Rottcodd

What “entitlement?”

I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.

I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.

If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.

I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.

Sort of. The broad dynamic is essentially the same, though evolution is a comparatively tiny idea compared to anything that might come out of cosmology.

That’s a good illustration of my point though. Think about the complexities and the table-flipping along the way to our current understanding of evolution, then expand that out - we’re not just addressing the mechanisms by which specific forms of life come to be on this specific planet, but the fundamental nature and history of an incomprehensibly vast universe.

When we know - we’ve demonstrated to ourselves repeatedly - that we still don’t even fully grasp the facts regarding something as relatively mundane and constrained as the origin and differentiation of species of life, it should drive home how ludicrous it is to believe that we’ve managed to grasp the facts regarding the origin and history of the universe as a whole.

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Of course the story we’ve come up with has started to unravel. It was essentially destined to, just as all the past stories we’ve come up with have. We’re just the tiniest little splash in the tiniest little pan way off in some obscure corner of a reality that is vast and complex beyond comprehension.

To think that we can understand the nature of the universe, much less that we already do, is and always has been startlingly obviously ludicrous.

It’s beyond an echo chamber in there.

It feels sort of like an isolated village of eldritch abomination worshippers in a Lovecraftian horror story.

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Ironic that they’re effectively proving that you were right to not trust them…

i was just about to post about that - my tuxedo also loves zipties and I have no idea why.

I find google works fine if I’m just looking for general information on a simple topic, because it will dependably return a link to the wikipedia entry and a few of the most popular sites.

And I find that it’s pretty much useless for specific information about narrow topics, because it’s still just going to return the same general shit.

I’m not sure exactly how the change worked, but some time back (it’s been a year or two now, and maybe more - it’s just something that I sort of slowly realized had happened), they shifted to a system that made Google Fu essentially useless.

It used to be the case that you could define the importance of search terms by the order in which you listed them and make some effectively required by putting quotation marks around them.

But starting a couple of years back, it’s been generally ignoring search term order and quotation marks, and instead giving priority to specific common (and certainly not coincidentally common marketing) terms.

To anthropomorphize, it’s as if it’s developed a cripplingly narrow focus. So if, for instance, you’re looking for the title of some specific movie, it doesn’t matter how many other search terms you include or what order you list the terms in - if you include the term “movie,” that’s what it’s going to focus on. So if you’re lucky, you might get the actual movie you’re looking for, but it’s absolutely guaranteed that you’re going to get streaming services and “18 movies with real blood” style clickbait.

I love the entire game, but there’s one part that stands out for me, and that I always look forward to - the flight through the asteroid field with Juni when you first arrive in Kyushu. It’s just this beautiful, tranquil interlude in the middle of all the danger and drama.

To me, the thing with the game is that it’s just quality all the way through - the story, the characters, the mechanics, the graphics, the controls, the gameplay, the combat, everything.

There are so many places to go and things to see snd so many different ways to approach it. And it’s all balanced so well - there’s a constant calculation of risk vs. reward.

The only thing I don’t really like about it is that there are so many mooks. It gets tedious when I’m trying to explore or trade and some scrubby ships pick a fight that they’re absolutely guaranteed to lose. There’s no risk and no challenge - all it is is an interruption. But I can put up with it - all the rest of the game makes it worth it.