• 15 Posts
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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • I’m talking from a perspective of reality. What you “predict” or “feel” or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn’t really interest me much.

    Damn… not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn’t really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.

    Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don’t give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren’t getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary “return to using horses while we get cars figured out better” approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future…

    It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class…and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.

    Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.

    Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not


  • I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.

    Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.

    This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!

    Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.



  • Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.

    Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.

    If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.




  • TL;DR of course sci-fi couldn’t have imagined how cool juggalos are, scifi is mostly written (and MORE importantly gate-kept) by man-babies with incredibly narrow views of reality, fuck sci-fi let’s go hang out with the juggalos…

    Honestly other than just extrapolating out what technologies will facilitate the rise of dystopias (while being weirdly obsessed with the aesthetics of dystopias to the point of it being dysfunctional to the objectives of the narrative and fiction) what have sci-fi writers actually meaningfully imagined about the future in the western canon?

    For all the mountains and mountains of sci-fi books and tv shows written I am not sure there is actually much to show for it except endless descriptions of how colonization, war and authoritarian power will be facilitated by future technologies (in a way that superficially claims to be subversive but is really just technology porn, politics be damned).

    The only western/European sci-fi series of any significant popularity that I think grapples with anything meaningfully human about positive potentials of the future is Star Trek. Other scifis of course accomplish this in parts of their stories, or in peripheral stories and side series, but almost without fail they all circle back to the same 5 things a boomer dude can imagine a society of boring boomer dudes doing who worship technology and talk over women.

    Murderbot is dope tho, I don’t say this critique to attack the wave of sci-fi that is written by diverse new authors that subverts the genre, just to say that the old guard of the genre should be trashed and thrown out the window in favor of these new authors who actually treat envisioning the human condition realistically as important…. to writing books about humans in the future…….

    ….sigh sorry I really think the classic sci-fi genre gets wayyyyyyyy too much of a pass for being a serious genre of art when it is written by a bunch of clowns who mainly used representations of human beings like action figures and G.I. Joe figurines, bending them in brutal and inhuman ways so that they carry out cool action sequences on the living room floor and reference cool technologies that will make their dad notice them and give them a hug for being smart. None of which is wrong unless you are claiming to write literature that illuminates deep things about the human condition with respect to the breadth of future possibilities.




  • Unfortuantely, I think just about every fan base these days has to deal with its share of racist Trump supporters who steal scrap metal from construction sites for meth money…

    If you live in the US (or UK) you live in a collapsing society being suffocated and held in place by neoliberal austerity politics that purposefully shuts down the possibility of any genuine systematic reform that isn’t in the direction of fascism. The US is run by centrists who will spit in your face (while their Republican drinking buddies cheer them on) for daring to suggest populist leftism reforms that would actually improve the quality of life of the working class and poor of the US.

    In that environment people are going to resort to taking meth and stealing scrap to survive, as society is literally trying to kill them off and there is no rational hope to be found for things to change. Are these people druggies, are they sketchy? Are some of them maga heads who turn to pathetic and hateful views? Yes, but I think it is important to always recognize the conditions that lead desperate people to act in desperate ways when we discuss the repulsiveness of said desperate acts of non-violent crime.


  • Maybe the whole point of Monty Python was to sketch out ways that humans could behave that would confuse and hugely throw off machine learning algorithms.

    Talk about “poisoning the well” with AI training, all you have to do is 65% of the time make completely normal and rational intelligent choices and the other 35% be completely illogical and inscrutable. Any algorithm trained on you then, no matter how smart you are or how valuable your knowledge is, will inconsistently and abruptly resort to batshit crazy and unreliable choices and information. :)

    The thousands and thousands of years we have nurtured sarcasm and absurdism in the garden of human culture has all been for this one true purpose…

    I would say maybe John Cleese is an alien trying to save us, but Cleese is a dick no matter how funny the stuff he was involved in was and I would hope Aliens were much more open minded than he is.



  • My conversations with young people have been trending towards going the exact same way as my conversations with MAGA boomers who are also very passionate about the disinformation they’ve found on the internet by “doing their own research.” Being upset on the internet isn’t something to be proud of.

    Critical thinking is more important than emotion in the age of disinformation. Try harder to think more critically and less emotionally.

    Critical thinking is not more important than emotion, you are a fool if you think it is.

    Critical thinking relies on your head not being up your own ass to work, emotion on the other hand taps into a human learned intuition that has successfully gotten humans through innumerable challenges over our long evolutionary history. If it isn’t your emotions that have guided you back to reason and kindness over and over again in your life, your relationship with your emotions is to be frank quite immature and stunted.

    I would go a step further and say what makes the kind of centrism you are defending and leftists like me attack, so dangerous and insidious is it conflates adulthood with lobotomizing the relationship between your emotions and your politics in the pursuit of some logical construction of ideology that becomes more and more empty as it departs from the human condition and is lost in pedantic defenses of the status quo that aren’t salient to people who are suffering and need actual change, not management of the status quo.

    It is my emotions integrated with my politics in constant conversation that makes me able to actually evolve my views to new realities and new information, that is precisely what differentiates someone like me from a stereotypical toxic stereotype of a boomer. My emotions are what nag at my outmoded views, that keep reminding me of inconsistencies in my actions, my emotions are what keep my morale compass oriented and stop me from handwaving away the genocide of Palestinians because the tv news I watch tells me it is ok, they probably deserve to die…



  • Nothing wrong with sounding like a teenager, most teenagers these days are passionate and aware of the stark realities they are entering into adulthood under.

    Sounding like an entitled boomer who blames young people for demanding a future for themselves that isnt a fatal compromise with far right nutjobs driven down their throats by ideologivally bankrupt centrists?

    That unfortunately for you, is the actual cringey behavior.




  • Thank you for the thoughtful response

    It’s also kind of interesting to consider the impacts of the biters themselves, they aren’t really a life form, they’re more akin to a bacteria, just on a macro, insect scale. They literally only do something productive for themselves once you get in their way. Their entire evolutionary lifeform is predicated on you being a negative influence on their environment. They consume your pollution, and use it to grow and become stronger. However, left to their own devices they seem to spread across the entire planet, almost like a cancer, just without the consumption of life that is typical, because biters seem to be magic?

    I mean I would accept magic, but anything less of an explanation of the biters behavior seems like a problematically reductive view of life.

    Even the behavior of bacteria is complex and more nuanced than a cancerous process.

    I get that it is a game, but I think these things do matter, especially for computer minded people who want to understand everything as a computer programs and recklessly ignore the reality of the environment around them. Media like this severs the salience of the surrounding landscape to people, and contextualizes it simply as a resource to exploit.

    Idk, I mean factorio is amazing, I totally get why people love it, and I know the focus of the game isn’t on this but still…


  • I loved windows phone, the UI was so clear (I still use square home on android to this day), the camera app was superb and it was a very efficient operating system for low end hardware.

    It didn’t have a ton of apps but honestly I don’t know, sometimes that doesn’t feel like a bad thing for a thing I am always trying to make more into a tool than an addiction….

    Sure windows phone wasn’t going to grow rapidly for years, but it was well situated to take advantage of an opportunity in the future when apple or google stumbled and created an opening. I think for a company as large as Microsoft just abandoning it entirely was a massively stupid move. Now Microsoft has a gigantic blind spot in mobile, and they are stuck in that position.


  • I said this earlier in the thread but I am very confident at this point that Microsoft already lost this battle to Linux in the longterm. Particularly because Linux operating system devs don’t care about AI and Microsoft is obsessed with it like all other dumb massive tech companies and honestly it is going to lead nowhere in terms of providing a useful basis for an operating system especially if the foundation you are working from sucks (glares at Microsoft and Windows). So volunteer Linux devs actually have a huge lead here even though Microsoft has wayyyyy more resources and money because Microsoft is firehosing it all at the stupidest shit while they fire core team members left and right destroying their longterm capability to create quality products.

    You really have to understand AI as the dream come true from sociopathic tech CEOs standpoint, they can finally get rid of the humans, fire most of the programmers and suck up so much data that they can create an UBER AI that knows all…. except reality doesn’t work like that. No matter, reality is kept safely at bay always at least 4 kilometers from the Microsoft C-suite at all times.

    The shift just hasn’t happened yet like a dead tree limb hanging on until that gust of wind comes along and the whole limb comes crashing down abruptly weeks after the storm that weakened it.


  • I guess but Microsoft truly feels like it is abandoning any commitment to making Windows function well for users.

    They basically seem to think people have no choice and that they can focus their entire business on turning Windows into a surveillance advertisement platform.

    In this environment, launching a windows handheld would be a laughable joke honestly.

    The numbers don’t show it yet, but in the longterm Windows has catastrophically lost the home user operating system market and they deserve to for their awful stewardship of the market.