Right! It’s kinda wild when you do see them. I always equate it to the feeling of being in a casino.

What really throws me is tv commercials. When I do see one, like in a waiting room or something, all I can think is, “people fall for this?”

Hey now. In harsh3466 land only I have the authority to mint pinecones!

I am always shocked when I have to use a browser without an ad blocker. How do people tolerate it?

I mean, I get it. I know many people have no idea about adblocking, etc. But goddam. It’s so awful without it.

This can be applied to anything, but the quote as I read it in a book by Piers Anthony (I know, gross, I was in middle school), was:

Power is a means to an end. Don’t let the means become the end.

I often think of it as:

Money is a means to an end. Don’t let the means become the end.

I’ll do this and they STILL only answer the first question

Vibe coding is a hilarious term for this too. As if it’s not just letting AI write your code.

100% this. Why would I go back to another centralized corpo line must go up service that will inevitably enshittify when we got lemmy right here?

Careful with that you though. I thought the same thing but someone pointed out in another thread that depending on your system, it may update the firmware over USB when you do system updates.

Shit. I didn’t even think of that. I’m using fedora. Tomorrow I’ll be blocking firmware updates for the printer. Thank you for pointing that out.

Glad I’ve got an Brother laser that has no network connectivity.

Isn’t this all a simulation anyway???

Seriously though, I do know several people IRL that are Lemmy users.

I don’t have the financial wherewithal to pick up and move to another country. If I did I’d be out of here.

I am a U.S. citizen (stuck in the U.S.) and I view the U.S. as an enemy country

I feel like by the time Trump and Elon and the project 2025 gang have finished having their way with the government there won’t be any demand for COBOL or FORTRAN. It’ll all have been burned down to the ground.

Edit: Fixed twatboy’s name.

You more elegantly said what I came to say.

Came to say something similar. Like I give a fuck that OpenAI’s model/tech/whatever was “stolen” by Deepseek. Fuck that piece of shit Sam Altman.

What 2028 election?

Totally normal. Just keep throwing stupid amounts of money at it so it can find a way to undercut some existing business structure by operating at a loss until that business is dead and then enshittify. Profit! /s

I was reading that whole thing thinking the exact same thing. Disdain and all.

The isn’t snark. The answer is simply greed. The rich want to be richer. They want it all. The mentality is, “I don’t care about anyone else, I want it all.”

Edit: removed a redundant sentence