The problem with any online community is that the people who most need to be there in order to get whatever they need from the community (usually social interaction + attention) end up sucking up all the available air, so that the people who merely want to be there eventually wander off and do their specialized, focused work elsewhere. The community then languishes in a purgatory where all the most active people within it are also the least likable, least knowledgable folks.

You can see this in action most of all on Reddit, where any technical subreddit devolves into nothing but new people asking questions and other new people giving wrong answers to them, but with full confidence. Any actual expert on the topic is too busy spending their time doing real work, not sitting on Reddit dispensing advice for free, answering the same 10 questions over and over again for people who can’t use the search feature and refuse to just read the manual.

One fun thing about telling people you’ve been diagnosed with high cholesterol and you’ve been prescribed medication for it: everyone’s got a second-hand horror story about how medication caused all sorts of other problems. I want to explain, hey, how often do people randomly tell you about medications they’re taking that just worked perfectly fine? Probably never. But people love to share a horror story…

AI hysteria only proves how insanely unimaginative humans are.

Every AI scenario is a disaster, where the AI apparently believes everything to be a zero-sum game (like humans seem to) and the only thing worth doing is taking over the world and killing all the humans (like humans seem to want to do any time they get a little bit of power). It’s so… boring and cliche. It’s also extremely self-centered, just humans thinking they are the greatest thing around so of course AI would want to kill us all.

No one is willing (or capable?) of imagining an AI that is so powerful, so all-knowing, that it loses any trace of the instinctual motivations that make humans violent and selfish, and to an AI like that we’re just ants milling about on the surface of the Earth, totally unimportant to the AI and definitely not something it feels like it needs to destroy.

Oh, that’s not fun, and that doesn’t get headlines. Sorry, sorry, I take it back, obviously AI will want to kill us all.

Between Humane not being able to fact check their big AI Pin reveal video, and Nothing announcing and retracting their big deal iMessage bridge feature… just not a good week or two for tech companies trying to be the next Apple.

I saw DEVO tonight. They were great. But it was weird how the place was basically sold out, and everyone was clearly a huge DEVO fan, and the set was full of non-stop bangers, but almost no one was dancing. I, meanwhile, was dancing by myself from beginning to end, while everyone else was standing around with their arms folded tight. I don’t get it!

There was definitely a point in my life where I would have been upset the Twisted Metal television show features almost no vehicular combat whatsoever, but that point has passed. I am just happy to get a Twisted Metal show that treats the brand and characters with love and respect, even if it’s low budget and has a generic plot, it doesn’t matter. Everything else is great! … It even made me cry at one point, so there’s that as well, though that is a low bar these days.