Used to work in mobile phone sales at a 100% telco owned store, so when things went tits up for customers the licensed stores in our area would tell customers to come to our store as we had employee access that exceeded partner access. I had SO many variations of the apologetic conversation with an elderly person whose family assured them that the iPhone is the easiest thing ever to use. They were happy with a feature phone but had an iDevice shoved down their throat by family members because “they are so easy”. Oh and arranging a change of mind return on an iPhone is a fucking nightmare in Australian Telco land.

They are not the easiest most straightforward choice, unless you use your devices in the constrained manner Apple has decided you will use them. The multiple times I have been forced to use a Mac or an iPhone or IPad, I have found them slow, obtuse and they have an annoying habit of hiding information I want to see. Windows is not really any better, just different.

I kind of see it like any other preference, people assume that because they find something the best then everyone must agree with that take.

That’s fair. I never actually subscribed to Reddit, I was wary of social media after a brief time on Facebook where I realised it was harming my mental health. Plus I was friends with a bunch of strippers, a lingerie model who did a shoot with Playboy the year before I became friends with her, and a super exhibitionist gay guy I worked with… Result was I needed 2 Facebook profiles and swapping back and forth all the time was too stressful.

Which is a long way of saying that Lemmy is my first social media in more than 10 yearsnand I am not sure how I feel about downvotes as I don’t remember ever having recieved one.

I allowed NSFW posts because I used to get some truly random shit coming up back when I lurked Reddit that way, so when I got Boost for Lemmy I thought I would do the same. Reddit had a much better ratio of weird and wacky vs onlyfans ads. Lemmy unfortunately only seems to have OnlyFans ads.

I kinda miss some of the bizarre ARAD topics, or shower beers or borderline brain melting confessions.

Do any of these rhetorical questions ever get replies?

I find this amusing, had a conversation with an older relative who asked about AI because I am “the computer guy” he knows. Explained basically how I understand LLMs to operate, that they are pattern matching to guess what the next token should be based on a statistical probability. Explained that they sometimes hallucinate, or go of on wild tangents due to this and that they can be really good at aping and regurgitating things but there is no understanding simply respinning fragments to try to generate a response that pleases the asker.

He observed, “oh we are creating computer religions, just without the practical aspects of having to operate in the mundane world that have to exist before a real religion can get started. That’s good, religions that have become untethered from day to day practical life have never caused problems for anyone.”

Which I found scarily insightful.

Had a big thing written out, didn’t like it when I read it back. So keeping it simple, I equivocated to try to deflect some of the potential rough replies from the cultists who have already drunk the Koolaid.

Hmm, not meaning to get my conspiracy hat on here but do we think this could relate to the fact that Microsoft now has a quantum computing chip that they can hype to their investors to show they have the next big thing in the bag?

AI has served its purpose and is no longer strategically necessary?

Since they are only spending investors money it doesn’t matter if they burn billions on leading the industry down the wrong path and now they can let it rot on the vine and rake in the next round of funding while the competition scrambles to catch up.

Seems to me that Romania should just let everyone know that they are receptive to the idea but will need some funding towards the cost of improving the speed and efficiency of their court system.

Start the bidding at an even billion USD. Let Trump try to Art of the Deal™ that one past the american populace. Should be some interesting mental gymnastics to try to explain why he is valuing Tate at 500 million times higher than any rational person would.

I honestly feel like every country that has anything that Trump wants needs to start figuring out the most unreasonable price tags they can.

And of course Donald Trump is as immovable as granite and unwaveringly loyal to his friends & allies.

There is no chance of him having a spat with the Aberdeenshire council about rubbish collection for his golf club and responding with a 50% tariff…

Or for that matter of being directed to do it by his owners with even less justification…

I imagine that a society that votes in a wannabe fascist dictator will continue to be a bastion of safety for people of different racial backgrounds. I know if I was fleeing violence and gangs I look for somewhere with a nice welcoming camp just waiting for me.

For clarification I am Australian so I have a bit of experience with a national bias of racism leading to poor outcomes for asylum seekers.

I am taking a more positive view than I was about what’s happening over there though. I think that the Trump presidency may well serve as an unambiguous demonstration of the end results of allowing democracy to become necrotic. I really hope Australians heed this lesson before our next election, although I won’t be at all surprised if they don’t.

So I was thinking about the way he worded this, 25% tariff until the border crossings stop. I think he might be onto a 4D chess move here.

If he tanks the US economy so badly that it’s financially detrimental to cross the border then the flow of people across the border will definitely come down. If he tanks the economy hard enough we may even see the flow reverse, at which point he can lift the tariffs and declare the job done.

He is already happy to make Americans ignorant, illiterate, and spiteful to outsiders; is he really going to baulk at making them dirt poor as well?

This may come across as naïve, but I also wonder if the excision of all those “essential” layers of needless bureaucracy, might not free up some resources at a societal level to allow a more complete or holistic physical and mental health care system to emerge. After all we need to figure out something for the eye watering numbers of people who are employed directly or indirectly by the Insurance industries to do with their new found free time.

Hell, couple UHS with large scale tax reform and we might find that there are advantages at all levels of society to providing for people whatever their needs might be.

But then maybe I am a pathetic utopist who just needs to realise that Capitalism is simply the perfect structure for us all to live under.