Xauri'EL Zwaan

Within just the lifetime of the baby boomers, less than a century, we've gone from "a barely-literate factory worker can own a home and support a family" to "better get a college degree if you don't want to end up working at McDonald's" to "even a degree won't support you now, take a trade seal IDK" to "AI is going to replace even skilled workers and we have literally no plan for the economic dislocation that mass unemployment in a consumer economy would cause and in fact are actively working against any kind of social support that could potentially soften the blow"

So! Had my first AI interview today, for a remote creative writing tutor position. I cut off halfway through; the thing was creeping me out, basically asking the same question over and over again in different language with obviously no understanding of what I was saying. If this is the future of employment, I want no part of it. I'll forage for berries in the fucking forest before I do that again.

- The scientific corpus is being infiltrated by mountains of fake bullshit studies

- The codebase of every software product is transforming into unstable spaghetti

- We have at best added a massive mental tax to our ability to tell fake from real

- We are training a generation of people out of the ability to exercise every brain function we can conceivably automate

This is the world we bought when we demonstrated our willingness to throw writers and artists under the bus. The arts are the canary in the coal mine for civilizational collapse

Arguments against AI:

- it's built on stolen creative labour
- it's terrible for the environment
- it's putting tons of people out of work
- it's de-skilling people at a frightening rate
- it's inducing literal psychosis
- everything it creates is crap

Arguments in favour of AI:

- it's here whether you want it or not, better get on board before you get left behind
- don't you want to stick it to those snooty, arrogant artists?
- it might make us more productive maybe
- it's totally going to become a superintelligence and solve all your problems, we promise
- we're going to shove it in your face relentlessly until it just becomes normalized
- look, we've invested the entire economy into this shit and if it doesn't succeed there's going to be a generation-defining crash, please please use it

Have to say, I'm digging the Vivaldi experience so far. The amount of customization options is ludicrous; I'm sticking to a pretty Chrome-adjacent configuration for now, but just having to consciously think about it is making me deliberate about the way I use the web in a way I haven't in years. I've played around a bit, connected my Proton account, set my default search engine to DuckDuckGo (huge improvement), and I put a to-do list widget on the home page, which I think might be genuinely life-changing

My new computer keeps giving me a helpful notification whenever I plug and unplug my headphones from the aux jack. I'm like, bro do you think I don't know I did that

Woke up to an argument on here about whether the treatment of trans people in the US technically constitutes a "genocide". And I'm like, there are more important things you could be discussing right now, folks, like maybe how to stop the trans genocide from happening

Conservatives: These lefty lunatics want you to believe there's six genders!

Also Conservatives: Please take very seriously this chart I have prepared of the different kinds of males there are. You will note that each of them is denoted by a letter of the Greek alphabet, which makes it Scientific