Obligatory Carl Sagan from 1995:

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance

Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

They’re made to “Enhance the user experience profit”

“Enhance the user experience” is just what the dev or documentation team writes when management dictates that they drop a feature. The only reasons they would have dropped it:

• Dev work vs actual customer usage (e.g. it wasn’t getting a lot of users but devs had to maintain it with each update)
• People were using it to intercept the stream and capture movies to pirate.

Every decision is about increasing profits first, and UX almost always takes a back seat to that

“You worked really hard this year. 60 hour weeks. Impressive but you can do more. See that rolls Royce in the parking lot? If you work 80 hour weeks next year and everything works out, I’ll be able to buy a second one.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse

Yeah this is another rugpull meant to allow the rich to get richer on the money of idiots

The hentai server I’m on told me to switch to libreoffice instead of helping 🙁

Either that or it will secretly fund gang activity or drug smuggling or something so that it can “catch the bad guys” and secure more lucrative government contracts

TV and movies I’m totally good with 1080p. If I want a cinematic experience, that’s what the cinema is for.

But since switching to PC and gaming in 4k everywhere I can, it feels like a night and day difference to play in 1080p. Granted that means I care about monitor resolution rather than TV resolution.

But as an aside, as a software engineer that works from home, crisp text, decent color spectrum support, good brightness in a bright room, all things that make your day a whole lot better when you stare at a computer screen for a large chunk of your day

For me that’s like the inverse. Plenty of fast food around me but the nearby McDonald’s is pretty crazy efficient (and generally busy), always gets my order right without issue. Burger King, Taco Bell, Wendy’s in the area are all terrible with order issues, badly prepared food, etc. I’ve never checked but I wonder which of the stores are franchises and which are corporate owned and if that makes a difference

It’s wild that “we’re cooked” started as straight meme terminology but now literally describes the future of the human race

Basically, but with MCP and SLMs interacting rather than a singular model, with the coordinator model only doing the work to figure out who to field the question to, and then continuously provide context to other SLMs in the case of more complex queries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

There were certainly companies that survived, because yes, the idea of websites being interactive rather than informational was huge, but everyone jumped on that bandwagon to build useless shit.

As an example, this is today’s ProductHunt

And yesterday’s was AI, and the day before that it was AI, but most of them are demonstrating little value with high valuations.

LLMs will survive, likely improve into coordinator models that request data from SLMs and connect through MCP, but the investment bubble can’t sustain

Yeah sorry forgot my /s there

Unfortunately I wonder if it’s more expensive to set up a closed loop system that’s really expensive or to buy lawmakers that will vote against bills saying you should do so and it’s a tale old as time

And water usage which will also increase as fires increase and people have trouble getting access to clean water

https://techhq.com/news/ai-water-footprint-suggests-that-large-language-models-are-thirsty/

My fiancé lost her father recently just after we watched

Haha all good, I wasn’t criticizing, snacks just made me laugh. Teens have probably been bartering weed and alcohol in high school since the 70s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwLccJOMTX0