Exactly right.

As such, any bleating about markets being driven by “consumer choice” is either hopelessly out of date / embarrassingly naive - or malicious.

Just as consumer sales are a rounding error, so is consumer choice - it’s a direct relationship.

This extends a lot farther than the AI bubble, we have allowed corporations to merge and monopolize, and “investors” to gamble on it all, to where they completely invert the relationship.

They shape our experience by constraining choice, dictating only options with profit margins and heinous licensing terms that work exclusively and overwhelmingly in their favor.

Weren’t you listening trend?! The AI is going in the nostrils

Damn, rough.

This is what I do (and have for almost 20 years). Once I notice what feels like a fever, ASAP I layer up and sleep for as long as my schedule allows. Seems to really work well.

The few things that stick around after that, though, those are guaranteed to fuck me up for a few days.

vibe coding but great

Always loved that Futurama scene, for the way it’s perfectly in line with Fry’s character and his amazingly broken reasoning facilities, while also just directly pointing out the bitter hatred of self, as a class, this kind of thinking always entails.

I mean. The photo kinda looks like him trying to keep whatever he thinks his hemisphere is, in view.

I feel like what sounds personally insane to us (and is, don’t get the wrong idea), to the people making such decisions the situation is more like -

“Emerging market with unknown upside thanks to new and evolving capabilities, exploration and competitive advantage shaped and constrained, globally, by hardware capability. Not my money I’m betting, ‘risk’ is extreme opportunity for me, negative consequences borne by others. Let’s go”

That’s really beautiful.

Cool people made cool thing! -> awful people made cool thing awful

Idk exactly what comes next for us nor when, but for fuck’s sake WHATEVER we do next has gotta get rid of this goddamn shit.

“Guys, you don’t understand, my MBA specifically said this would work!”

Often followed by “Hmm, can we pay someone to help us solve this personnel puzzle? Let’s find a consultant. I’m no rube though, I’m a shrewd business cretin - if we don’t find a consultant with an MBA fancier than mine, we’ll just be wasting our money.”

Costco also didn’t do the “yay we don’t have to pretend to care about minorities anymore” rug pull that Target and others did, where they went out of their way to signal the dismantling of whatever DEI stuff they had previously implemented.

The bowties! Holy shit lol, what a uniform

What a great way to frame it, I love this! I typically spend something like 60-80% of time available for a given task thinking through approaches and trade-offs, etc. Usually there comes a point when the way forward becomes clear, even obvious.

After that? Bliss. I’m snapping together a LEGO set I designed, composed of pieces I picked (maybe made one or two new ones!), and luxuriating in how it all feels, when put together.

“zip ties near me”, amazing, perfectly fitting for our era of unreality

Wait is “that X” replacing what would’ve been “that tweet”, in the before times, or am I being dense? Does one “X a reaction” to the latest news, maybe “re-X” someone else’s? After the fact, has one “X’ed about it”?

To be clear, not laying any of that at your feet whatsoever, lol.

But if so…just amazing stuff. Not only trashed what was arguably the most cohesive, iconic branding of the Internet era, but made it just flat out impossible to talk about in any smooth way at all.

Haunted, made ravenous, beastly, low - by knowledge of a flavor too pure for this world. Left lurching, bereft, cursed to sin against kith and kin, searching desperately, urgently, for a satisfaction that can never be born.

The heavens weep!

Hate to tell ya but I had the same inverted experience. “How come this gross artificial banana tastes nothing like bananas?! Ohhhh…”.

It does kinda drive me nuts though, not knowing what the real deal tastes like. Can only imagine, for you!

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Just out here rubbing bug goo on plant corpses, guess we’re weirder than the bees