Libra00

Yeah, my plan would be to buy a (small, perhaps even cozy) house to live in right now because my living situation is not ideal, set some small portion of it aside just to blow on stupid shit to get it out of my system, and then invest the rest to ensure that I can live off the proceeds for the rest of my life. Anything beyond what is necessary to secure myself a modest but comfortable lifestyle is going to be given away to help people.

No, that’s fair, the isolation, alienation, and dehumanization was always going to just continue to get worse.

I agree. It was always going to isolate, alienate, and dehumanize people to the point that keeping their own heads above water was all they could think about and there was just no room left for having some empathy and compassion for their fellow human beings.

3 searches a day? Most people probably clear that just satisfying idle curiosity while sitting on the damned toilet.

Yeah, but compare even Henry Ford, who was not exactly a socialist icon, when he said:

There is one rule for the industrialist and that is: make the best quality goods possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the highest wages possible.

…to the ‘fuck you I got mine’ attitude that is utterly pervasive today. Definitely feels like something other than just the evolution of a broken system. It has changed in character as well as in scope.

I admit I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve heard it’s a thing, apparently? shrug But I’ve noticed in my other uses that they’re a lot better about citing sources for their claims now, so I guess you could just go ‘Hey what’s the capital of Vermont?’, ignore its answer, then click on the source link below it, and voila: search engine?

My point was more: is this just the way things are going to go, we’re going to get funneled into using AI for everything whether we want to or not?

Indeed.

Reagan was in the 80s, but yeah, 100% agree. But I mean someone was going to fuck it up sooner or later, cause this country has always been by, for, and about the rich, and it was pretty clear the rich weren’t very happy about how hard it was to get even richer back then.

What does ‘watering down’ even mean? Why is ‘user friendliness’ bad? Do you want computers that are harder to use for some reason? If that was the case why don’t you also give up your favorite OS or interface or language and go back to carting around stacks of punch-cards or flipping physical switches to set memory registers? Or are you just trying to make yourself feel superior as a technically-minded person?

Also, I dunno if you know this, but people interact with health and legal shit all the time, that’s why there are people who only do that job. Reading some email and punching some numbers into an excel sheet are about the equivalent of signing a lease or getting a flu shot. It’s not their job to know how things work behind the scenes, just like it’s not your job to know how to make vaccines or write legally binding contracts.

And finally, you’re forgetting two important facts.

1. Older people tend to have been in their jobs longer, and at higher levels where their computer expertise matters less and less
2. Companies, especially in certain industries, don’t update their hardware/software as often as IT would like them to

So that old guy you think ought to be able to know what a start button is might have never seen one because the only computers they use at work are old SPARCstations from the early 2000s, or might’ve worked in a bank for the last 50 years that is still using AS/400s from the late 80s or whatever; those machines can’t even run windows. You tell me, what are the keyboard shortcuts for copy and paste on a DEC Alpha? Where’s the power button on an SGI Onyx? I worked IT in a hospital in the late 90s that was still using computers from the early 70s and shit, it happens way more often than you think.

Not unless you have some way to get me a free lifetime membership, cause I’ve already made it pretty clear I’m not paying for it, and it wouldn’t even let me use it without making an account when I checked it out.

Yeah I’ve been using duckduckgo for a few years now and loving it, I really hope it doesn’t go away. Still waiting to hear from those guys about how this affects them.

No doubt, but it’s still a lot better than doing the annuity. Half of fuck you money is still fuck you money.

I agree with all of that except the end: it’s definitely still greed, it’s just become easier to other your fellow man so you don’t even have to hate him, you can at best briefly consider his existence as you pave over him on your way to whatever absolute moral certitude you’re pursuing. That’s the true banality of evil: greed makes dehumanization so commonplace that advocating for awful shit to be done to your fellow human being isn’t even widely seen as evil anymore.

Oh I know, but it used to be at least - on the small scale - somewhat mitigated by the fact that most people were basically decent and not trying to fuck everyone else over. I remember as a young child in the 70s that my mother shopped at a grocery store that wasn’t much bigger than my house is today, a little mom and pop operation that had been open for 40 years and run by an old guy, his wife, and a couple of their kids. They knew every customer who came in, knew each others’ families, and were actual acquaintances or even friends instead of merely friendly with them. Nowadays I couldn’t even tell you how to go about finding a grocery store that isn’t the size of my neighborhood and owned by one of maybe 5 companies. Monopolies certainly existed before, but I dunno if it was people, regulations, or what, but there was a while, when I was a kid, that at least the ground-level experience of it wasn’t nearly as bad as it is now.

I mean we keep signing up for services because they’re convenient or fun or interesting and every single time they start cutting corners, worsening services, being more invasive with ads, and charging more and more for the ‘privilege’ of doing whatever it was you were doing there. Why do we keep falling for that and then being surprised when it ends up in the same place as the last 12 platforms or whatever?

That’d be a hell of a thing. I’m with you on that one. Too bad this country is by, for, and about the rich and we don’t really… do consequences for the rich.

No, I use duckduckgo which is powered by Bing’s API. Hence why I said other privacy-focused search engine.

I looked at it briefly, the only free option I saw was 100 free searches, which will not last your average user anywhere near 30 days. Shit that might not last me 3 days depending on what I’m doing.

No, but companies are made of individual people who get more or less greedy with time, like most other attributes of people. Which is why I said ‘people got greedy’.

Capitalism - and I am the last person to defend it - didn’t used to be like this, or at least not as bad. shrug I could probably tolerate capitalism if, say, no company was allowed to employ more than say 15 people.