most LLM’s for chat, pictures and clips are magical and amazing. For about 4 - 8 hours of fiddling then they lose all entertainment value.

As for practical use, the things can’t do math so they’re useless at work. I write better Emails on my own so I can’t imagine being so lazy and socially inept that I need help writing an email asking for tech support or outlining an audit report. Sometimes the web summaries save me from clicking a result, but I usually do anyway because the things are so prone to very convincing halucinations, so yeah, utterly useless in their current state.

I usually get some angsty reply when I say this by some techbro-AI-cultist-singularity-head who starts whinging how it’s reshaped their entire lives, but in some deep niche way that is completely irrelevant to the average working adult.

I have also talked to way too many delusional maniacs who are literally planning for the day an Artificial Super Intelligence is created and the whole world becomes like Star Trek and they personally will become wealthy and have all their needs met. They think this is going to happen within the next 5 years.

I had a teller LITERALLY try to steal money from me.

A number of years back I was depositing cash from doing some side-hustle party entertainment work, I counted the cash, handed the cash to the teller and he counted it off, and it was short $100.

The thing was, I was doing magic tricks at parties, I had taught myself a bunch of very basic card tricks and slight-of-hand, not amazing but well enough to impress grade-schoolers, so I caught when the teller did a thing with his hands as he counted, he seemed to palm a bill and I felt immediate unease and wasn’t sure what to do, so I called the manager over and my partner and got the attention of another teller, I figured if I got enough people around he couldn’t pull any further tricks. I said we were “missing” a 100-dollar bill, and the teller acted really confused, pretended to look everywhere, then suddenly the missing bill “appeared” in his drawer. I let it go because I just wanted to go home.

I can even forgive that, that’s one person, not an entire institution. I wouldn’t have a gripe with Wells Fargo if that was all that ever happened. But they did things later on in my life like when I rented a car, they sent me on an overdraft-fee spiral that made my account -$5000 by the time I called the bank. They undid the erroneous charges after lots of shouting.

Later on, I had no choice but to finance a vehicle through WF, I will save the whole, long, horrible story and the shouting matches, but to give an idea how bad-faith they are, they fucking REFUNDED ME THE ENTIRE CAR with a series of “apology checks” over a period of three years after they repossessed it wrongly.

The only reason I didn’t lose tens of thousands of dollars to Wells Fargo is because I learned to fight, fight and scream and yell when they tried to scam me. This shouldn’t be on the customer to be aggressive and angry just to guarantee normal business.

few realize how they work and what they do.

Seriously, you have no idea. I have spent some time delving into the current models, human psychology, neurology and evolution and how people engage with each other or other entities, and the problem is already worse than we realize, and it’s going to get so, so much worse, because our species has major vulnerabilities in our entire conscious experience, these things are going to reshape the way people engage with reality itself at some point and we should all be a lot more concerned and I’m an old man yelling on the street corner with a cardboard sign huh.

If I had a red button to press and it would remove Putin, Trump, Musk, Thiel, Hamas, Netanyahu, or other bad guys, should I press the button? What do you think?

You mean take the current unstable genocidal dictators who are deeply connected with the current political climate and have definite limitations and restraints placed upon them, and replace them with all the associates, wormtongues and ideological puritans that surround these authoritarians and are there simply for the reason to seize any level of control and power that they can?

To say nothing of the lesser-recognized dictators-in-waiting who surround these nations and will look for any opportunity to strike a rival when they’re down.

You may help things, or you may make everything far, far worse. The devil you know and all that. We get hung up on the idea that single individuals control outcomes, when really those people are just the face of a movement or agendas spanning across thousands of people.

Use your red button on the wealthy elite of the world who retain vast surpluses of hoarded (stolen) wealth from billions of people, you would do a lot more good, particularly if that wealth is just lost forever. Better it burn than be used to control populations.

Our best bet right now is acceleration.

The administration is trying to boil the frogs slowly enough that people forget their discomfort and worry, so people get used to being without services like social security or medicare slowly enough that America just keeps running but with less benefits for the citizens and more prosperity for the wealthy.

If the administration moves too fast, people will connect the dots and associate their discomforts with the presidency, and there will be popular movements to oust leadership, peaceful or otherwise.

What you’re likely going to see happen soon is an “economic stimulus” check program with Trump and Musk’s names on checks sent to every American to try to get people to associate them with wealth again. Stick everyone with a 3k - 5k check, while stripping us of tens of thousands of dollars in benefits a year. And it will likely work amazingly well, because our population has memories of goldfish.

So we want them to make more stupid moves faster, we want more people to feel the pain of losing public sector jobs and services, we want chaos and recession and consequence, that is the only way American people will move.

I would really like them to try, they are toeing a line right now because Trump and his closest people aren’t there for ideological reasons, they’re just trying to make a recession happen so they can all gobble up devalued assets and blame biden or trans kids or something. The outliers are the Millers and Bannons who tried before and will try again to assert an ideological presence to bring about the Fourth Reich, but their hold isn’t as strong as the oligarchs who just want money and security for their business empires.

You don’t sustain a business empire when popular political figures are getting jailed, much less if they’re being executed. That would signal the beginning of the actual overthrow of Democracy and if they do it too fast, that would immediately trigger massive popular uprisings and they would lose a lot of control. As it is, the donor-class is looking at the administration right now with a LOT of apprehension about current market destabilization.

Capital doesn’t want instability, and would rather go back to a country of rules and regulations than see the entire market literally burn to the ground, so we would see a sudden and dramatic tone shift in politics broadly, we would see media channels turn on Trump’s administration instantly, we would see prominent republicans in house and senate suddenly start forming opposition groups, we would see impeachment.

Let us make no mistakes about what’s happening. There are people who do indeed want to turn America into a monarchy and they have longer-term plans to do so, and may succeed, but they want it WITH the wealth and prosperity that we have now, they don’t want a banana republic, they just want a really big class-divide so they can have while we have-not.

It’s part of the “nothing ever happens” generation desperate to have a narrative to follow. If they’re going to feel disengaged and disconnected from how complicated politics has become in an increasingly complicated world… WELL MIGHT AS WELL DUMB THIS SHIT BACK DOWN, OOHRAH WWE WRESTLEMANIA YEAH BROTHA ACTION

I too grew up in an age of movies like Star Wars fighting an overtly fascist empire, of Indiana Jones killing nazis, of countless kid’s shows and cartoons emphasizing values like being accepting and not judging people by appearances, of shows like Star Trek explaining the complexity of human societies and using aliens to relay messages of understanding and empathy with others, of science and educational shows like everything on PBS… I thought FOR SURE that these lessons being seen by everyone would lead to a brighter future of mutual compassion and understanding between people.

Holy shit was I wrong. People didn’t watch ANY of that shit, and if they did, they didn’t think about it, and certainly didn’t take any lessons from it. A vast majority of media-consumers don’t engage with their entertainment I’ve learned, they just experience it and move on without any attempt at making mental effort. Even the lightest mental effort is too much for most people. I’m literally shocked we have the society we do knowing now exactly how ignorant most people are.

There are times when you want a brilliant college student on your team, But you need seasoned professionals to help them through the things they’ve never seen before and never done before.

Honestly, any sweet, white-haired old lady who keeps pictures of her dogs and grandkids on her desk who’s been doing data entry for 15 years could do circles around these clowns.

But she might also have the wisdom and perception to know we’re not supposed to be doing this “work” at all, which is why he recruits naive teenagers and college kids who are still emotionally immature to think that this is going to be their “destiny” or their opportunity to get into the big leagues of business.

I do data analysis for a living, I reach out to tech and complain if I can’t open a file with a million+ lines.

this whole thread just seems like a crime scene now.

The worst thing is that you gave them the permission to send emails to you, but you did not even notice it.

Note: there are a lot of services now that will sneakily get your signature/acceptance without you realizing it. The latest one I noticed was at the pharmacy, where you normally sign for your prescription, it now has one or more options that pop up before you sign for your actual medicine, and if you read what you’re signing you see it’s permission to text you special offers and promotions.

ALWAYS READ WHAT YOU ACCEPT, IF YOU DON’T KNOW, DON’T SIGN IT. If you’re worried or pressured, just ask someone. We can’t keep discarding our rights and privacy because we’re worried about people in line behind us or worried how much time you’re going to lose at least SKIMMING the user licence agreement. You can save yourself a lot of junk and hassle if you at least make sure the accept buttons and signature fields are actually for what you want.

“STICK TO GROWING TURNIPS YOU FUCKING RAT BASTARDS”

I was astonished when I first learned that hardly anyone enters web addresses anymore, then it made sense when I realized that almost everyone browses on their phones and uses the app versions of whatever they scroll, which is really only going to be somewhere between three and a dozen sites anyway, people don’t just “surf the internet” anymore, they scroll content aggregators and social media feeds. People hate making choices or having control, they want to turn off their mind and just be fed sensations and experiences.

Because of this most people don’t really know HOW websites and networks work, when I explain things like how cookies work, how to refresh a page, how to navigate to specific parts of a website by changing the address, how to search the web for alternatives, etc. I get looked at like either an annoying nerd or some kind of wizard.

Me just trying to fucking pay a utility bill:

“Honey, could you come in here and tell me if this looks like the edge of crosswalk just visible behind that car? I have one chance left and can’t mess this up!”

Yep, he has no political will of his own, he’s a fucking geriatric reality TV host, he has no energy left, he’s being paraded around to push the talking points of people like Stephen Miller and Putin. He gives zero shits and it shows. He barely bothers trying to articulate his reasoning for anything, and he still has a rabid following of zealots who have turned off all thought and will just invent his justifications for him.

The reason we don’t have a US rail system is because of the constant, unending efforts by automotive industries to dismantle all plans and dreams we’ve ever had for mass-transit. And every other possible public offering or social service that we pay taxes for.

Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)

The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.

They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!

It’s not the “lead” in the reporting though, media is as complicit in the attention-span blackout we’re all experiencing. There are not-bad people in this very post who think this is entirely misinformation because media isn’t leading their charge with this context.

Every headline and every major political story is focusing on what Trump is saying and doing, not the historical context of what our national relationships have been like and what Trump’s history is.

I know we hate this, but our population is eroded. We have like, fucking microplastics in everyone’s brains that are making people not think with words anymore. Everyone is just scrolling and working and slowly boiling to death as the pan heats up. If mainstream news sources actually did their job and showed us what was happening with intentionality and a focus on trying to FORCE people to pay attention, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere close to this mess.

But the media is complicit. They profit from chaos and they LOOOOOVE donny, he is their cash-cow and they will mourn when he finally passes away, or bursts into a cloud of bats or however people like him die.

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