We've entered a phase of society where "rules for thee and not for me" is so intrinsic that they don't even notice their own hypocrisy. "GIMME ALL YOUR DATA" and "DON'T STEAL MY DATA" don't even register to them as connected concepts, at all. They have a right to take any data they want and are able to access. They also, once they've acquired that data, 100% believe that the data belongs to them, and always did.

Our current generation of AI is just greed given digital form, and the very particular greed that drives our owner class. "GIMME THAT, IT'S MINE!" is the name of their number one driver. No other point even exists in their view.

Anybody else hear "Don't Fear The Reaper" starting to play?

Here's the thing though, it may actually be more profitable to promote the AI sloposphere. If ad-views generate revenue, and AI bots can clickedy-click faster than humans, why would any of these companies want to expend effort in keeping themselves human-only? That's a legitimate question in the age where profit comes before everything else. What's the motivation to curate human-only content? Prestige won't drive profit, unless humans are willing to pay, and pay handsomely, to have a prestige site or sites dedicated specifically to them and their content, I can't see any profit to be made by filtering out the AI slop. The AI slop *IS* the profit. And profit is absolute god in this day and age.

As a dude in his teens during the 80s, I'll now have Tears for Fears running through my head all day. Props.

Yup. There's also an election cycle starting up for midterms.

The Obama reference above is completely missing the fact that Obama made a silly joke about aliens being real, and Trump isn't smart enough to understand dry humor. On top of that, Trump is desperately scrambling to come up with anything to distract from his current worries, the Epstein files, and the coming midterm trouncing the Republicans deserve. He's already declared emergency powers over immigration. Can you imagine what powers he would need to declare if he can convince enough nutters that aliens are real?

I vote menage a trois! Fuck Microsoft AND fuck Apple! But make sure you use protection. Who knows what kinda diseases those two carry around with them.

I prefer to at least have a vague idea what the species of my meat is. Until we identify his species, I wouldn't try a bite.

I'm honestly shocked Microsoft would even publicly discuss this. Don't they like forced obsolescence to justify continued sales?

The hope is likely that by the time they start charging what it actually costs, the businesses in question will forget that these jobs used to be done by humans at a specific cost. If they just raise the rates slowly enough, it will become a "required" budget line that simply increases year by year, and nobody will question the fact that in year 10 it's 400% more than it was in year one. I've certainly seen that happen with other tech that starts out affordable, gets entrenched, then becomes ridiculously expensive. And it becomes a habit until someone comes along with another disruptive "LOOK AT THE SHINY BAUBLE" tech to displace it. And AI is the current shiny bauble.

Consolidation is not an intelligent path long term. Yet, somehow, we're allowing a singular industry trend to capture not just the speculative market, but entire giant segments of the manufacturing sphere, as well as starting to make preparations to allow it to allow it to capture other resources, like electrical production, access to fresh water, and, of course, the all important tax dollar subsidies that all big business actually runs on.

When you pull back from this, and look at it from afar, what it looks like is an attempt to clamp down and maintain a hold of an entire society via technological means. We're putting all our eggs in one basket, and potentially limitless profit generating basket for a very small number of people, at the expense of all the rest of us. It's already consolidating the data of people, of books, of music, of movies, all data. And it seems determined to consolidate the rest of humanity's available resources. And when that consolidation is complete, will there be anything left for the rest of us? And even if there is, what happens if/when that one, singular entity that we have given all power, all resources, all data, and all focus suddenly breaks, or loses momentum? Do we just shrug and standby watching as our world falls into the technologically driven blackhole we've created?

We, the collective we, are being absolute idiots about this whole AI/LLM thing. We've allowed it to subsume too much already, and it seems all world leaders are determined to keep throwing resources at it. "We must or someone else will." It seems stupid to continue down this path, but no one with the power to top it or even slow it a bit and consider the consequences, has any interest in doing anything other than continuing to accelerate the consolidation. It's like the greed of the elites manifested in a completely carcinogenic and caustic manner, and it will not be stopped until it has metastasized and subsumed the entirety of human society.

Clearly, you've not seen what happens to teenagers when they're forced to go cold turkey due to power outages or family vacations where there's no wifi available. I'd describe the symptoms very similarly to withdrawal, except with a lot more screaming involved.

Fans are theorizing the retirement may be due to him knowing he's on borrowed time already. I don't wish ill on the guy, and it's cool he wants to go do the whole tour thing one last time, but I hope he's more energetic on stage than he's appeared to be in his interviews. Seeing Megadeth should be hype, not, "Oh shit, did he just fall asleep up there?"

If they do host a mass layoff because of AI, they'll most likely hire everybody back a few months down the line, but of course at a vastly lower pay rate. The true motivation for the AI hype is suppression of wages by any means necessary. If the fear mongering over losing your job doesn't work, they'll just shove you out and bring you back later when you're desperate enough to accept even lower standards.

The future's so bright, I need 20,000 SPF sunscreen.

The AI sucking down all your confidential data accidentally let you know it's been scarfing down all your data. We'll try to fix it so it keeps your confidential emails from returning a summary to you while it continues to scarf them down going forward. Sorry 'bout the mix-up.

For the slow in the audience, this was the purpose all along. The "find missing dogs" thing was the marketing approach to sell this furthering of this new addition to the surveillance state.