Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.

At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.

As an old person who knows a lot of old people and has to deal with a lot of other old people, you’re in a bubble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and you may already be aware.

By and large, early gen X and older have a very difficult time discerning what materials are AI generated. Then when you get to a certain age range, maybe 70+, AI to much of that crowd is just another buzzword they know nothing about.

Now, in the pedantic sense of the word “increasingly”, if literally one more old person is against AI or doesn’t trust AI compared to last year, then that’s increasing. But on the whole, I’m not seeing it. In fact, as AI gets “better” and harder to detect, I’m finding that more people just go with it. You basically end up with camps of “the person who accuses everything of being AI”, “the person who has no clue what’s what and doesn’t care”, and “the person who can’t tell if something is AI regardless of how obvious it is”.

Gas prices have been higher, both in a relative and absolute sense, if you’re looking at the USA’s national average. The biggest issue now is that these prices are due specifically and directly to Donald Trump, his administration, and the complicity of the courts and congress. They were avoidable and unnecessary.

This is in DIRECT contrast to his campaign promises: Lower prices, Day One. He’s going to immediately lower prices.

Average intelligence people and above knew that this was a lie from the get go. That millions upon millions of American voters believed it, is a shame.

Did you inform this impressionable young reptilian that this is not what its teachers meant when they instructed the class to go out and climb a limb?

AIneOneOne: I understand your concern that you had an accident and hit a tree — a lost limb hurts, but did you know that oak trees are are hosts to more caterpillar species than any other species in North America?

For me it’s because, at least historically speaking, there’s usually no immediate feedback whatsoever if the command was successful or not. And then in addition, individual applications can also disable it entirely, often with no indication. Then on top of that, I switch back and forth between OSes, and some like Mac have different command keys and my brain doesn’t always automatically do the translation – especially since I’m using the same keyboard for all of them.

So, from a strictly reactive sensory perspective, my failure rate with just the single ctrl + c command is far from the non-zero it would take for my brain to be convinced that just the one ‘c’ is sufficient. Hitting the ‘c’ many times also gives my brain a tiny bump of endorphins / dopamine / whatever over and above hitting it just the once. It’s like playing the lotto or playing a slot machine, except all I win is paste.

Your “in other words” hits hard.

I have family in a nearby rural county where the local hospital is at high risk of closing once the medicaid changes (aka cuts) take affect next year. I mentioned it to my family members, who are Trump voters, and they weren’t even aware. Despite that, they did have an opinion on the matter, of course! At one point someone said something along the lines of “we can’t afford to go to the hospital if something happens anyway”. Which that’s just a tangled mess of cognitive dissonance considering they’ve all been in that hospital, some multiple times, over the past 5-ish years AND they’re the ones who use the emergency room as free healthcare because they know the emergency room can’t turn you away if you can’t pay.

The thing is, the next closest hospital takes around 30 minutes longer to drive to and these are unhealthy older people. If their local hospital closes, their next emergency may be their final emergency as a result. And I know they’ll care then.

I grew up in a time of optimism, but the foundation was already completely rotten.

Even as a child I understood the societal contradictions. Love thy neighbor and let he who is without sin cast the first stone, but gay people are demons spreading AIDS and disease, they should be killed. Immigrants are taking our jobs, but our bosses who are hiring them to replace us bare no blame. We should feed the less fortunate, but the black ones are welfare queens who are having babies just to get free money.

On TV, though, everything was PERFECT. Black people and white people got along. Black people could even be doctors. Churches helped out the poor. People working minimum wage jobs could afford nice homes in high cost of living places and have big families on that single income. In real life, none of that was to be taken at face value.

A rewind button, I suspect, will never get you back to a place where the future is truly better. The zombie apocalypse is pure fiction. What we have is much worse. And even in the zombie fiction, it’s often what’s worse that ends up being the focus, with the zombies and the apocalypse just serving as a place setting.

So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.

First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.

Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.

Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.

Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Meh, that one there’s South Africa. The one above it is North Africa. There’s Zanzanibia over there in the corner. Oh yeah, and isn’t Egypt in Africa or is that in the Middle East? Oh yeah, Sahara and Congo. Eithinopeia. I shoulda wrote that Animaniacs song myself.

There’s so much I could say about this topic. It’s obvious that the “unemployment” numbers, like so many metrics, don’t reflect the reality of our economic situation even if those numbers are accurate & to be believed. This is a statistic born of anecdotes, as everybody involved has their own story, but I personally don’t find that number shocking or surprising at all. In all my life, I’ve never known this many “working aged” people who are unemployed all at the same time.

Obviously the boomer and older generation being such a large cohort and largely being retired weighs heavily in this number. But even those folks have a story. Many of them expected they would get a post-retirement job “just to get out of the house” or “for some fun money”, only to find out that they aren’t healthy enough, the jobs are too risky for their health, the jobs don’t pay enough to be worth it, their healthcare access and quality has declined, and so on. Better to stay home and just try to live off whatever they already have.

For me, I had a great job with a purpose, then DOGE destroyed all that. Then parents’ health declined and I found myself in a position of having to be a caretaker. The job market for my skill set is abysmal and I live in a rural area so local job market is even worse and I don’t think I can juggle a 1+ hour trip to work each day (and back) on top of everything else right now. Fortunately I saved for a rainy day and boy is it ever rainy. Obviously not everyone is/was able to.

I came from a big family like that. My mother had 13 children and 11 of us survived long enough to get married and start our own families. Lost one sister to fibroids and another to gang violence.

Something that annoys me is the number of people who claim they don’t read/watch the news (except the weather) or use Facebook/social media anymore because it’s all bad news – and yet they still seem to have an opinion on everything that’s happening AND they still vote based on that opinion.

But I suppose that’s also bad news in and of itself, so I apologize for that.

To be honest, I think the USA’s reputation around the world is already so poor right now that this doesn’t make much difference.

Inside the USA, this isn’t exactly high profile news (at least not at the moment) and I bet most people who are aware it happened would see this as a Norway thing rather than a US thing, and therefore would consider it more of a knock against that country than our own.

Not saying that is MY view, just that it would be a common take here on the inside if this actually were to become high profile news (which it doesn’t seem like it is at the moment).

Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.

Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.

Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.

And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.

There aren’t many realistic scenarios where this could be true, so I’m going to have to spray you in the face with a water mister for being bad because you should feel bad for posting a completely untrue lie.

They aren’t common in the places I typically shop, at least not yet.

So, around here, when you see these, you know you’re in an unsafe part of town, so they’re essentially a huge advertisement to go shop some place safer and nicer. The privacy invasion aspect of it isn’t even really the biggest factor in regards to where I spend my money.

Ironically, so does his medical team. Based on the bruising, wouldn’t surprise me if they’re having to draw blood constantly for all the testing required to keep his corpse functional.

Stores are also pushing the boundaries of how far they can reduce aisle widths. Every one of the corporate retailers in my area who have remodeled their stores since the COVID era, have reduced aisle widths. Having had to travel quite a bit the past year and change, my impression is that this seems to be an industry-wide thing.

Also since the COVID era, all or nearly all of the restocking happens during the day time now. In the before times, the bulk of shelf restocking happened during low-volume hours and/or over night. Now, the people stocking shelves are competing for aisle space along with customers.

And don’t forget that pretty much all the stores have order pickers (for online pick-up orders) roaming around with large trolleys. In theory this helps reduce foot traffic to the stores, of course, but for a variety of reasons, the way they currently operate seems to negate any of those potential benefits making them a wash at best.

THEN you add the shoppers (particularly older shoppers) whose primary outlets for socialization are church and impromptu meetings in the grocery store aisles, and it is a recipe for frustration for shoppers. People around here are generally nice and courteous, until group dynamics kick in and they get distracted by the news that Betty Parsons was just diagnosed with a heart valve condition and Wanda McCabe’s grand daughter just graduated from college.

Weird that affordability has never been worse (in my lifetime), inflation is not under control for actual necessities (like groceries), and yet there’s not Trump “I did that” stickers all over the place. Wonder why those people who put out all those Biden “I did that” stickers, practically everywhere, don’t care now. What happened to them? Hmmmm, guess the world will never know.