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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Long, long before this AI craze began, I was warning people as a young 20-something political activist that we needed to push for Universal Basic Income because the inevitable march of technology would mean that labor itself would become irrelevant in time and that we needed to hash out a system to maintain the dignity of every person now rather than wait until the system is stressed beyond it’s ability to cope with massive layoffs and entire industries taken over by automation/AI. When the ability of the average person to sell their ability to work becomes fundamentally compromised, capitalism will collapse in on itself - I’m neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, but people have to acknowledge that nearly all of western society is based on capitalism and if capitalism collapses then society itself is in jeopardy.

    I was called alarmist, that such a thing was a long way away and we didn’t need “socialism” in this country, that it was more important to maintain the senseless drudgery of the 40-hour work week for the sake of keeping people occupied with work but not necessarily fulfilled because the alternative would not make the line go up.

    Now, over a decade later, and generative AI has completely infiltrated almost all creative spaces and nobody except tech bros and C-suite executives are excited about that, and we still don’t have a safety net in place.

    Understand this - I do not hate the idea of AI. I was a huge advocate of AI, as a matter of fact. I was confident that the gradual progression and improvement of technology would be the catalyst that could free us from the shackles of the concept of a 9-to-5 career. When I was a teenager, there was this little program you could run on your computer called Folding At Home. It was basically a number-crunching engine that uses your GPU to fold proteins, and the data was sent to researchers studying various diseases. It was a way for my online friends and I to flex how good our PC specs were with the number of folds we could complete in a given time frame and also we got to contribute to a good cause at the same time. These days, they use AI for that sort of thing, and that’s fucking awesome. That’s what I hope to see AI do more of - take the rote, laborious, time consuming tasks that would take one or more human beings a lifetime to accomplish using conventional tools and have the machine assist in compiling and sifting through the data to find all the most important aspects. I want to see more of that.

    I think there’s a meme floating around that really sums it up for me. Paraphrasing, but it goes “I thought that AI would do the dishes and fold my laundry so I could have more time for art and writing, but instead AI is doing all my art and writing so I have time to fold clothes and wash dishes.”.

    I think generative AI is both flawed and damaging, and it gives AI as a whole a bad reputation because generative AI is what the consumer gets to see, and not the AI that is being used as a tool to help people make their lives easier.

    Speaking of that, I also take issue with that fact that we are more productive than ever before, and AI will only continue to improve that productivity margin, but workers and laborers across the country will never see a dime of compensation for that. People might be able to do the work of two or even three people with the help of AI assistants, but they certainly will never get the salary of three people, and it means that two out of those three people probably don’t have a job anymore if demand doesn’t increase proportionally.

    I want to see regulations on AI. Will this slow down the development and advancement of AI? Almost certainly, but we’ve already seen the chaos that unfettered AI can cause to entire industries. It’s a small price to pay to ask that AI companies prove that they are being ethical and that their work will not damage the livelihood of other people, or that their success will not be born off the backs of other creative endeavors.


  • The only thing I agree with on Trump here is that he’s correctly pointing out that WalMart made billions in profits last year. Yes, WalMart supported this monster in the first place thinking it would work out for them in the long run, so it’s a leopards eating faces scenario for sure, and I wouldn’t be sad if WalMart lost profits this year because of Trump’s stupidity. It’s just too bad that regular people are going to suffer because WalMart killed the small businesses that used to support towns that they wormed their way into.

    We aren’t even done adjusting to inflation pricing, and here we are not getting slapped with a Trump Tax on top of it. Madness.







  • I think of this every time I see some egregiously fascist behavior on display in the Trump admin getting defended by people who think the left is overreacting. I wish more people knew about this and understood that it’s not some left wing looney saying it, it’s a guy who lived through it and can identify it for what it truly is.





  • Trump blew up the economy only to pause or walk back every single one of his stupid tariffs that were supposed to “make everybody rich” and bring manufacturing back to America. Could have seen that one coming from a mile away.

    And we’ll never know the terms of the new trade deals he negotiates, only that they are great and better than before and that we should be thanking him on our hands and knees. As if anybody actually gives a single fuck about whether or not the U.S. runs a trade deficit.

    Mark my words, these tariffs are never going to go fully into effect for any significant amount of time. One day into their implementation and it was clear how damaging and destructive they were, so they got paused to halt the chaos. Trump now needs a way to pull back on the reins and rescind the tariffs while still looking like he is emerging victorious. I expect more “breakthrough trade deals” in the coming weeks. In spite of this, however, the damage to the trust in American stability and economic certainty will probably never recover from the absolutely idiotic implementation of these tariffs for the sake of gaining negotiation power when a phone call could have had the same effect.




  • Palworld did more for the monster-collecting genre in one early access title than Pokémon has in the last decade of AAA titles.

    Why does Nintendo deserve these patents when they aren’t going to produce anything meaningful with them and simply weaponize them to squash any real threatening competition?

    Pokémon is the highest grossing franchise in the world, and 2nd place isn’t even close. I think they can give a little ground to an indie developer who makes games that people are actually interested in playing. The patent bullshit is ridiculous.