Nothing will change until they fear for their lives.

Likewise. I used to get 3-4 cold DMs or connection requests from recruiters per week just a couple years ago. Now I maybe get 1 per month.

It’s nice for me specifically, but definitely a symptom of the times and worrysome for anybody trying to find a job in this economy now while also having to compete with fucking AI slop generators doing all the menial and entry level work.

What I meant by that is the ability to access the entire world interconnectivity - obviously cutting those cables would not affect domestic internet access but people who live elsewhere would not be able to access content hosted overseas in gulf states.

I don’t think Iran cares if their citizens can access the internet or not. I presume their military uses satellites for that sort of thing so they won’t be negatively affected by it.

The rest of the world, on the other hand, gets their access to worldwide connectivity held hostage.

Warhammer 40k Mechanicus

I think it’s concept art, or maybe some promotional art. If you Google image search for it, it’ll come up on the first page.

Good read, but I think the author touched on something that is way more troubling. Sure, you can get reliable information from regular people who are living in other parts of the world, but spreading that information with any kind of veracity is almost impossible due to the collapse in public trust of mainstream media.

If I say something with any degree of authority or confidence, someone in the comments will inevitably chant the ancestral magic spell “Source?!” and suddenly my evidence of a conversation with a stranger on the internet is reduced to merely anecdotal at best. Able to be dismissed outright without thought or care.

However, if I post a link to some legacy media rag, existing in the modern day as a mere husk being puppeteered by corporate oligarchs, wearing the skin of a legitimate and trustworthy news source, the credibility of the information is then called into question by anybody reasonable - knowing full well that right-wing governments have managed to capture most of the remaining independent reporting, or at least have threatened them with who-knows-what in an attempt to influence their press releases that would otherwise paint the government or any of their cronies in a negative light. If someone decides that the provided source doesn’t line up with their narrative, it’s hilariously easy to attack the reporting itself as being “fake news”.

The brain shuts off, and information gets siloed. Objective reality is no longer shared. We are still living in a state of simply believing whatever we want to believe and the few people who are able to break out of that are not going to be influential enough to have an effect on anything. We can pat ourselves on the back for not being a group of people concerned with being brand-builders, I guess, but in the end it’s a meaningless victory.

I would not buy one. I would not use one if my current phone exploded into tiny pieces and the only convenient replacement was a free OpenAI phone - I’d much rather inconvenience myself.

I am so glad to hear that I am not the only one who finds AI coding to be an almost futile exercise. I spend more time talking to the damn robot trying to get it to fix problems than I would if I had just done it more slowly and deliberately in the programming language I am familiar with, or just circumvented the automation effort and done the task manually. All three seem to take about the same amount of time.

Every time I see this image I swear his eyes get smaller every time.