Everyone wasn’t? But also, you ever heard of this thing called a “fad”? You best start believing in fads, you’re in one.

There was the time I had to hunt down an employee to make a copy of a house key for me because they didn’t have any of the automatic machines and the other home improvement super store in the area which did have an automatic key making kiosk unfortunately did not have a functional automatic key making kiosk.

For 45 minutes, I tried to steer the conversation away to almost any topic besides the one he insisted on having about his favorite American football team, The Patriots. This guy was stopping the key duplication process just to look me in the eyes and tell me about The Patriots. He messed up his first 2 attempts at copying the key I was having made because he was too busy talking to me about The Patriots. I probably told him 10 times in the course of this episode that I don’t watch sports at all, don’t know the teams, the players, the rules, the seasons, and I have no interest in it. That didn’t dissuade his passion to discuss The Patriots with me at all.

Got home and of course the set of keys he made didn’t work.

This one hits hard, not going to sugar coat it. Obviously the conversation doesn’t necessarily go exactly like that, but close enough for a meme.

In my bunkty-two years on this fine planet, prior to this year, I have been called a communist exactly none times. All of a sudden, I went from mild mannered and hard working homosexual to world ending communist supreme in like a manner of a few months. If this pace keeps up, I may be the communist black hole that devours the entire universe by the time the USA’s midterm elections come in November.

At one point I was out with a group that was bringing attention to the fact that the medicaid cuts resulting from the big beautiful bill are projected to bankrupt a rural hospital in my area. There were people out there screaming at us things like “how are we going to pay for it” and calling us “commies / communists”. And you can bet those willfully ignorant people are voters.

I got laid off because Trump & Elon are a disaster.

You got laid off because, well much the same, but also different.

Girl same

Best Buy broke the power button on my laptop when they replaced a faulty screen and then refused to fix it for free. It took so many phone calls and emails and in-person visits to get them to take care of that shit, it was like a part-time job. In the end they framed it as “this one time we’ll make an exception and do it gratis” as if they were doing me a huge favor by addressing their own fuck up.

At the time, they very carefully crafted a mirage hidden behind carefully worded messaging and the appearance of an in-house workshop for computer repairs, when in fact, the overwhelming majority of the time they were just sending the equipment out to a 3rd party repair warehouse (sometimes in another country) that clearly did not care about the quality of the work.

As an old person who knows a lot of old people and has to deal with a lot of other old people, you’re in a bubble. Nothing wrong with that, of course, and you may already be aware.

By and large, early gen X and older have a very difficult time discerning what materials are AI generated. Then when you get to a certain age range, maybe 70+, AI to much of that crowd is just another buzzword they know nothing about.

Now, in the pedantic sense of the word “increasingly”, if literally one more old person is against AI or doesn’t trust AI compared to last year, then that’s increasing. But on the whole, I’m not seeing it. In fact, as AI gets “better” and harder to detect, I’m finding that more people just go with it. You basically end up with camps of “the person who accuses everything of being AI”, “the person who has no clue what’s what and doesn’t care”, and “the person who can’t tell if something is AI regardless of how obvious it is”.

Loving this low effort controversy bait! LOVING IT. LOOOOOOOVE IT. NOT.

Gas prices have been higher, both in a relative and absolute sense, if you’re looking at the USA’s national average. The biggest issue now is that these prices are due specifically and directly to Donald Trump, his administration, and the complicity of the courts and congress. They were avoidable and unnecessary.

This is in DIRECT contrast to his campaign promises: Lower prices, Day One. He’s going to immediately lower prices.

Average intelligence people and above knew that this was a lie from the get go. That millions upon millions of American voters believed it, is a shame.

I run a tight ship. Other than the odd moments like when something in the garbage just started going bad, my “is this what my house smells like” moments are always good. But, no I don’t have cats, so maybe that’s part of it?

Farms happened.

We have coyotes, and they help, but humans are the primary population control for deer these days.

Come to my part of the world. You can’t have an unprotected garden out in the open. Deer will eat it, to the ground. Even “deer resistant” plants. To the ground. And it’s illegal to shoot them outside of a small window of time in the fall. They will destroy a garden far faster than any invertebrate I’ve ever encountered.

Some men hunt for sport,

Others hunt for food,

The only thing I’m hunting for,

Is a preserve that tastes good…

See my jam, see my jam, made from giant panda ham.

Eyes flame? EYES FLAME? Of all places? That’s basically just supporting the guy who once petted a dog owned by Elon Musk’s former neighbor’s sister-in-law. If you post there, you’re basically a nazi.

AIneOneOne: I understand your concern that you had an accident and hit a tree — a lost limb hurts, but did you know that oak trees are are hosts to more caterpillar species than any other species in North America?

For me it’s because, at least historically speaking, there’s usually no immediate feedback whatsoever if the command was successful or not. And then in addition, individual applications can also disable it entirely, often with no indication. Then on top of that, I switch back and forth between OSes, and some like Mac have different command keys and my brain doesn’t always automatically do the translation – especially since I’m using the same keyboard for all of them.

So, from a strictly reactive sensory perspective, my failure rate with just the single ctrl + c command is far from the non-zero it would take for my brain to be convinced that just the one ‘c’ is sufficient. Hitting the ‘c’ many times also gives my brain a tiny bump of endorphins / dopamine / whatever over and above hitting it just the once. It’s like playing the lotto or playing a slot machine, except all I win is paste.

I grew up in a time of optimism, but the foundation was already completely rotten.

Even as a child I understood the societal contradictions. Love thy neighbor and let he who is without sin cast the first stone, but gay people are demons spreading AIDS and disease, they should be killed. Immigrants are taking our jobs, but our bosses who are hiring them to replace us bare no blame. We should feed the less fortunate, but the black ones are welfare queens who are having babies just to get free money.

On TV, though, everything was PERFECT. Black people and white people got along. Black people could even be doctors. Churches helped out the poor. People working minimum wage jobs could afford nice homes in high cost of living places and have big families on that single income. In real life, none of that was to be taken at face value.

A rewind button, I suspect, will never get you back to a place where the future is truly better. The zombie apocalypse is pure fiction. What we have is much worse. And even in the zombie fiction, it’s often what’s worse that ends up being the focus, with the zombies and the apocalypse just serving as a place setting.

So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.

First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.

Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.

Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.

Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

I came from a big family like that. My mother had 13 children and 11 of us survived long enough to get married and start our own families. Lost one sister to fibroids and another to gang violence.

Number One: I’m a homosexual, so I’m not having the reproductive type of copulation, EVER.

Number Two: Bigots. They poisoned public perception of homosexuals. They fought to legislate away our rights and prevent us from adopting children amongst many other things like legalized marriage. They pushed gay people into the fringes of society, lead our friends and families to abandon us, marginalized, and isolated us. Those scars run deep and the societal damage is still festering. Even if I were still young enough to feel confident I could raise a child and live long enough to finish the job now that things are “better” and these rights are an option to me, I wouldn’t adopt. I have seen the inside, and I know it’s all too easy for society to fall back into the abyss. NO thank you. I’m already at max capacity caring for adult parents, can’t imagine if there were children in the equation as well.

Now that’s just me personally. On the other hand…

Fewer couples have the capacity and/or desire to support a family, let alone a large one, as it means a loss of income from one or both partners not working, vastly increased expenses, strain on relationships, and a myriad other problems. If most people could live comfortably and with reasonably fulfilled needs/desires on the income from one person and it didn’t require that one person to work themselves to death, then you might see higher birth rates.

Anecdotally, the people I’m seeing having the most kids (like 3+) are pretty much all financially very well off or struggling really badly. There are exceptions, of course, but most couples who are keeping their heads above water (if only barely) know their limits and recognize that having kids, let alone multiple children, would bring hardship to all involved.