The old rich guys in charge only care about getting richer and can't stand to be even mildly inconvenienced or lose so much as a penny. The rank and file think nobody should ever be able to tell them what to do. That's pretty much it. If people say, "We must do this for the good of the planet," they'll do the exact opposite because, "Fuck you! You don't tell me what to do."

Also racism. That always turns out to be at the root of even the most unrelated seeming things somehow.

I do not understand why Google has become so ossified. They must know they're strangling their own business, surely? Do they somehow think they're irreplaceable? That no one will ever build a better search engine? And the best they can come up with is AI-generated search nonsense? As if that's going to help.

Stop trying to make maximum profits for minimum effort, fire whatever useless exec is in charge over there, and get someone who actually wants to fix things before someone eats your lunch, Google!

Yeah, I got that, but this was the particular part I was reacting to:

"He continued, “And applied to AI? That’s a terrifying possibility. Terrifying. Not least because as AI systems go into the defense infrastructure, ultimately they’ll be charged with nuclear weapons and if we allow people to say that that’s a separate entity from the person’s whose wielding, programming, putting AI into use, then we’re doomed."

Possibly I misread it.

Excuse me, what? I fervently hope nobody is considering letting an "AI" get anywhere near anything nuclear! Despite whoever happens to be in the White House at any particular time, the upper echelons of the US military seem to be generally sane and smart enough to know that allowing glorified predictive text to control city-destroying superweapons is a bad idea.

AIs aren't anything of the sort. They're not intelligent at all, and we should stop calling them that. It just gives people weird, unrealistic ideas about their capabilities.

I'm still using Reddit for some stuff, but much less than I was. I have no doubt this will fully replace it at some point just as Mastodon has completely replaced Twitter for me.

Most flavours of metal, hard rock, punk, some blues stuff like SRV and Gary Moore. Basically, if it has loud guitars in it, I'm there.

Yes, I can't stand complete silence. I have a fan going at pretty much all times, summer or winter, and I definitely can't sleep without it. I have a white noise generator, but I prefer the fan because I'm so used to the airflow that the room feels dead and suffocating without it now.

There's more than that too. Like Pixelfed for images and Funkwhale for music streaming.

Check out this Feditips thread for a bunch of stuff.

That's true, but they'll never be satisfied with just making some profit. There will always be a rapacious desire for infinite profits. If they could find a way to make you watch nothing but ads on there and charge you for it, they would do it. It's only going to get worse.

If you liked Shadowrun Returns, I'd definitely recommend the sequels - Dragonfall and Shadowrun: Hong Kong. That first one was more of a proof of concept kind of thing. It was fun, but it was more about showing the gameplay could work. The other two are a massive improvement in the level of storytelling.

I say sequels, but they're not actually related story or character wise. They can be played in any order. I'd say Dragonfall has the better story and Hong Kong has the better characters, but they're both great and well worth your time.

As the meme goes, if you saw someone stealing food, no, you didn't. Poor people gotta eat too.

Well, Microsoft can fuck the fuck off! First of all, you should own things you paid for. And second, they can't even make Windows Update function reliably. I have no desire to have my OS stop working just because some server isn't responding. No, thank you.