The early story of McDonald’s is one of the great American tragedies. The food used to be excellent fresh-cooked hamburgers, real milkshakes, all this real food and available cheap and fast because they were well-organized. There’s a reason it got popular on a historic scale and started making a basically unlimited amount of money. Then, Ray Kroc pulled an Elon Musk on the (original) founders who had invented it all, hijacked the whole thing and took it over, and ruined the food to save money. Not satisfied with having fucked over the McDonald brothers, he then sued them for using their own name and then successfully drove them out of business from even having the single hamburger stand serving real food – now with a different name – that was all they had wanted to have in the first place.

It’s like everything good and bad about America, all wrapped up in one heart-rending little anecdote. Look up the whole story if you want to get upset.

South pole

And after that, citizens of the US. This all has nothing to do with deportation, it just happens that starting with the “other” is convenient because it lulls US people into thinking it won’t happen to them. The fact that ICE was already full-on into Gestapo tactics made things a little smoother, too.

Please accept our apologies, our country is trying to die though. It’s kind of all we can think about.

1. Because they want to know who you are
2. Because what are you going to do about it? They’re going to make money regardless

One or the other

Assuming the current trends pretty much continue, which they are guaranteed not to.

I love how sincere he is about really emphasizing how worthless the product is.

I would really encourage everyone to go to https://www.berries.com/ just to see that the same uncanny valley person who wrote the ad copy is still making images for the site.

Also, a hundred and nine dollars for twenty-four strawberries?

Bill was right, man. Spending over a hundred dollars on not very many strawberries to give to your father is definitely not going to make his heart swell with happiness to be your dad. He’s going to think “Jesus Christ I raised a person who can’t function.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HK16HXxQTO4

“This has been today’s lesson in talking about politics on Lemmy”

That Cyndi Lauper version is a mindfuck.

Edit: They muted her for the part where she talked bad about religion…

The genuine version of this: Shari’s Berries

Edit: “I’m sure you have… wonderful… chocolate covered berries.”

For those who don’t know

Which is probably a lot, they didn’t give this song a lot of airtime. For some reason.

There’s usually one of the buttons you can hold down to mute the ads, near the bottom right in the little phalanx of buttons all around the screen.

If you find it, label it “MUTE” in marker or something, spread the word.

Yeah. If you talked to any of these people toiling away in obscurity, they would never in a million years describe their work as boring. To an outsider, maybe.

I have a theory about this.

The people who had both genius and work ethic made magic. That was the GPT, Dall-E, AlphaGo generation of AI. You can’t make magic because you want to have a good career and you did some seminars. You have to do it because you have it burning inside you, and you’re in a community of people who all have that type of vision, and all pulling in the same direction you can make things that are impossible before you did them.

(Not that I’m saying AI itself is necessarily a good thing, certainly not in its present trajectory. I’m just saying that getting the tech from recognizing digits to ChatGPT was pretty fucking impressive.)

Now probably about 90% of the people in the field are there because it’s a good career. And, the people giving them their marching orders day-to-day are greedy idiots. You just can’t make magic that way. All you can do is follow the road that’s been laid down. The industry is just throwing orders of magnitude more electricity, money, and engineer time at these still-impossible remaining problems and hoping that’ll get them suddenly solved.

Remember when ChatGPT was programmed by competent and humble people (who are now, a lot of them, fired because they fought with Sam Altman), and so it kept emphasizing to people that it was not an AI (meaning an AGI), just a language model? They felt like that was important for people to understand (not that it did any good). Anyway, those days are gone, and with them, the forward progress that people like that can make.

Why? Because we’re trying to make magic with career people. It doesn’t work that way, never has. It’s like trying to start a fire with a bunch of rocks. Rocks are fine. Fire is fine, if a little bit dangerous. But they are not interchangeable.

No, no. Everyone who isn’t Elon Musk just doesn’t remember anything they’re ordered not to remember.

“But I rem–”

SHUT THE FUCK UP OR I’LL TAKE AWAY YOUR ALLOWANCE YOU WHORE

“I’m not–”

I SAID SHUT THE FUCK UP

That was it! Yeah, it was wonderful.

I knew some people who put together a demo for a MMORPG that would support people playing the monsters or the players depending on what their particular play style was. You could build your character, have social interactions, level up over time, and put all this attention into your skill tree. Or, you could run around and fuck shit up, potentially as a massive OP badass boss who could mow player characters down, and then you would respawn instantly when you (frequently) got killed.

I don’t know of it having been done in exactly the way they wanted to do, although a couple of the games in the Aliens franchise came pretty close. There was also one fascinating mod (I legit can’t remember the name) where one player on the “Marines” team was basically playing an RTS in the ship giving orders and the rest of the team was running around playing an FPS against the (also player-controlled) alien team. It was a ton of fun.

I miss the pre-AAA-shitfest era of gaming.

No idea about tools although I hope you find something.

Two related suggestions that will change your life:

1. Grunt Fund if you are making decisions about equity
2. Have people estimate the total time for a task, rigidly enforce that every man-hour spent on a project has to be allocated to one of those tasks (including the elusive but vital “oh shit we forgot” task), keep track of the coefficient between the two. It’ll be different for different people sometimes. When estimating a project, have people come up with estimates and then multiply by the coefficient. Be transparent with everyone about this system. It’ll revolutionize your project management life once people get used to it. I tried to find a blog post which explains more detail, but honestly, it’s not complicated, and Google is too shit now to find it.

They would also carry a little basket of hand grenades sometimes, and toss them out of the airplane to fall on any troops they saw down below.

It was a fucking wild time lol. No radios, open cockpit, no artificial horizon. If you flew into a cloud you just lost your orientation and fell out of the sky and died. They just went up there.