I went through a round of layoffs at my last company. They laid off around 15% and then went hiring, people who just had their teams cut in half and their workload doubled and had to say goodbye to colleagues with years of experience were then told to do 3-4 interviews a week to hire new talent.

It was all just a yank of the choke chain. Management wanted labor to know that they could replace you. Our most senior people burned out and I left after staying longer than I really should have to try to help out my teammates.

Layoffs like this are about obedience and control and showing the investors that you are willing to break people to return them a healthy profit.

I don’t think it’s weird to feel exhausted by the pace of innovation, especially when the innovation has nebulous value.

I felt this way with the wave of “smart house” stuff. I’m a software engineer, I spend all day programming and debugging stuff. I do NOT want to spend 1 fucking second of my precious finite life debugging a fucking light bulb. Not one. Oh I can say “Alexa, red alert” and all my lightbulbs turn red, fucking fuck you. I don’t want my refrigerator connected to the internet, I don’t want my toaster monitoring my speech patterns to serve me ads and customize my toasting experience.

To every shitbag manager out there tying to shove this garbage down our throats, fuck off and die. And you might think “you don’t like a smart (whatever) then don’t buy one.” Fuck you too, over time I fucking can’t. Try to buy a tv that isn’t a fucking smart tv, you just fucking can’t anymore. And slowly but surely everything you use turns into some shitty piece of fuck.

The good news is that AI is probably a bubble. We’ve fed the sum total of the internet into our LLMs and we’ve gotten pretty convincing liars that are sometimes right. We are running out of data and 99 out of 100 uses of AI don’t make sense.

I’ve been in the startup scene for my entire adult career and if you talk to people that try to jam AI into their products to make investors happy you’ll hear very similar things every time. It was incredibly expensive, no one used it, and no one liked it.

There are some use cases for AI, but not nearly as much as what’s getting thrown at the wall. AI has been through many winters where progress stalls, the hype dies out, and AI winter begins.

Final thought, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. People are enamored with using AI to make false memories (sorry, there comes a point where you’ve touched up a photo so much it isn’t reality anymore), destroying their ability to use their brains for critical thinking, art, writing, reading. You don’t have to. Those people might deeply regret not having a single real picture of their child. Maybe the clouds made the photo look bad, but now you can’t remember laughing as you ran through the rain.

Our lives do not need to be curated and polished into some technicolor madness. Do what you want and in 20 years people will ask you “how are you so interesting and fulfilled” as they shovel AI garbage into their maw. I see a future that is similar to what happened to social media (I know, I’m using social media right now, we are all hypocrites). People working everyday to present some faux reality to others, jealous of everyone else’s faux realty, unhappy and unable to go 5 god damn minutes without a dopamine hit.

The other day I had to wait for something, I sat and looked out the window at the beautiful trees rustling gently in the wind. I took in the glory of the world around me, I sat in peace and let my mind wander. These are skills too few enjoy these days because they let the future happen to them.

You are in charge of your life.

Why would you complete a game when you can make a constant stream of income and increase that income stream with announcements and drip feeds.

Look at this madness https://robertsspaceindustries.com/funding-goals

As a Bay Area resident, what the absolute fuck? Is delta in favor of veteran suicide. For something to be “threatening” there has to be some sort of articulable threat. Who was the flight attendant white knighting for, the grim reaper?

Fuck delta

It will truly be a shock to the owner class when after extracting every last bit of value out of the planet they realize that they can’t eat money.

They can’t breathe it either.

It won’t protect them from drought or super hurricanes.

The bunkers they are building to ride out the doom they are sowing will be protected by men. Men who today are willing to accepts their slips of paper. But when that paper becomes worthless, they will slit their throats and sleep in their beds.

They are piling up paper that will turn to ash and they think they are oh so clever. They’ve been able to buy off and escape accountability in almost every domain. But the extraction has taken its toll on the earth, the delicate balance that the ecosystem exists in and the damage they have done can’t be fixed by buying a senator or even building a bunker.

It may be the only solace the rest of us have, man seems incapable of holding this class accountable, but reality doesn’t care. The laws of physics will not bend as easily as the law of man, and they will sit there with their bank accounts full of zeroes and impotently slap at the cold cement walls of the prisons they’ve built for themselves and they will know fear.

What stability though? They’ve been there since being established after WW2 and it’s been an extremely volatile region the entire time.

It would at least be a Faustian bargain if they were doing horrible atrocities but that’s just the price you pay for the Middle East being a peaceful and stable area of the world… but the Middle East has been in crisis for my entire life, so what am I missing?

Also America has the ability to project its power in the region without Israel, so what exactly is there to gain?

Hurricane Milton wouldn’t attack his namesake, that’s just bad form

I heard from the woman that broke Jewish space lasers that “they” have the ability to move hurricanes. And so I guess “they” wanted to protect trumps orange house because “they” are secretly working for project 2025 and there’s probably a level Q drop coming soon to explain how this is all part of the plan but also is part of a different plan that true Americans have to fight like hell against…

God even play acting one of the brainwormed people for a paragraph is exhausting

Fun fact about Eric Schmidt: he’s a moron

And you might be thinking, well yea, I can read the headline. But that’s not even what I’m talking about.

Inside google a bunch of engineers wanted to make chrome, you know that browser everyone uses and gives google an even more unfair strategic advantage. They literally had to hide this effort from Eric Schmidt because he’s a bean counting moron. He has negative strategic vision and would have killed the project.

Listening to this man prognosticate about anything is pointless. This is a man leading google that couldn’t see the value in owning the browser platform, he might be the dumbest person on earth.

Seems an effective government would have organized taking this stuff to a landfill that was operating properly and would correctly store the debris.

Sounds like he sent trucks to a non operating landfill, then decided “landfills are just big fields you dump stuff right? It can’t possibly be more complicated than that”

Here’s a video about all the actual engineering that goes into proper waste management. Maybe the people that operated that landfill had roped it off because they knew no one would be there to correctly manage debris drop off

https://youtu.be/HRx_dZawN44?si=cq-0sgZ6FO9CzTFe

More importantly, Anderson has eight vehicles. GEICO is only choosing to terminate the insurance coverage from Cybertruck and is actively pursuing renewal of his vehicle coverage for the rest.

Oh won’t somebody please help the guy with EIGHT FUCKING CARS one of which is a big dumb refrigerator on wheels.

Seriously fuck this guy anyways just for the sheer overconsumption

I suppose you might get to kill people but that doesn’t mean that the law is going to be ok with that. Proportionality of force is a thing. Stand your ground states are doing their best to change that, but that’s a very mixed bag.

If you shoot and kill someone for blocking your waymo and being a creep, in most places you are going to have to convince a district attorney and a jury that you were justified in ending their life. Even if you do that and escape criminal liability, you’ll then have to convince more people not to hold you liable in civil court.

Sounds pretty cool to go “I got a shooty bang bang so if I feel threatened in any way I can come out blasting.” It is true in the moment, but if you place any value on your future liberty, money, and time you might want to consider the ramifications of killing another human being.

Finally, even if society decides you shouldn’t face any criminal or civil penalty for killing someone, you will have to face yourself. Sitting behind a keyboard it sounds badass to shoot someone that’s pissing you off. In the moment you will probably feel justified. Many a young man sent to war or employed as a police officer didn’t think that taking a life would change them, only to find the reality of taking a life is not what the action movies promised. Self doubt, self loathing, ptsd, depression, these are all common reactions to reckoning with the fact that you are the cause of another persons death.

It is hard to feel like a righteous badass as you watch a grieving widow mourn someone that may have even done something stupid or wrong, knowing that their child has no father now and their wife no partner. Are these people jerks and creeps, sure, is the punishment for being a jerk or creep death, rarely. It is a heavy burden to carry to end another.

Yea that’s fair. I agree, it’s shitty to work someone until they are about to get overtime and then swap them out to avoid paying overtime.

I would agree that to “stiff” someone of something is to deprive them of something they’ve earned, like not paying out overtime once someone has worked it.

I wonder why they bother, it’s not like the thing he said isn’t already shitty.

Thanks for the example, have a cool day

I remember when I first heard the “we will build the wall and Mexico will pay for it”. I thought, “oh they must be taking him out of context that makes no sense”. Nope

He is pretty consistently advancing absolutely batshit insane things. I don’t think he actually gets taken out of context that often, not because the media is fair, but because the shit he says is so goddamn insane there’s no need.

Is there something in recent memory where you think there was a headline that misconstrued what he said?

The guy that privately owns twitter claimed to be some sort of free speech absolutist.

For once this is not someone getting confused about the first amendment but simply calling out musk’s hypocrisy.

Here’s an article from a year ago that covers the same idea and includes a bunch of direct quotes from musk about his free speech views that his fans love to idolize while his actions bear no resemblance

https://www.newsweek.com/elon-musk-promised-free-speech-twitter-hes-betrayed-it-again-again-opinion-1794478

I’ll save you a click with one pull quote

This time, it’s after he clashed with a BBC reporter over the prevelance of “hate speech” on Twitter. “Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like,” Musk said in a clip since shared across the internet, including by mega-stars like Joe Rogan.

So musk using “free speech” to defend hate speech and then censoring this because it doesn’t align with his politics is of course legal, but hypocritical, and logically implies that hate speech does align with his political views or at least isn’t as offensive to him as this dossier.

Board of Directors shocked, absolutely shocked, that they were supposed to be directing the company. When reached for comment several wealthy looking people were seen with dictionaries in hand looking up the word “director” looking absolutely aghast

You sound a lot like me. I figured it out for myself, maybe this insight will help you, maybe it won’t apply, but I’ll share.

I’m an introvert to start and on the spectrum. The world seems built for extroverts, and for a long time I thought the thing I was “supposed” to do was a bunch of extrovert activities that required me to mask my autism and drained me of all my energy. I felt a very similar feeling of being with people but feeling alone, I was in my head carefully running the scripts and behaviors I have learned. Not consciously (well, sometimes consciously) but it was just this extra burden I was carrying around that no one else was. It wasn’t a fun day at the beach without a care in the world, it was an assault on my senses, everything is too bright and too loud and sand is everywhere and “oh, what did that person just say, ugh, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in this situation. I don’t want to play volleyball but are you supposed to anyways because that’s what people do at the beach?”

Over time I found people whose interests more closely aligned with mine. People I could trust to share my true self with, and not the mask of social scripts that I had learned was what I was “supposed” to do. And I realized I was not alone, but that a lot of the activities that people commonly associated with social togetherness were just not for me.

University can be a difficult time, most of the fun to be had is in those activities that I wasn’t very compatible with. I used to think that maybe I was broken too, but now I think that I am just different, and there’s nothing wrong with different. I have friends and a wife and people that I care about and who care about me, the real me, and I don’t feel so alone anymore.

I wish the same for you, if you like exploring the city with headphones, find someone that wants to do that too. If you like watching a dog play with a ball, there are people that will want to do that with you too. I found the more I opened up to people about who I really am and stopped caring about who I was “supposed” to be, the happier I became, the less lonely I felt.

I am sorry things are difficult for you now, in my experience it does get better. Early 20s are the time when people want to party and go to concerts and be quite loud. In a decade those same people will enjoy a quiet evening at home just as much as you do now.

You my Internet friend are not broken, you are just different, and different is beautiful.

A hacker, who has been quite active recently and goes by the alias ‘grep,’ has leaked over 12,000 (11,802) call records with audio, which they claim belong to Twilio customers.

11,802 is not, in fact, over 12,000.

The article goes on to assess this is 3.37% of all Twilio accounts because there are 350,000 accounts.

As of 2024, the company has over 350,000 active customer accounts, which means the latest alleged leak is approximately 3.37% of the total accounts.

Let’s say despite their struggle with math earlier that this 350,000 figure is correct, they seem to think that each account does exactly one phone call.

Further, the image posted makes it pretty clear that the guy hacked someone using twilio and that 3rd party that got hacked had simply recorded their own call information. So this article should be something like “person using twilio got hacked, had made ~12k phone calls with twilio service”

This articles analysis is extremely sloppy and nonsense to the point of seeming like it’s AI generated

The most poetic death for trump would be to suffer a stroke at one of his rallies. The stroke hits and he begins to mix up words and blather nonsense. He can sense something is wrong but his bigly words are not working, he tries to tell his faithful what’s happening.

The meschia and windmilths are shooo shlaaaaad

He slurs out, those weren’t the words he wanted, but with neurons misfiring the most used pathways are trying to help. He spends minutes, all recorded for history, dying in front of his bored onlookers unable to ask for help. His years of word salad and lies have finally achieved an awful goal, no one can tell his brain is broken. For this boy that cried wolf a million times, finally the fangs of an enemy he can’t bully or bribe have sunk in deep, years of kfc fried chicken grease now blocking bloodflow to his brain.

It’s only been a few minutes, the crowd awaits some applause or laugh line, but for trump the time feels like an eternity. The pain is increasing, the fear all consuming, he collapses and dies there.

A fitting end to the man whose greatest fear was that people would realize his weird incoherent ramblings were a con.

They banned single use a decade ago. My family switched to reusable bags. A lot of stores realized that they could sell “reusable” plastic bags, thicker single use bags, and get around the law.

So the rollout went like this, stores gives you free plastic bags your entire life, about a week where people were told “no plastic bags, you gotta bring your own,” then the plastic bags were back but a bit different and the store would sometimes charge you a bag fee (although a lot of places effectively waived the fee). This meant that no one adapted and they continued doing what people had always done with their plastic bags, sone reuse, mostly discard.

People always complain about unintended consequences of laws, I’ve always gotten the impression from those people they would prefer we don’t make the laws. I would love it though if we could iterate on our laws faster than, pass the law, every company finds a loophole a week later, close loophole after a decade of unintended consequences.

And yea, having reusable bags is not difficult.