Followup question.

“As opposed to what?”

If everyone is “insane”, what would a “not insane” person look like if one hypothetically did exist?

All but you?

By George, I think OP’s got it.

“A friend”, huh?

I’ll let you him know when I figure it out.

Anything to shorten it sounds good to me.

So say we all.

In the U.S., a few years ago, GOP Senator Josh Hawley, one of the speakers who helped incite the January 6th insurrection, introduced a bill to make the term of Copyright 28 years with optionally one renewal for an additional 28 years.

And, it’s so weird to me that I could agree with him on anything really.

Mind you, he introduced that bill in an effort to punish Disney for being too “woke”. And the bill didn’t go anywhere. But I’d let the MAGA nuts use such a bill as an opportunity to crow for a few minutes about their victory over strong woman protagonists or whatever if it got us more reasonable copyright terms. (And honestly that’s too long, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the bullshit we have now.)

Also, fuck Sonny Bono.

Not in the U.S… For work-for-hire, It’s 95 years after publication. For works owned originally by a lump of flesh, blood, and bone, it’s 70 years after the author’s death.

My employer considers developers, infra, SRE, PC Support, even QA all to be part of the “IT department”. I’ve always used the term “IT” to just cover any specifically “tech” sort of function. As opposed to, say, finance, sales, HR, operations, etc.

I’m being trolled and I ain’t even mad.

Be serious, please

Ok, why do you think she lost the general election and the popular vote then?

I mean… that’s a pretty low bar, though, right? Kamala just set the world record for fastest time from hype to revulsion any politician has ever achieved and pulled her entire party along into the grave she dug herself.

And I wish that was all he had.

I just got this too. Using old Reddit (the realest Reddit (which still isn’t saying much)) got rid of the banner and allowed loading all the content.

Because Congress is letting him.

I don’t know about you, but I sort all my fruit according to tanginess.

I’ll let you know.

…can’t seem to differentiate between real vs what’s on the screen…

Speak for yourself.

So many places I could start when answering this question. I guess I’ll just pick one.

It’s a bubble. The hype is ridiculous. There’s plenty of that hype in your post. The claims are that it’ll revolutionize… well basically everything, really. Obsolete human coders. Be your personal secretary. Do your job for you.

Make no mistake. These narratives are being pushed for the personal benefit of a very few people at the expense of you and virtually everyone else. Nvidia and OpenAI and Google and IBM and so on are using this to make a quick buck. Just like TY capitalized on (and encouraged) a bubble back around the turn of the millennium that we now look back on with embarrassment.

In reality, the only thing AI is really effective as is a gimmicky “toy” that entertains as long as the novelty hasn’t worn thin. There’s very little real world application. LLM’s are too unreliable at getting facts straight and not making up BS to be trusted for any real-world use case. Image generating “AI”'s like stable diffusion produce output (and by “produce output” I mean rip off artists) that all has a similar, fakey appearance with major, obvious errors which generally instantly identify it as low-effort “slop”. Any big company that claims to be using AI in any serious capacity is lying either to you or themselves. (Possibly both.)

And there’s no reason to think it’s going to get better at anything, “AI industry” hype not withstanding. ChatGPT is not a step in the direction of general AI. It’s a distraction from any real progress in that direction.

There’s a word for selling something based on false promises. “Scam.” It’s all to hoodwink people into giving them money.

And it’s convincing dumbass bosses who don’t know any better. Our jobs are at risk. Not because AI can do your job just as well or better. But because your company’s CEO is too stupid not to fall for the scam. By the time the CEO gets removed by the board for gross incompetence, it’ll be too late for you. You will have already lost your job by then.

Or maybe your CEO knows full well AI can’t replace people and is using “AI” as a pretense to lay you off and replace you with someone they don’t have to pay as much.

Now before you come back with all kinds of claims about all the really real real-world applications of AI, understand that that’s probably self-deception and/or hype you’ve gotten from AI grifters.

Finally, let me back up a bit. I took a course in college probably back in 2006 or so called “introduction to artificial intelligence”. In that course, I learned about, among other things, the “A* algorithm”. If you’ve ever played a video game where an NPC or enemy followed your character, the A* algorithm or some slight variation on it was probably at play. The A* algorithm is completely unlike LLMs, “generative AI”, and whatever other buzzwords the AI grifting industry has come up with lately. It doesn’t involve training anything on large data sets. It doesn’t require a powerful GPU. When you give it a particular output, you can examine the algorithm to understand exactly why it did what it did, unlike LLMs which produce answers that can’t be tracked down to what training data went into producing that particular response. The A* algorithm has been known and well-understood since 1968.

That kind of “AI” is fine. It’s provably correct and has utility. Basically, it’s not a scam. It’s the shit that people pretend is the next step on the path to making a Commander Data – or the shit that people trust blindly when its output shows up at the top of their Google search results – that needs to die in a fire. And the sooner the better.

But then again, blockchain is still plaguing us after like 16 years. So I don’t really have a lot of hope that enough average people are going to wizen up and see the AI scam for what it really is any time soon.

The future is bleak.

We need to advocate for better pay

Yes.

and stop taking tipped jobs.

If people could just “stop taking tipped jobs” you really think they wouldn’t have been doing that already?

Your post kinda has “have you tried just not being depressed?” energy.

Are you thinking not tipping would magically transform a “tipped” position (that was subject to the minimum tipped wage) into a non-tipped position (that was subject to the normal minimum wage)? What’s the threshold? A particular percentage of transactions refraining from tipping? Under a specific dollar amount of tips per worker? The employer having to supplement the tips to get it up to the minimum tipped wage more than a certain percentage of the time? Are you sure “yeah, but there’s a blank on the receipt labeled ‘tip’, so theoretically the workers could get tips” isn’t enough to make the minimum tipped wage apply? Does it vary by jurisdiction?

Meanwhile, the real person behind the real counter of the real coffee shop you like probably regularly skips meals to afford rent.

Even if what you’re suggesting could work, who’s to say they wouldn’t immediately replace it with some “gig economy” sort of alternative that would turn the workers into freelancers to whom no minimum wage applied?

Yes, advocate for worker rights, but don’t kid yourself that not tipping your servers is somehow doing them a favor.