I literally just finished Circe by Madeline Miller less than 24 hours ago. The book includes a version of this story, among many others, from Circe’s perspective. I was also unfamiliar with the character despite being a big Greek & Roman mythology nerd as a kid.

One interesting and fucked up related fact is that when Amazon expands its delivery network it has a bunch of last-mile delivery services spin up to their specifications, promising them business. Then, after it analyzes its output and determines how much excess delivery bandwidth it has, it just leaves whatever last mile delivery businesses it doesn’t need holding the bag (and a bunch of Amazon branded delivery trucks, because of course Amazon doesn’t front the cost for that necessary investment).

I’m in the closed beta. Its great! I pay extra for the premium tier - I only have to subject myself to free use by any random shareholder visiting my town on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The base-tier peasants have to give up their whole weekends to shareholders like fuckin losers lol.

Queue the new subscription cloud version of Windows that force-feeds you whatever the fuck Microslop has a hard on for this week. Advertisements in your start menu, open video stream everything you are doing, slop token credits if you answers surveys about what you are doing so CoPilot can train off of your screen recordings, un-uninstallable CoPilot/OneDrive of course, free license for Microslop to use anything OneDrive ingests (everything it manages to discover) without limitation…

I would also be surprised if the cost of production, now using cheaper ingredients and far more automation, hadn’t also decreased.

I don’t believe they are suggesting such. The concept of AI as a helpful tool for people trying to complete a task is still valid. Most good work includes repetitive, tedious tasks and AI can potentially automate some of that away.

I believe the problem is that, first and foremost, we’re attempting to throw all of the world’s knowledge into a black box and power it with all of the worlds resources while praying that it will result in genuine General Superintelligence. Its reckless, destructive, wasteful, and naive.

Second, most of those in power see it as a replacement for those workers and as an avenue for cost reduction. Middle management that is deluded into believing that they are the reason everything gets done. Narcissistic executives who think their “genius” is the key to their company’s success. If those pesky workers beneath them would just sacrifice literally everything for their bosses and literally obey their boss’s every command, including commands like “just do it faster” everything would be perfect… they believe. The false promises of AI replacing labor gets them rock fucking hard.

Brainwashing starts with deprivation. Those with wealth in the US have been manipulating the system into serving the wealthy at the expense of the rest of the country. It isn’t an inevitability, it’s a flawed underlying system and a capitalist class willing to take advantage of every opportunity to cement their own power.

Oh, but it does.

If the population is kept uneducated, poor, and fearful they don’t have the energy, understanding, or organization to keep the assholes in check. It’s way easier turn a country to dictatorship and/or fascism when everyone is stressed and struggling.

There is no perfect system, but they are systems that can build a population that is at least asshole resistant.

Which systems? Democracy? Communism? All systems?

Stalin was a totalitarian dictator that happened to lead a country experimenting with socialism/communism.

Does Trump’s treatment of certain groups represent the totality of what is possible under capitalism?

To be clear, I’m not a fan of Stalin or Trump. It just seems weird to hate a political theory/ideology because a power-hungry asshole said it was his ideology.

Pretty simple. Our relationship started when we were in our early 20’s. Over the course of the ~10 years we were together we became different people. By the time we were in our 30’s, what she wanted in a partner changed and I was no longer what she wanted. Figuring it all out hurt and sucked… but I’m in a good place these days and consider it an important learning experience in my past.

I recognize President Pedophile is incredibly stupid, in addition to being a horrible human being. But I’m struggling to see how he could have made this mistake. Additionally, he has lawyers.

He’s burned through many lawyers and there are few reputable or intelligent lawyers left who might be willing to light their careers on fire. Sure, he might find one willing to trade their career for whatever benefits they might get (or maybe they just have a hard on for fascism, which often means they are fucking stupid too), but most of his lawyers have, eventually, been left holding a flaming bag of shit while Trump transparently lies and pretends he has never heard of them or has heard they aren’t very good.

It’s happening to pretty much the entire fucking justice department. It used to be a very sought after career. Now they are giving fresh grads signing bonuses and then shuffling them into the meat grinder and sacrificing their reputation to further the administration’s nakedly corrupt agenda. “Hey, new kid, I need you to take this case.” Turns out the case is about some poor immigrant that been detained for months and then deported despite having court orders protecting him from deportation… that were clumsily bypassed with unsigned orders or some other bullshit. New kid sits in front of a frustrated judge yelling at him and the kid can only say “I don’t know what happened” and go home and cry into his pillow.

I’d be more likely to believe that his staff posts things and he’s only somewhat aware of what it means.

The number of people I know who now ask AI instead of web searching is… very upsetting.

Maybe they will offer a commercial-free subscription service.

They want a presence on your phone, collecting any data the phone OS allows. They want to send you notifications. They want to prevent you from exerting any control over the experience - you can’t block ads for an app as easily as you can for a webpage… and if you help anyone else mess with an app, you are literally committing a felony.

Republicans are beyond hypocrisy. We need a new word for their consistently bad faith, disingenuous lies.

They are basically just human scarecrows with firehoses irrigated up their ass and out their mouthes, violently spewing a never-ending torrent of flaming horseshit.

“No Republicans are acting in good faith” doesn’t mean “only Republicans aren’t acting in good faith”.

I wholeheartedly agree that “It’s not politically wise” is often a bullshit excuse.

However, when you are an openly socialist mayor in the process of overhauling numerous aspects of city laws and regulations, opening a war on additional fronts is risky. The US public is tired of more of the same, but that doesn’t mean we live in a post-Red-Scare society.

From what I understand, he’s focused on improving conditions in NYC to demonstrate that the policies and theory are effective and accumulate some public wins. If he doesn’t play nice in the meantime, national Democratic leaders might find ways to prevent him from getting many victories in NYC.

Similarly, going to war with the NYPD would likely lead to them purposely doing a shit job to make him and his policies look bad. Police unions have done it multiple times. Again, he’s looking accumulate good will first so that the public will stay on his side when the NYPD pulls that bullshit.

Normally, I’m in favor of organized labor… but using that power to protect corruption, racism, and the capital class basically makes them class traitors so get no sympathy from me.

Mamdani literally, strategically avoided a fight with Hakeem Jefferies (as well as the NYPD) because it’s not the time.