Hawaii

And for something similar in its insanity, there’s also Santa Claus, a product of Mexico that I can only assume was fueled by product from Columbia.

“I wonder if there’s beer on the sun”

The Canada Song lives rent free in my head.

“We put our faith in BLAST HARDCHEESE.”

Final Sacrifice.

France on Sunday took a step closer to delivering what was once seen as an unthinkable nightmare: a far-right government taking power in Paris for the first time.

Well… the first time in a while. And just as the last time was exiting living memory.

Steam isn’t a monopoly, I can get my games elsewhere (epic, gog, humble store, origin etc). But Steam is dominating the market because it does it better. It offers value and features that others don’t, and it generally hasn’t abused its dominant market position to squeeze the consumer or crush their competitors. The closest thing to enshittification we’ve seen from Steam was them allowing third party DRM and launchers, which isn’t something they wanted, it’s them backing down from a stand-off.

I want competition, but there’s good competition and bad competition. Good competition is what we see from Steam and gog, where they stand out by being good at what they do and giving customers what they want.

For an example of bad competition, just look at streaming sites. We went from everything being on Netflix to everything being divided among dozens of shitty platforms, each of which costs more, and the prices keep going up, especially if you don’t want ads. Nothing was improved for the consumer when Netflix lost its defacto monopoly. Which isn’t to say that Netflix is great, only that the competition for marketshare has only made things worse for the consumer.

I think it’s easy to look at all the bullshit EA and Ubisoft and the like pull now, and imagine that same pattern from streaming playing out in gaming.

If I buy a product, and the manufacturer remotely disables that product in order to coerce me into buying their goods and services, the people responsible should be charged with fraud, destruction of property, criminal conspiracy, racketeering, and anything else that can stick. It should be treated no less severely than if they hired thugs to smash it with a crowbar.

Yes, you can make a building from pieces that were produced on an assembly line. But the vast majority of construction doesn’t happen that way. And even those require labor to assemble.

My point was that the stationary robot arm you see putting cars together make sense in a factory setting, but that it wouldn’t be so practical on a job site compared to something less specialized and more versatile.

I think it’s going to be interesting to watch machine labor continue to evolve.

Currently we have factories full of dedicated machines which specialize in a limited number of tasks. This makes sense because mass production involves doing a limited variety of jobs in a controlled environment, as part of a process that only rarely changes. A more general purpose robot adds little value.

Where things get interesting is when you leave the factory. New construction shares similarities to factory production. You have a mostly controlled environment, a predictable process, and most variables within a given job can be planned for in advance. But you can’t throw a house or office building on an assembly line and move it past stationary robot arms. Which means that machines need to be light and mobile enough to move around a building throughout the process. And without the assembly line, extreme specialization is less practical. Better to have one machine that handles each stage of construction, as opposed to many machines which are only capable of a single task.

I could see some future prototype robot acting as an assistant, and slowly taking over more and more tasks. As it becomes more refined, its performance becomes more reliable, and we move more and more towards autonomous operation with human oversight.

The greater challenge is leaving the controlled environment of a construction site and into the real world. Going into some hundred year old building and assessing the existing condition, formulating a plan of action, and the executing that plan (adapting to unexpected complications along the way) is so much more complex and demanding. It’s entirely possible for AI to get to the point where it can do that, but it’s going to be a much longer journey.

Still, I could picture a more advanced version of that construction robot following a plumber or electrician and providing assistance while learning as it observes. As these trade bots expand their pool of knowledge and experience, they could gain the ability to recognize similarities to previous issues, and may learn to analyze and propose solutions which can be approved by a human on site. With each successful task, the machines get a little closer to functioning autonomously.

With a complex enough AI, we really could reach a point where the only jobs performed by humans are the ones where we value the human involvement. AI politicians probably aren’t on the agenda, and there will always be a demand for human sex work. So if nothing else, know that there will always be a job out there for those who specialize in fucking the people.

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AI today, or actual AI someday? And do they need to do the job well, or just at all?

I also wonder how many of these people are open to the idea of UBI when brought up in the context of AI replacing the majority of human labor.

Not since I was a teenager.

Sending a notification that a renewal is coming up? Impossible, will cost a fortune.

Sending mountains of junk mail offering bundles and limited time offers? Clearly much cheaper and easier.

Also, think of the labor costs, retraining the call center staff to not spend hours trying to talk people out of canceling and instead just having them hit a button. Why, that’s got to force a price hike.

That’s not entirely true. Russia is part of Europe, and he’s definitely gonna keep helping them.

Well, since you say Christmas or not, my favorite show any time is Babylon 5.

But for Christmas stuff, Hogfather is my favorite tradition. Also Die Hard, and the Christmas episode of Justice League.

Not only is there a lower margin, but the fact that EVs are lower maintenance means they will get less money from a customer coming into their service department. Not that it even needs to get to anything as farsighted as that when a sales guy gets a larger commission for an ICE vehicle. They aren’t going to spend time learning about a product that gets them paid less, they are going to say whatever it takes to steer a customer towards whatever gets them the biggest payday.

One of my favorite examples of ignorant dealers saying stupid shit was a dealer telling a would be customer that they weren’t able to bring EVs into their service dept because they have to be kept in a bomb proof shelter in case the battery explodes. This wasn’t even a sales guy, it was a manager in a service dept, at a dealer that (supposedly) sells and services EVs.

The automatic diverting of money to the copyright troll is the part that gets me. That really ought to open YouTube up for liability just as much if not more so than hosting copyright violating material. Copyright trolls should be facing fraud charges and systems that reward them should be under intense legal scrutiny.

Sadly, that’s not how it works and even if there was enough interest to organize and lobby for a positive change, there’d still be zero chance of congress anything useful in the foreseeable future.

While they could, that is also a different situation. YouTube copyright claims are generally done through YouTube’s own system, not through the actual DMCA process. That system is designed first and foremost to prevent YouTube from getting sued. It’s rigged in favor of the people claiming copyright because those are the ones doing the suing. Any attempt to fix it increases the chances of a lawsuit.

These trolls messing with Google are making actual DMCA claims, which is a formal legal process and opens the claimant up to potential liability. False claims are perjury. And by affecting Google search results on a large enough scale, they are hurting Google’s business. Those sites getting taken down abelong to current or potenti customers.