absorb all the information on the internet and not even come close to what they say it is. These days we’re in the “bells and whistles” phase where they add unnecessary bullshit to make it seem new like adding 5 cameras to a phone or adding touchscreens to cars. Things that make something seem fancy by slapping buzzwords and features nobody needs without needing to actually change anything but bump up the price.

I’m just waiting for these incompetent fuckwits at DOGE to fuck something up so catastrophically that it backfires on them tenfold. I’d take GeekSquad running the government over these guys.

And that’s what you get for cheaping out on tech and going with cameras over lidar. Not only that, but Tesla removed all the radar technology that literally every car uses for collision detection about a year ago.

Because we are so far removed from poor conditions that some of us don’t even think they exist. And since they’ve never seen it, misinformation can just slide right in.

As someone that lives above a meth-lab, that’s a pretty good analogy. One day I’m selling my old car to them and we’re shooting the shit, the next they’re banging on my door at 3 AM saying they’re gonna fucking kill me for literally no reason.

Bro this was 6 months ago lol. Models have gotten way better since then. I made this comment when Google was still telling people to put glue on pizza. Which, if you did re-input the answer, would take you to a reddit post. Almost all of them would take you to a reddit post back then.

These announcements are just Truth Social posts with extra words at this point.

I miss the days when Google would just give a snippet of a Wikipedia article at the top and you just click the “read more” button. It may not have been exactly what you were looking for but at least it wasn’t blatantly wrong. Nowadays you have to almost scroll down to the bottom just to find something relevant.

Yeah, imma have to go through our equipment to find out if they go through with this. If we do have to replace it, this shit is not cheap.

GPS isn’t just for google maps. I’m a land surveyor and we literally use GPS every single day. Without it we’re basically fucked. We do hydrographic surveying and without GPS we’d have to basically go back to analog as 90% of the equipment on our boat would be useless. Good luck figuring out how much water is left in the Colorado river without it.

Im not exactly an expert on this, but i am very familiar with what my job requires. The National Geodetic Survey (NGS) will be completely fucked without it as it’s built on decades of data and monitoring. You can’t just look for “alternatives.” Whatever Elmo has is not robust enough for the precision that is required for what we use GPS for. And without shit like that you couldn’t hit the broad side of a city.

https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/

I came from skype so my bar was already pretty low. I’m not defending Discord, by the way. I’ve just been using it to talk to my friends for years because they all had Discord and it was convenient.

I think it’s less about trusting Discord and more about not giving a shit. It does the thing they want it to do and that’s the extent of their consideration. It’s the reason why everyone still uses Windows even though it’s basically spyware at this point. Talking to my friends about it is like talking to a brick wall and they just check out of the conversation.

But the problem I keep running into is getting my friends to switch. They’re not very tech literate as they came from console gaming. I could try to educate them but the response I usually get is “why would I switch to something that might not work when this already works perfectly fine?” And I can’t really argue with it. It’s just not even an issue for them.

I’ve already switched to Linux. The problem I have with this is that all my friends, a Discord server of around 20 people, are not going to be willing to switch. It’s been the way we have stayed in contact for the past 5 years.

I used to. It’s entirely too easy of a program to use.