OpenStars

Yes, yes, yes, and yes. Even the CEO has acknowledged this. They serve you what makes THEM the most profits, not what YOU wanted, ever.

For years now, the only way to find something technical related was to add “Reddit” to the search. But then Reddit imploded as well, chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

And Twitter/X likewise is now chasing profits over the needs of its customers, causing many to flee.

As too is happening in so many other places, such as Stack overflow, and most of Hollywood itself was on strike for months, bc they have been chasing profits over the needs of its customers.

Managers think they know better than customers what you want, or at least what you are willing to put up with.

And now they are pushing AI to the rescue, to put even above the SEO results, but soon they’ll have to think about actually monetizing those answers, and the cycle will repeat at the level of SEO’d AI answers.

DuckDuckGo works, for now. Maybe one day there will be a hostile takeover and it won’t anymore.

Btw this phenomenon is called https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification of the internet - yes that’s the official term afaik!!:-)

They do it simply b/c they can.

Well, hopefully not that shocked.

Not true. They voted, and THAT legacy will be with us for a LONG time…

And sadly, I don’t even mean DT - there’s Ted Cruz, Moscow Mitch, the whole cohort - along with all the international agreements that we’ve already pulled out of and so on.

See, they left us something after all?! :-P This economy, lack of access to healthcare, and so much more!?

Btw, I don’t know about you, but I have a retirement plan for my old age. I plan to die. :-P

In fairness, it is less that they are “selfish” and more that they are “clueless” (to the point of obstinacy, outright refusing to open their eyes) - b/c as you said, your mother didn’t inherit anything, and yet THEY are fine, so why wouldn’t you be, with nothing left to you either? (remember as you think this through to remove all of the actual “facts” first, and add the layer of Faux News Nostalgia factor)

deleted by creator

I think a lot of shows are AWESOME, but then late-stage capitalistic enshittification happens and they become… far less so, and often quite TERRIBLE even, though ostensibly still have the same title, even though nowhere near being an identical show.

One super-good example is Stranger Things, where the first season was really quite good! So many homages to nerd culture like E.T. and D&D - it was fantastic!:-) As I read though, the pair of creators had 2 rules: never use CGI, and absolutely do not “sell out”, i.e. a story should want to be told, not sold merely for the sake of cash. So after the first season where they made it b/c of their love for the craft, you can guess how the subsequent seasons played out (I believe one of the pair even quit over it).

Arguably a better example is The Walking Dead - it started off REALLY good, but then… well… it too “sold out”. Actually I keep trying to force myself to get through it, I even started watching it over again from the start (a couple times now) thinking that would help, but have yet to accomplish this feat.

Another is Designated Survivor. It had some big-name actors, most of whom quit (I think the show was sold to a different network… or something?), and the last season was just terrible, limping along before they finally put it out of its misery and ended it.

The really fantastic shows - like Star Trek - had to prove themselves, then the creators were given leeway to subsequently make great sequels and spin-offs and even entirely unrelated titles. Fun story: Gene Roddenberry even created shows after his death, as his wife took his unfinished notes and lead their creation under his vision, like Earth: Final Conflict.

TLDR: why offer you a good show when they can offer you a crappy show that they made for a tenth of the price, yet charge you the full amount?

(though stupidly enough, they also seem to be trying to offer us even more terrible shows that cost 50x the price to make, and yet somehow suck all the more for that!? anyway it all seems to be based on greed + arrogance - they want to make money, but they do not want to put in the effort to actually earn it, e.g. by paying the actors a decent wage)

I just clicked twice to find the article title, and don’t have time today to actually read through it… but it could be any number of things, including too early in the investigation to know, but we’ll have to read it to find out! :-D

Edit: okay so I did look (free full text here), and they don’t seem to know so precisely, except it transmits to grandchildren via the father, so like it could not be microbiome, it must be something in the sperm (even if something else also happens in the eggs too).

The title used by the reporter:

A Popular Sweetener Was Linked to Increased Anxiety in Generations of Mice

The title of the original publication:

Transgenerational transmission of aspartame-induced anxiety and changes in glutamate-GABA signaling and gene expression

I did not read the latter so I cannot vouch for it, but the former is most definitely click bait, through and through, from title to content. I mean, here we are talking about it and sharing the link so… they accomplished their purpose, and why should they care what happens afterwards?

There is no possibility of this ever causing negative effects of any kind, certainly it will not ever be misused (like one pilot being pressured into flying 5 planes at once bc… profit).

• Elon Musk, probably

Next up, sipping on orphan tears.

sudo make behave

I’m just going to leave this here, in case anyone needs it… :-D

Not every boss earns the respect of their employees… in fact most people worthy of respect end up being removed from a managerial role, I’ve found. Sorta like a good politician - more likely to end up killed than reforming the system.:-(

Keep in mind that many math teachers are incompetent at their jobs - some of that may have had little to do with you.

Though you are correct that math does involve patience, a willingness to fail often until you eventually get it right, and a logical progression of steps where at each stage you keep track of the results of previous steps.

I’m saying that you can most likely do it! Though it may be frustrating, especially at first, while you sharpen those skills that math should have taught you but bc of cheapening out in education, you may have skipped over. It’s all up to you now though… my advice is that even if it takes you 10 to 100 times longer than someone else to do some little thing, so the fuck what, the important thing is that you can do it! (And if you practice, it gets a heck of a lot easier over time) I love this quote (from C.S. Lewis):

Don’t judge a man by where he is, because you don’t know how far he has come.

You missed the part where the boss fires those who don’t comply.

“Want to” isn’t a natural language statement, it’s a bullying one as in “You want to do this, or else, RIGHT!?”

I am not sure how democracy can survive, globally. It takes so very much effort, but people are so extremely lazy, yet those two factors seem like they work against one another? Many parents just want to use schools as daycare centers, and I’ve even heard of some schools having to potty train the youngest ones, who somehow never did learn that at home.

While at the same time, globalization and mechanization make schooling irrelevant for so many, who will earn less in service jobs that don’t need it, but still are told to vote, as if they are capable of properly understanding political discourse, and especially how to spot misinformation. Places like Russia heavily push misinformation, and many of the dumbest Western societies seem to lack any defense against it, by people who kinda don’t even care which message they send so long as it lines their personal pocketbooks.

In this time period we live in where technology is at a higher level than it’s ever been, so very many people fall through the cracks and cannot access the most basic tenants of previous eras - like the ability to work hard and thus buy a home, or at least be able to afford rent so as to avoid becoming homeless.

In the face of all that, schooling seems to be not a priority for people just trying to hold on for dear life through these economic upsets. It’s like in chess, in order to perform a really cool end-game move, you have to survive the next few rounds first, and then the next several after that, and so on. So even if schooling would have been “the solution to all (many) of our problems”, it nevertheless may get ignored, especially as several Western nations go through major constitutional crises in the next decade.

Another big one is obesity - most people in the Western world are affected by it, and therefore we all are indirectly; and even skinny people can be full of saturated fats at the biochemical level. And yet we are pumped full of ads for it 24/7. You can stop watching TV or reading things where those show up… but nevertheless it surroundeds you still.

Some people fall prey to all of the things - alcoholism, obesity, overspending, and more besides - while some may be immune to some of them, but nobody among us is perfectly capable of avoiding all of them. So as you said, perfection isn’t a goal that we can reach so much as something to strive for, but it is so very much worth striving for!

However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.

Normalizing (the opposite of shaming) people living in debt all the time is not necessarily a good thing either. Whether you actually end up able to retire or not, it is a good practice to live within your means. It’s like all Zen and shit - seriously, it lowers stress, saves marriages, and eats babies, or like two of those three I can’t quite recall which…

It doesn’t have to be all prim & proper - things like just eating at home more than eating out, or the REALLY big one living in a cheaper place, can make such a difference.

Spez is unlikely to ever do anything unless the Musk has already said that he wanted to do it.

At which point you might start to worry that both X and Reddit may join us at some point? But consider this: if Spez ever did tell people that he wanted to do that, it would take their programmers 20 years to write the code to make it happen, and by then we’ll all have moved on to direct thought sharing over the Web10.0 anyway. :-P Whereas if he simply bought the code off of somebody else who already made a fully-functional copy, then like Alien Blue - the forerunner to Reddit’s official app - it would still self-destruct in his hands, converting itself into a pile of dung. At which point we simply defederate from it, no worries.

Here we are free.

There have always been such (it is human nature) - but right now they feel bold enough to speak and act, whereas previously they had been too afraid and embarrassed to do so publicly.

In South Carolina, various KKK-like groups said in advance that they wanted to kill people, wrapped barbed wire around baseball bats (in order to better kill people with), showed up to kill people, then actually killed people, then bragged about having killed people… Oh right, but the other side was not successful in securing a permit for their peaceful protest, so you know, there are “many sides” to every issue I guess.

Misinformation/brainwashing techniques are powerful. Like if you believed that a particular type of human was the root of all evil in this world, then you SHOULD want them dead, under those circumstances… right? You do not bc you know better, not just about that one group but more fundamentally that it is ideas that bring about evil, not people. But the people killing people do not know that, and it is to the advantage of others who seek power, and want to use the army of sheeple to advance their own agenda, for those sheeple to not know that either.

Fattening them up eh?

(So they taste better can work harder in their service jobs)