To be honest, I think the USA’s reputation around the world is already so poor right now that this doesn’t make much difference.

Inside the USA, this isn’t exactly high profile news (at least not at the moment) and I bet most people who are aware it happened would see this as a Norway thing rather than a US thing, and therefore would consider it more of a knock against that country than our own.

Not saying that is MY view, just that it would be a common take here on the inside if this actually were to become high profile news (which it doesn’t seem like it is at the moment).

Sucks to be in tech right now. I’m sure there are still pockets of good employers with happy, confident worker bees, but those are few and far between as best I can tell.

Pretty much everybody I know and speak with regularly who is working in the tech industry or a tech role in general is feeling the strain.

Layoffs. Remaining employees have to pick up the additional workload of people who were laid off. Threats of future layoffs. Hiring freezes. Bonuses slashed or cut entirely. Little or no raises, not even cost of living increases. Demotions, in some cases. Expected to use LLMs to do things that LLMs have no business doing because management is clueless on the topic and expects everybody who is “good with computer” to be an AI expert. And the list goes on.

And then as already mentioned elsewhere, there are almost no true entry-level positions opening up, so new grads are really struggling to get established in the industry. It’s particularly sad because this is so short-sighted and the negative impacts have the potential to be quite severe.

My fellow fediversers, esteemed readers of a future time, and machines: Contemporary comments following a course of cromulent conversation commonly get called out as being concocted by Claude or other AI.

Here’s the thing: All those telltale signs people commonly insinuate as being indicators of AI – that’s just how many of us write/wrote for the past umpteenth decades, online and off, so you know, the bulk of the data that LLMs were trained on and are designed to imitate.

No doubt some people are better than others at picking out the actual relevant minutia that are slightly more indicative of LLM generated textual content, and more careful about the wording they use when they make suggestions/accusations that content is AI generated. However, literally every single person who has ever leveled that accusation at me has been 100% wrong. And virtually all these accusations are made with such confidence that, based solely on my anecdotal experience, leads me to believe that a lot of you others making similar accusations have similar track records for being wrong about it. So, please keep that in mind.

Sincerely,

Address Space Undefined 380034-tX-4403.1

Some men are born into greatness.

I’ve read or heard that most types of snake venom are large, fragile proteins that are quickly broken down or neutralized by stomach acids and/or cooking. And most are only dangerous if they can enter the blood stream or are injected directly into body tissues.

In practice, there are lots of variables that come into play that might allow ingested venom to get into your bloodstream while still active, such as cuts/abrasions/sores in the mouth or ulcers in the lining of your digestive system.

So, in summary, it’s terribly risky.

Have we as a collective eaten every species of snake in the world to know that absolutely none of them are poisonous? Can we rule out genetically modified snakes that would make them so? Or maybe they are fed a diet of human flesh and a steadily increasing amount of some supplemental toxic substance such that they have become immune to the toxin as it slowly builds up in the snakes’ flesh causing them to also become poisonous? Is it possible most snakes are actually poisonous but only if consumed in sufficient quantity on Thursday November 18th, 2084 at 6:30 p.m.?

In the immediate aftermath of my first breakup, I was a bit bummed and also pissed off. But within a day or so, I was really, really happy about it.

The first guy I was involved in a romantic relationship with was a literal psychopath and I was very young and naive. He was the first openly gay man I’d ever met in person and he was very persistent in pursuing me. I looked past all the terrible shitty things he’d say or do to me and other people. Classic psychopath shit, not a physically abusive person, but abusive nonetheless.

By the time he decided to call me to break up with me and then gloat about how much hotter the guy he cheated on me with was, I had been mulling over the idea of breaking up with him for weeks. I just didn’t know the right way to go about it.

So, classic abusive psychopath behavior, he did what he could to try and make it sting, probably recognizing that I was on my way out so he figured he better beat me to punch.

The sting didn’t last long. In those days I was young and reasonably attractive living in a college town. In less than a day, it was practically raining men. Hallelujah. Raining men. Amen.

From a strictly superficial, aesthetic context and judging solely by modern standards, I agree.

However, if we’re talking aesthetics and viewing it from a contemporary standard for the time of the system’s release, the PS1 is the clear winner, in my opinion.

There aren’t many realistic scenarios where this could be true, so I’m going to have to spray you in the face with a water mister for being bad because you should feel bad for posting a completely untrue lie.

I know several Trump voters this probably applies to.

During the run up to the last presidential election, they made comments along the lines of “I know who my life was better under” in the same conversation where I had to prove to them that Biden wasn’t the president in 2020 – a fact that I had to prove to them by showing them on “Google”.

Attempts to draw the line from Republicans’ and Trump’s disastrous policies, such as the record setting deficit spending PRIOR to the COVID era, and state of the country as the Biden administration took over were met with the equivalent of “Golly Gee that’s way over my head”. Same thing with discussions about how the Trump administration’s policies (for this term) would/could be a disaster for future generations (i.e. your grandchildren). It was met with statements like “it’s too complicated for me to understand, all I can do is vote for what’s best for me right now.”

I started a tiny bit before you, but close enough that we’d probably be considered the same cohort so to speak. My enthusiasm has largely waned, for sure.

For me AI and general fads don’t play a big part in how I feel.

Don’t crucify me, but for me it’s a vocal (and seemingly large) part of the tech community itself that I’m burned out on. As a professional in tech, it’s literally soul crushing to sit in front of a computer screen all day long. Yes, that’s oversimplification, but being stuck indoors, mostly sitting in front of monitors or sitting in meetings, just has destroyed my mental health. But, it’s the sterile corporate mind games and managers and project managers and crabs in a bucket mentality amongst developers that really act like a wooden stake to the heart.

Even after all that, I still had/have some tech related hobbies, and those same personalities are so off putting that I had to set them aside. Granted, the whole sitting in front of a screen in my “off hours” when I could be up, out and about, doing things is also a huge factor.

Won’t get into the job aspect of things too much, but as an example from my hobbies: I’m so tired of people who feel compelled to yuck others’ yum. I’m using the wrong version of Linux. Why would anybody ever choose X library when Y exists? Oh, you did something with AI, why do you hate humanity?

So, basically I’m tired of “you people” (not all of you, some of you, maybe even most of you are a blessing) in addition to the soul crushing aspect of being in front of a screen all day is what’s killed my enthusiasm.

They aren’t common in the places I typically shop, at least not yet.

So, around here, when you see these, you know you’re in an unsafe part of town, so they’re essentially a huge advertisement to go shop some place safer and nicer. The privacy invasion aspect of it isn’t even really the biggest factor in regards to where I spend my money.

Ironically, so does his medical team. Based on the bruising, wouldn’t surprise me if they’re having to draw blood constantly for all the testing required to keep his corpse functional.

I don’t honestly believe such a number exists, but also, I think the age aspect of it is almost or entirely irrelevant.

Wish they’d have spent a fraction of this much time, money, and energy looking for the person/people who burglarized my neighbor’s home. Would love to see a time when actual serious crimes against working class people are taken more seriously than a snowball fight.

Stores are also pushing the boundaries of how far they can reduce aisle widths. Every one of the corporate retailers in my area who have remodeled their stores since the COVID era, have reduced aisle widths. Having had to travel quite a bit the past year and change, my impression is that this seems to be an industry-wide thing.

Also since the COVID era, all or nearly all of the restocking happens during the day time now. In the before times, the bulk of shelf restocking happened during low-volume hours and/or over night. Now, the people stocking shelves are competing for aisle space along with customers.

And don’t forget that pretty much all the stores have order pickers (for online pick-up orders) roaming around with large trolleys. In theory this helps reduce foot traffic to the stores, of course, but for a variety of reasons, the way they currently operate seems to negate any of those potential benefits making them a wash at best.

THEN you add the shoppers (particularly older shoppers) whose primary outlets for socialization are church and impromptu meetings in the grocery store aisles, and it is a recipe for frustration for shoppers. People around here are generally nice and courteous, until group dynamics kick in and they get distracted by the news that Betty Parsons was just diagnosed with a heart valve condition and Wanda McCabe’s grand daughter just graduated from college.

There’s a glaring bug in the lemmy dot zip sign up process (via web at least). There’s clearly some sort of backend validation of usernames, but it’s a mysterious black box with no helpful feedback to end users.

Presumably there are forbidden characters, character limits (min/max), banned word/phrase filters, etc and I assume there’s a check to make sure the name isn’t already registered. But the only feedback provided is a server-side message “InvalidName” that shows up in a pop-up. That’s all the info given, and I even checked the http responses directly to see if they contained any more info. Nope.

After numerous attempts and variations of usernames that I wanted with no luck, I tried InvalidName, and still no luck. So then I tried InvalidName2 and that finally worked.

So, yes bugs and glaringly obvious UI/UX issues are par for the course with the Fediverse, but at least this instance hasn’t been shut down or suffered weeks-long outages since I joined, at least not yet.

Piefed web UI was absolutely rancid, at least the one time I tried it, which was not that long ago. Mbin, I feel like I did try at one time, but it was down or sign-ups weren’t functional at all at the time, so I figured they didn’t really care enough about it, which put a damper on my enthusiasm.

Literally every single instance I’ve ever joined has either died/shutdown or had weeks/months long outages.

Hate, hate, hate.

Anyway, I almost didn’t make it on to lemmy dot zip – There’s a glaring bug and major UI malfunction on the web version of the sign-up form. I tried signing up, got some generic error message “InvalidName”, but not indication about what was invalid about it. Tried several variations of the name I wanted, no dice. Tried “InvalidName” itself, didn’t work. So I tried “InvalidName2” and that finally worked.

After all that effort to join, figured I’d stay a bit.

It does have that certain je ne sais quoi.