Deacon

I am having a surprisingly complex mix of feelings about being too old even for the revised age.

In a functioning society I think that would be criminal.

It’s like tattooing your new girlfriend’s name on your ass.

I would have to go and download an ad, and then upload it, and then select it from new additions in order to hear an ad on Plexamp.

But the subscription model is the framework for fuckery here.

It wasn’t long ago that subscribing to something, implied a consistent (usually periodical) delivery of actual goods or services that were in some way distinct from the previous periods good or services. Issue #33 is different from #32. March’s soup of the month is different than February’s.

And you could hold issue #33 in one hand and #32 in another hand and directly interact with two months worth of that subscription.

The tech bro idea of innovation is to get two revenue streams from each customer; keep us paying for the same thing over and over but never owning it, and sell our data to advertisers. The fact that they are also showing ads to subscribers is just dripping lemon juice in the paper cut because they can. They were already making money off that data.

Ironically it is comments like these that led to Reddit gold. But thank you kind stranger for saving me having to descend into The Depths for this.

In other words, everyone is vulnerable to this totally new form of hazard if they use these “tools”.

The problem is that - Already and forever more - the consumer and the AI have divergent definitions of “better”.

AI is not being served to us in a neutral space, it is largely developed and controlled by companies that also control important Algorithms, and that is no coincidence.

Use AI if you want to, but essentially You’re The Product and the cost is only the environment. Non-billionaires who think there is an actual value prop for them are basically concussed, they are so short sighted.

Oh, well I do beg your pardon.

My lovely brain

Thank you. Open Source is basically table stakes for any new investment I make moving forward.

I want to get into 3D printing before it’s outlawed and I’ve been gravitating to Bambu because I’m novice enough that marketing works. Where should I be looking? Price is a consideration but not my first.

Ah my namesake and fellow gandy dancer.

I call it salting and I do it religiously.

Or do I?

I hope they never recover. No ill will to the working level who would be impacted, but it needs to be clear to companies that this shit is TOXIC to your brand to even consider in 2026.

Which is why I will never buy a car made after 2015 if I can possibly avoid it. If I were writing the rules,

• My car should not be capable of pay-walling any features

• Just like my phone, I should have fine grained control over what data my car shares and with whom

• No vehicle controls that may need to be accessed while driving should require more than one click on a touchscreen to access

• Any touchscreen UI should be easily controllable from a steering wheel type d-pad

• No non-entertainment vehicle controls should be primarily accessible from a touchscreen

• Any controls that affect the speed, position, size, or access of the car should only have secondary touchscreen controls that are upstream of any failures modes in the primary physical control; in other words, a UI control should only be a backup method for important functions of the vehicle, and they shouldn’t be able to break the main method if they break

When I had to reluctantly buy a used car, I made it a point to buy a used car no newer than 2015 and this is why. Well this and touchscreen mania.

cucks

This would have actually been a great thing to not only acknowledge but promote if they weren’t so caught up in their own hype.

Not that I will ever get into one of those death traps but if you tell the average consumer that any failures in autonomy immediately engage a tele-operator “to keep you moving on your way” they would probably feel better about riding.

I’ve done tele-driving before and it’s remarkably good, even if latency is a concern.

It’s the facade of it all, the need to seem to live up to the hype. It’s going to get more people killed.

But here is the thing: There were already a million reasons to avoid Microsoft even before their lost weekend with this AI fever dream.

Remove the Microslop and those older reasons remain.

oooh, promise?