Right after “People Falling Down And Suffering Serious Injuries: Oops! All slide Whistles Edition!”

If subscribing and paying for services actually guaranteed ad-free, useful and complete experiences, then yes I would gladly pay. When iTunes made buying songs for a dollar easy, I paid hundreds of dollars for them, because it gave me exactly what I wanted at a fair price.

Now, when you sign up for a service, you’re still getting ads, you’re still getting paywalls around the movies and shows you really want to watch, you’re still getting your data mined and sold. You’re still paying more than you would have paid for premium, ad-free cable TV back in the old days.

It’s useless. I want to pay for good experiences and services, but they ain’t offering it.

Don’t forget, this was back in the day of fat people hate and Reddit hosting child porn. Reddit administration was never great

Reddit in the earliest days was basically 4chan but less controlled and more spread-out. There were thousands of illegal and horrifyingly abusive subreddits. Every single time one got taken down, it was this massive, whinging drama show from thousands of chuds screaming about their “rights” and “censorship.”

By the time admins came for the less overtly evil ones, like the weirdly prevalent communities dedicated to fantasizing about punching particular people in the face, reddit had very much become the WalMart of the internet. Not the cleanest or nicest place to visit, but it certainly had everything and was convenient if you needed a fix at odd hours.

I don’t even remember Digg but I remember it seemed relatively short-lived in the early days of the explosion of forum sites. A lot of people were trying to strike gold with the next big thing as internet popularity was soaring. There are likely hundreds of other big sites like Digg that people used to frequent that have also since died in the mass-extinction events of the 2010’s and beyond.

Owning an “upvote company” is literally the only reason on God’s Earth that anyone could give seven shits about content and voting on reddit.

It may have had cultural impact back in 2016, but that was almost a decade ago and the world is different, reddit is different.

Now it’s just bots arguing with bots and every post is a surreptitious paid ad for something. People haven’t quite “move on” but they certainly don’t give reddit communities the relevance they once had. People broadly roll their eyes at reddit. In the last couple offices I worked in, the people joked that you’re “never allowed to share something on Teams if it came from reddit” and “reddit is a dirty secret, everyone knows we browse it, but it’s shameful to admit it.”

Sorry reddit, the cool factor has left the building a long, long time ago.

It’s the same phenomenon of de-socialization that was radically accelerated during peak Covid that has led to everything from a 1000% increase in unruly passengers on airlines, to a drastic decrease in relationships and dating, to a whole host of people just checking out from the social contract and embracing ludicrous conspiracy theories and retreating to online safe-spaces where any crazy thought will be validated and praised.

As a species we were not meant to have constant exposure to millions of people’s innermost thoughts and feelings and unrestrained impulsive ideas. It fucks with your head. Combine that with the economic incentive of keeping people in one spot, scrolling their attention-span to sawdust, and you are training an entire generation of people to turn off their inner monologues and to stop thinking entirely, just seeking validation and things to click on.

I feel strongly that AI ruining the internet will be a net-positive, as it’s going to drive more people to human spaces to connect with each other. Sure there will be a whole segment of people raised in the AI slop of the next decade, but there will also be a subset of people who want more and create their own spaces with other real humans.

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The suburban hellscape that is most residential coded zones is far, far more sardine-like than what I’m describing, which is an environment far more like many cities in Europe that evolved to be, and have been maintained as walkable cities. The reason you’re repulsed by the idea of urban environments is specifically because you’re used to American residential areas that are hard, brutal and packed next to busy highways and multi-lane avenues that are constantly packed with people trying to get to and from work, with huge parking lots that act like hot deserts in the sun, with sprawl and noise and pollution and no good reason to leave your sardine can because there’s nowhere to get to within 30 minutes of walking except more sardine cans.

If a neighborhood is designed to be walkable, you will have condos and apartments and medium to high-density living spaces, sure, but you will have an entirely different aesthetic and atmosphere around it so it feels more welcoming, and encourages community.

If you’re opposed to community entirely, that’s your prerogative, there are still vast, vast tracts of land across the world you can live in and be left alone, and that’s fine. My comment isn’t addressing that lifestyle, because for MOST people, cities represent opportunity, safety and essential services. We can’t look down at the vast bulk of humanity who want to live around other people just because you yourself are bothered by your own memories and experiences of city life.

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This entire post will age poorly if we ever transition out of this incredibly self-indulgent and wasteful period of human civilization.

We should have walkable neighborhoods, mass transit of gleaming efficiency, bike lanes as priority, we should be encouraging socializing and creating spaces for people to gather that aren’t profit-driven, but with plans to create comfort and recreation to better the people and foster a sense of belonging to a community. It’s absurd we all live in places with lots of people but have no sense of belonging to a community. This goes against literally millions of years of our own evolutionary history. We NEED community to function and have healthy minds.

I mean, it’s not likely to happen. But maybe when the next great apocalyptic event happens the survivors can try to remake things with a little more planning. After the whole period of darkness and cannibalism of course.

containing loli

It wasn’t containing loli, it had generic hentai and some horse stuff. I was there and saw it, about 1000 hate-watchers immediately screamed “LOLI” and it stuck.

I think to be fair the artist was a known artist who had done loli and there was a character who was underage in some show but didn’t look more or less underage than ALL hentai, but people don’t necessarily save porn based on what other works the artist has made or what the storylines say. It was a pretty desperate accusation, people REALLY need to hate people who have different opinions.

This should show everyone clearly, unambiguously, without a doubt that conservatives in America have zero idea what progressivism or leftism is about at all.

It’s just words to them. They do NOT care. It’s WWE wrestlemania. They want to paint their faces and get swept away in a stageplay and die as heartbroken as the hero if they don’t succeed and make all their enemies pay.

We need to like, mass-spam the entire Midwest america with historical romance novels with bodice-ripping sex scenes. I think if more guys just got lost in that shit, we would have a lot less tension and pain in the world.

I started at advanced, I was born hating everything and scowling at imbeciles who didn’t think about the world. I am trying slowly to get back down to “beginner.” It’s been difficult.

Do you have money and/or personal emotional validation tied up in the promise that AI will develop into a world-changing technology by 2027? With AGI in everyone’s pocket giving them financial advice, advising them on their lives, and romancing them like a best friend with Scarlett Johansson’s voice whispering reassurances in your ear all day?

If you are banking on any of these things, then yeah, you should probably be afraid.

As someone dabbling with writing, I bit the bullet and tried to start looking into the tools to see if they’re actually useful, and I was impressed with the promised tools like grammar help, sentence structure and making sure I don’t leave loose ends in the story writing, these are genuinely useful tools if you’re not using generative capability to let it write mediocre bullshit for you.

But I noticed right away that I couldn’t justify a subscription between $20 - $30 a month, on top of the thousand other services we have to pay monthly for, including even the writing software itself.

I have lived fine and written great things in the past without AI, I can survive just fine without it now. If these companies want to actually sell a product that people want, they need to scale back the expectations, the costs and the bloated, useless bullshit attached to it all.

At some point soon, the costs of running these massive LLM’s versus the number of people actually willing to pay a premium for them are going to exceed reasonable expectations and we will see the companies that host the LLM’s start to scale everything back as they try to find some new product to hype and generate investment on.

Truth. I would say the actual time scales will be longer, but this is the harsh, soul-crushing reality that will make all the kids and mentally disturbed cultists on r/singularity scream in pain and throw stones at you. They’re literally planning for what they’re going to do once ASI changes the world to a star-trek, post-scarcity civilization… in five years. I wish I was kidding.

Just got back from Southeast Asia, I’ll take this any day.

Wait til we get started about Sonic.

The biggest reason for declining marriages is that people can actually make choices now and people don’t want to be shackled to someone they hate their whole lives.

People had radically different attitudes about marriage in olden times, when marriage equaled survival in many ways, and survival of your family, your connections, your career and your status, which was held through generations. It wasn’t thought of normally in terms of love and that’s a very modern view of marriage.

Romance and marriage for love certainly existed, but that was usually considered fantasy or stageplay.

He’s a 4-chan troll that gained enough wealth from his parents that he can now actually believe and preach the things he used to read on those forums and not only barely see consequence, but actually ignite passions and movements in the world’s most ignorant and mentally challenged chuds.

We have to stop wondering what his “plans” are because he has none, he is just a stupid man, like so many others, and yet commands legions of devoted followers because our species is fucking stupid.

The only reason we’re trying to somehow compromise and allow or even incorporate cheating software into student education is because the tech-bros and singularity cultists have been hyping this technology like it’s the new, unstoppable force of nature that is going to wash over all things and bring about the new Golden Age of humanity as none of us have to work ever again.

Meanwhile, 80% of AI startups sink and something like 75% of the “new techs” like AI drive-thru orders and AI phone support go to call centers in India and Philippines. The only thing we seem to have gotten is the absolute rotting destruction of all content on the internet and children growing up thinking it’s normal to consume this watered-down, plagiarized, worthless content.