You’re currently connected to your neighbors that intimately. Chances are a good chunk of your neighbors are on the same ISP as you.
What disconnect do you think a non-local ISP is providing that a local one wouldn’t?

Those darn consumers having opinions on things that affect them without being experts in it. Next thing you know they’re going to want to ban smoking in restaurants despite not having medical degrees or knowing first hand how this will impact the tobacco industry! Or carbon emissions, food safety, or anything really…hell, cold calls are just part of the reality of marketing. Eventually consumers will grow up and realize that unprompted phonecalls at 7pm are just part of the reality of effectively offering them products.

If it’s not clear, I think the notion that people can’t have an opinion on something that impacts them without understanding the process that yields the impact is silly and paternalistic.
Attitudes like yours that are dismissive of consumer concerns are very much part of the reason why consumers are starting to increasingly reject AI products.

I apologize if I misunderstood your point, but I truly fail to see how

It’s just a vocal minority that’ll eventually grow up.

And

public sentiment will grow up

Isn’t calling the opposing view childish, which is a pretty strong sign that you’ve failed to actually consider what they’re saying. Same for calling them “brainwashed”.

Consumers fundamentally don’t understand the process

Do they need to? You’ll find that most consumers don’t know how a car works or how industrial design is done but they still have justifiable opinions and concerns about the impacts and quantifiable attributes of them.

If you actually look at what consumers are concerned about you’ll find that IP and copyright concerns don’t even make the list. People are concerned about the errosion of human connection and the diminishment of creativity. Privacy. Data usage and accountability.

And what’s more, even if they were opposed for those reasons the consumer is still intrinsically correct about what they value. If consumers respect your work less because you trace AI art it doesn’t matter if you still creatively contributed, the value has been reduced.

Telling consumers their preference is wrong because you want to be able to copy and trace AI content while viewing yourself as a creative is some backwards boomer shit. 30 years making casual games doesn’t give you lofty insight into the nature of the creative process. It’s just “trust me, I know more”. Same for trying to bolster your position by talking about betting on it.

Saying people who disagree with you are childish is a sure sign that maybe you’re not giving their argument proper consideration.
Particularly when you’re arguing that the consumers are wrong about their feelings towards the product and need to grow up and adapt to how the producers want to make it.

You’ve got a situation where people are seeing the assets, coding, design, and writing of games being moved from being human endeavors to being human supervised endeavors, while also being asked to pay higher prices.
The producers and vendors aren’t entitled to consumers happily letting them do less work to deliver an inferior product for more money just because the graphics card manufacturer says it’s the way of the future.

I don’t think anyone thinks you’re spending your time doing corporate graphic design putting yourself into your work. No one calls you an artist either.
People buying art though have a reasonable expectation that the person they’re buying it from isn’t tracing ai content or random things from google.

Keep in mind that if the “vocal minority” “grows up”, it means people stop paying you, because you’re the one not really adding anything to the equation.

Your anecdote isn’t as against expectations as you seem to think. People just also think that what you’re doing is grody.
If you traced a design you found from a Google result, people would object to you saying it was “your” creation. In the ai case, it just also isn’t anyone else’s.
People used to do your job by learning a bit about what they were designing and applying some creativity. You’re quite literally describing the AI enabling you to be less informed and creative as a creative worker.
No one much cares when the button layout for an accounting firms CRM is rote, but people do care when they hear that the designers for the game they’re playing kinda phoned in the art design and it’s significantly a mathematical approximation of other designs.

Some countries have more consumer protections than the US does, and consumers from there are wary of the lack of assurances a lot of us products have.

To them, it’s like being told you have to pay for your food at the restaurant even if they mess up your order and you don’t get to eat it. It doesn’t matter that the waiter probably isn’t going to drop your food on the floor, throw it away and then give you a bill: the fact that they could makes you not want to go there.

Likewise, your watch will almost certainly not break via factory defect after more than a month, but the expectation is that if they sell you something it’ll either last the expected lifetime or be suitably replaced or refunded on failure.

We’re used to our particular blend of capitalist hellscape, so a company saying they’ll replace things if they’re obviously broken the moment you buy it, but beyond than you’re out of luck just seems normal. It’s on us to make sure they don’t mail us subtly damaged microelectronics and tiny lithium bombs.

Entirely agree. Personally most of what I would want done would be better handled by a macro system that was easy to setup. Most of what I want is pretty usually the same so “remember this setup” is basically good enough.

If they hadn’t jumped the gun so badly and tainted the launch with crap results, Google would have been well positioned to do something profoundly useful.
If it could actually extract useful information with citations and pointers for next steps and work as an interactive search, that would actually be really really useful.
The whole “hallucinating health advice” and “being terrible” thing really set them back, even if they’ve improved.

Like you said, I don’t really need help creating. I do need help remembering things or finding information: that’s why I’m using a search engine in the first place.

At work, there’s a person who knows everything about the job. He regularly gets questions where the answer is just the correct way to find out for yourself.
That’s what I want. “Oh, you mean X? Try looking at YZ. Oh, you wanted X, but in G conditions. That’s over in FOO. It’s confusing because reasons written down here…”

Some people do want to talk to their computer and would love it if it worked right.

The problem is that it often doesn’t work right,cans they’re setting it up as though everyone has that as their top priority for their desktop.

Instead of baking it in to the os, expose the bits needed so it can be an installable program. Now people can have it or not, and you open the door for different non-ai tools to also work on the computer.
It’s almost like a proper, consistent API would be better than a bot you try to convince to use a dozen bad ones.

We have a code of conduct training at work that includes and anti corruption segment (nothing weird, just stuff like “a vendor buying lunch at a sales meeting is fine, but no gifts or having lunch at extremely expensive places”, and “some places give small symbolic gifts around holidays, usually a pastry. That’s fine. Do not accept a $500 pastry”)

A couple years ago they updated the module and the person engaging in non-obvious corrupt business practices became gay in passing. The overwhelming response by a lot of the company was “yay! We made it guys! They realized that we like bribes too! I feel so seen”.

Oh, it’s definitely far bigger than GDP. Not all financial activity factors into GDP but it’s all part of the general movement of money that factors into inflation.
A lot of money is used for things that aren’t counted as “production”, like investments or used goods.
More than half of the worlds trade is conducted in dollars and there’s even larger flows of money involved in foreign exchange on a daily basis.
There’s just so much money churning around that reducing the supply by $300B isn’t a big dent, particularly when most of it’s already effectively out of circulation.

The ~$200 a day figure is right from bls and tracks consumer spending, notably including housing costs.
https://www.bls.gov/cex/.
It’s about $100 a day if you remove housing and transportation. About $25 on food and $10 on “fun” a day, with $16 of that food being consumed groceries.

It would actually do next to nothing if the entire supply were vanished right now. There’s about $300 billion in pennies in circulation. Around $850 per American, or roughly four days of average individual consumer spending.
The economy as a whole does on the order of 10s of trillions of dollars of activity a day.
Eliminating every penny would be less than a 1% reduction in liquidity, and even smaller in terms of actual use.

It’s a matter of priorities. A large portion of Linux users don’t actually care about adoption. They’re not selling the os, so the docs aren’t designed for anyone who isn’t already a user.

Valve on the other hand is paying people for documentation and good ux. That’s enough to significantly boost the quality.

It’s even still a valid course of action if there’s literally no interest in making the world better.
They’ve potentially found a way to make their nearly omnipresent e-commerce platform share a name with the operating system, which is coincidentally mostly developed by others. They get to associate their name with a few tens of billions of dollars of development effort for a fraction of the cost.

To be clear, this isn’t bad or anything. It’s quite literally what a lot of the people doing all that legwork want. It just doesn’t require any altruism from valve. They make money selling games, and they sell more games when people think it’s easier to play them. A desktop with the ease of a console is a big selling point for a lot of people.

Their streaming system works fine with desktop apps, and it already works with their VR setup on different headsets.

I’ve streamed desktop to a different headset. I was able to also do stuff like mounting an app in a picture frame on the wall of a little VR house.

Using the video player on desktop while streaming was a little jank, but since this is a proper desktop I imagine it’ll be easy enough to switch over and use a normal video player without streaming another computers video player.

They’ve been pretty great on Linux. They built on the great work of the wine people and have done a lot to push the state forward.

I believe they’ve had a lot of good things to say about the stability of the Linux platform from a development perspective. For all the jank and instability that Linux software exposes, it has a lot more stability in terms of things like kernel and driver interfaces as a point of deliberate design choice. So there’s a lot less work needing to code around the specific versions of drivers being used.

Management isn’t your friend, but managers are still people. The job is not the person. A good, nice, friendly person can have a job where their work interests aren’t necessarily aligned with yours and still try to do what they can to see that your interests are met.

If they fire me, no manager is going to ask me how I’m holding up or what my plans for the future are

That’s just not true. It’s not universally untrue, but it’s just wrong to default to such an antagonistic view from the outset.

All that to say: it sounds like you’re mainly having difficulty reconciling your thoughts on how you behave towards people with how you behave towards management. If you replace job related words with words like “people” or “person” then the question gets a lot easier.

I had an argument with this person everyone likes and after thinking about it, it was mostly my fault we raised our voices. She raised her voice first but because I wasn’t listening to her because she triggered me.

It’s pretty obvious to me that you apologize. Then ask if they’d be open to a conversation about what you feel could have gone better.
“Hey, do you have a minute? Sorry about how I acted when we were talking the other day. I thought about it and realized that I hadn’t been listening, which wasn’t right of me and made things worse. Would you be open to discussing it now that we have a little distance from it? I’d like to explain myself a bit and share some related concerns that I had, if nows a good time.”

They’re a person. If you feel your wronged them, apologize. If you feel like you want to explain things and offer feedback, just make it clear this isn’t a prerequisite for the apology or anything.

Exactly. If you’re apologizing, apologize. There’s nothing wrong with also asking to have a conversation about what caused the conflict.

“I’m sorry” and "can we talk about what happened?” are both valid, but ultimately aren’t dependent on each other.

Yup. I’d definitely think it’s more to do with utility 10 years ago than AI now. That’s enough time to see that some people who went to college aren’t using their degrees and some people who didn’t are doing just fine, and that for a lot of people then biggest difference is debt. Current AI tools haven’t had enough time influencing the market to make it clear if they’re actually going to change things significantly or not.

I think the political difference is between which groups value education in the abstract more, and see college as a way to get that, despite a possible lack of utility. College can be a way to learn critical thinking and such. In an ideal world, we’d also be more okay giving anyone who wanted it knowledge for knowledges sake without making it so focused on utility.
I’d love if I could pop over to the nearby university and sign up to take an intro course on something that I know I will never practically use.

Ah, alright. :) sometimes these things are hard to tell in text.