This kind of problem falls under “communicating badly and acting smug when misunderstood”. Use parenthesis and the problem goes away.

https://xkcd.com/169/

Most email is short. I don’t see a need to summarize it. Google is run by idiots and assholes.

MacOS by default hides scroll bars. They’re big on form over function which I hate.

Some people are just like that.

I knew a couple that mounted their TV in a way that all the ports (eg: HDMI) were inaccessible. They just didn’t care that a big chunk of the TV’s functionality was now blocked. They didn’t want to see wires.

A lot of people making decisions are idiots, or are following the whims of idiots above them.

Back in like 2017 a company I worked for made a mouse tunnel on their web UI. That’s where like you mouse over a menu, and that opens a sub menu. You mouse into that sub menu, and another menu opens. If at any point your mouse leaves this area, the whole thing closes. It’s shit. It’s been a known bad pattern since like the 90s.

Product guy wouldn’t listen. Not sure if he didn’t care or didn’t understand. Either is bad.

This happens all over. People don’t care. They don’t understand. They don’t listen to people that do. They have their own metrics and goals that are disjoint from actual value.

When people do try protests that are disruptive, people complain about it.

i think protests should be focused on stopping the machinery that’s grinding us all up. But if your protest means traffic or a closed Walmart then all the short sighted idiots and all the people barely holding on get mad.

I don’t think people are smart enough to deal with this world we have created.

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore.

Ed Zitron wrote an article about how leadership is business idiots. They don’t know the products or users but they make decisions and get paid. Long, like everything he writes, but interesting

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-the-business-idiot/

Our economy is run by people that don’t participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don’t experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

If I was raising kids, I absolutely would not want to do it in the suburbs. It’s isolating and limiting. I was always so jealous of the kids I knew that lived in the city. They could do things. I was stuck indoors , or walking for like 90 minutes to get anywhere.

I do not miss driving. Public transit forever.

But when I did drive, after my reckless youth, I’d usually just chill in the right lane. I don’t care. Fly by at 120mph. I’ll be here going with the flow of traffic, or about the speed limit if I’m alone.

I do remember one time in the suburbs when I was visiting my parents, I was driving to the grocery store. It’s a short drive (because it’s the suburbs, you can’t safely walk to the supermarket), no highways. About 10 minutes to get there from driveway to parking lot. Some guy behind me started absolutely losing his shit, screaming, and passed me dangerously by driving onto the shoulder. He pulled into the same parking lot. I parked well away from him because I didn’t want to deal with crazy.

I’m not good at math, but if the entire trip was about 10 minutes, I feel like the time difference between me going about the speed limit and me speeding is, at most, what, 2 minutes? 5 minutes? The guy probably took more than 5 minutes off his life being so angry.

There are credible allegations that the AI companies are not merely scraping publicly available resources, but are also consuming content in violation of the terms of use / copyright law. Like, a site has a robots.txt file that says “no scrapers” and they scrape it anyway. People would be mad about traditional search doing that as well.

Secondly, if a search service scrapes your site and then directs relevant users to it, that’s probably fine. Most websites want users to visit. A lot of AI stuff sucks up the content, and then the creators of that content get nothing. No users are sent there. The scraper hitting the site takes resources, and gives nothing back.

Google has also gotten some flak for putting stuff on their own site instead of sending users to the source. Like you do a search and get a snippet on the google page, and you never click through to example.com/cool-stuff. Well, now the owner of example.com/cool-stuff doesn’t get the click. If they run ads, they get no credit. If they have metrics, they probably don’t see any visitors. If they have like forums, people are less likely to engage.

If the “AI Search” includes links back to the source, that’s not perfect either. One, it’s kind of excessive to use an LLM to parse text when the origin site is already there and readable. If I search for “population of london”, you can just send me to a census website or even wikipedia. You don’t need to use a whole ass LLM. Two, as I touched on in the previous paragraph, users are less likely to click through if google is putting the core of the information right there (even if it’s not always accurate). It’s still lessening traffic to the origin site, and traffic is often the lifeblood of websites.

Lastly, a lot of AI stuff is simply inaccurate or misleading. We’ve all laughed at the “use glue on your pizza” stuff or the “there are two Rs in ‘strawberry’” fuckups. If traditional search was really bad, like you type in “cat food” and you got a webpage that was all jewelry and “buy gold” scams, you’d be annoyed, too. That’s more like how search was before old google came about. There were a lot more low effort “SEO” hacks like putting a bunch of keywords in tiny print to fool the search indexer. Now google is the shitty old guard, but they have too much money and power to be easily replaced.

That’s just off the top of my head. Scraping for AI isn’t the same as scraping to make a searchable index.

I live there. Why?

, systematic defending of public education

Going to assume you meant “defunding of public education”, heh.

I think a lot of people in the US have their head so far up their ass being racist and doing other xenophobia, they’d rather drown in their own shit than than have “one of them” get something “for free”.

There are many approaches to this problem, but as a reminder and context setter I’d like you to look at “wealth to scale” https://dbkrupp.github.io/1-pixel-wealth/

It’s kind of infuriating that if you’re wealthy you basically get basic income. You can put some of your money in safe stuff (high yield savings, bonds, whatever) and just get more money without working. But a poor person needs to debase themselves for food.

Seems like the shared trait is “what’s good for the ownership class, in the most selfish short term sense?”

no different than taking a bunch of books you bought second-hand and throwing them into a blender.

They didn’t buy the books. They took them without permission.

I just tried “Language Drops” and it was… interesting. It didn’t place me at the right level, so I got a very beginner lesson when I’m closer to intermediate (but definitely not fluent). I’m not sure I liked matching the pictures- the picture for “thank you” could mean different things depending on how you interpret the person’s face and body language- and then I hit the end of the free content for the day. It didn’t get to different tenses or even whole sentences- just basic vocabulary and no verbs. Maybe it ramps up quickly?

Lots of people don’t get anything resembling a speedy trial in the US.

To be right wing is to be ruled by emotions. Humans are all emotional creatures, but for some people it reaches a point where emotion alone creates reality. Facts are there to be picked up or set aside to support feelings. When their guy eats ice cream it’s because he’s a man of the people. When your guy eats ice cream it’s because he’s a baby. Facts don’t matter. It’s feelings.

And most of their feelings seem to be fear. Fear of loss. Fear of humiliation. You can show them stats and history demonstrating how, like, a diverse workforce leads to higher productivity and greater happiness, but that doesn’t matter. They’re not looking at facts. They’re feeling feelings.

Imagine trying to talk to someone who’s drunk. That’s the right wing, except all the time and they can’t really sober up. Honestly, it sounds like hell.

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.