If you’re willing to wait, you can probably get a good bike used in the spring. Otherwise, head to Craigslist or FBM to find a used bike. Cheaper and already broken in.

Some real 5D chess plays from the big MS these days lmfao. I’ll stick with Linux, thanks.

Something like 1500/yr for insurance, probably 30/month for gas, assuming I don’t take a long trip.

My motorcycle has paid for itself many times over in terms of the enjoyment I get out of riding it. It’s something I can recommend to anyone, and lets you see the world in a way most people never will.

Cheaper to buy a new one than more ink. Fucking extortionate.

That sounds wildly illegal and fraudulent.

If all of that were the case… why aren’t they ALREADY profitable? There are only 2 companies in the actual LLM/AI space, OpenAI and Anthropic, and OpenAI is already so dominant that Anthropic is a noncontender. Since that is the case, why aren’t either of them profitable? If they were, they’d be screaming about it constantly; Altman would be on stage every single goddamn day boasting about it; OpenAI would be posting monthly, if not WEEKLY profit reports, just to show how much money they were making as “”“The Future™️”“”; public investors would be POURING IN like nothing else mattered!!!

So where is it? Where’s the profit? Where are the reports and press conferences, the investor statements and the IPO’s? Where’s the goddamn money, Lebowski???

And don’t say they’re in the “growth stage” or whatever. 4 years in and a TRILLION DOLLARS LATER, there’s no profit to be seen, no remarkable products to use, nothing of substance except billions burned building bespoke data centers and polluting the planet. The whole AI “”“industry”“” is a lie.

Hard to do that when there’s no profit NOW.

Thanks, I hate it.

That’s the truly hilarious part - NOBODY is okay with this! EVERYONE knows it sucks! The ONLY reason it’s still relevant is because Business Idiots are so goddamn pervasive and stupid. Any rational society would’ve taken GenAI out back and shot it years ago, that’s how bad it is. If you want to get into the real nitty-gritty of JUST HOW TRASH things are, I recommend more of Zitron’s work; it’s a common topic for him to rip apart in a well-researched rage.

Do non-programmers just enter Claude and write “make program!!!” and then expect it to work?

Unironically, yes. The main proponents of this tech absolutely DO just do that, because they’re Business Idiots who are fully happy and content with code that looks “”“good enough”“”, even if it does nothing useful. You can see this in all the credulous articles detailing tech CEOs who decree “All workers shall now use AI!!!” while vibecoding a bunch of slopware. They have no idea what the fuck they’re actually doing, and they don’t care. All the other Business Idiots have decided that this is the new hotness, so they either fall in line and “do AI”, even at massive financial loss to their company and themselves, or they stop being part of the “In” crowd.

And to the Business Idiot, there is no fate worse than being irrelevant.

The Era Of The Business Idiot - Ed Zitron

Fascist Propaganda plays super hard on the fears and nagging doubts that come with being an immigrant. The fears of deportation, imprisonment, or worse, not fitting in. The fear that everything is for nothing because someone is always poised to steal it out from under you. The fear that you are simply too weak to make it in the world, that there are things you don’t understand and never will.

It’s truly insidious.

ITT: Really depressing stories of society’s decline into ChristoFascist mania and delusion.

It’s all the middle managers and Business Idiots who think they’re so goddamn smart and effective at their jobs, wasting everyone’s time because they’re actually incompetent.

The absolutely critical difference between the work you, your buddies, and basically everyone else wants to do, versus corporate “”“work”“”, is that you want to do it because it’d make you happier and your community healthier, as opposed to making a line go up for some shareholders who honestly wouldn’t care if you died tomorrow so long as it made the line go up a little further. Neoliberal Capitalism is Hell, man.

And this is a prime example of why Terminal Carbrain on a societal scale is TERRIBLE for designing cities. Forcing everyone to drive, instead of using Transit or even walking, DIRECTLY ENCOURAGES behavior that leads to shit like this.

When it’s stripped down to its bare essentials, yeah. They’re a cult founded on internalized hatred and externalized rage; if there’s no external target for that rage, it turns inward, and the whole thing self-destructs.

Fascism, as an ideology, is utterly fascinating to look at sometimes. It strikes so many wildly different mental chords that you can get lost trying to understand the minds of its believers and followers without even trying to, all while just drinking your morning coffee.

At what point are the right happy?

To answer this, it is utterly critical to mention that Fascism, as an ideology, is fundamentally predicated upon the idea that the Fascist “In-Group” is better than whatever “Out-Group” they are focused on at any given moment (Jewish people, LGBT+, Black people, Mexicans, etc.). To that end, they will stop at NOTHING to crush, oppress, exterminate, and ultimately obliterate that Out-Group completely, all the while screaming to their fellows and to anyone that will listen that the Out-Group is simultaneously infinitely weak and easy to crush, as well as insurmountably strong and impossible to resist. This contradiction allows them to drive themselves into a frenzy, by pissing each other off, as well as draw in new recruits who hear about the Out-Group as “weak” and decide they want to get in on it. Meanwhile, anyone who thinks deeper about this contradiction more easily writes off their movement as sloppy, reactionary, and ultimately harmless, since they clearly don’t know anything, letting them amass real public support under the radar for DECADES; we’ve seen this in America, with Fox News doing tons of heavy lifting for almost 50 years now in the Fascist PR department. It WORKS.

Once the In and Out-Groups are established, and public support starts to amass, the Fascists move to take public office, often starting in smaller, local elections that nobody runs for, elections that they can get a bunch of their buddies in the In-Group to vote for. Once they achieve public office, they try to continue ascending the public ranks to further their group’s political legitimacy, often forming alliances and coalitions with other right-wing and conservative groups to garner additional support in the legislature. For a historical example, the actual Nazis did this in Weimar Germany, starting as a fringe group in local elections, slowly climbing the ranks and gathering support, and ultimately working with other conservatives to seize power. Once sufficiently embedded in the system, they start purging members who aren’t sufficiently zealous and loyal to the In-Group, now a Political Party, and continue raging about the Out-Group, but on a state-side, or even national scale.

At this point, several things can happen. If there isn’t strong enough leadership in the party, it can splinter into a bunch of factions that hate each other, but still work together because they hate the Out-Group more. If there IS strong leadership in the Party, then they tend to make a mad grab for power, and consolidate it as much as they can. We saw this with Jan 6, Germany saw it with The Night of The Long Knives. Should this fail, the whole Party may very well self-destruct from infighting.

Now, you may ask, “what does any of this have to do with my question???” Remember, the entire time they’ve been climbing the political ladder, they’ve been raging at the Out-Group constantly, whipping themselves ever higher into a frenzy, garnering more and more support as they gather legitimacy in local elections. And now that they’ve made their mad grab for power, should it succeed, they can actually ACT on all their rhetoric that more rational, level-headed people wrote off at the beginning.

It starts with outright oppression, the boot of the state on the neck of the masses, usually focused on the Out-Group, but everyone feels it. Then it escalates, usually into mass-confinement and deportation of the Out-Group, while the oppression on everyone else gets worse. But as the rhetoric never ends, so too must the escalation; Extermination. Once the suffering and deportation of the Out-Group isn’t enough, always they turn to extermination. And once the Out-Group is gone…

Well, they’ll just find a new one. And another. And another. Over and over, until there’s only one group left, after all the purging and expulsion and deportation and death - the In-Group. But they won’t stop there. No, they keep going, denoting various internal factions as the Out-Group, targets to purge and exterminate. Constantly, accelerating as the numbers get smaller, until the whole Party explodes.

So. To answer your question, the Right will NEVER be happy, no matter how hard or how many Out-Group members they purge and exterminate. Because Fascism doesn’t have an endpoint where the In-Group “”“wins”“”. The entire ideology is fundamentally predicated on that singular idea, that the In-Group is better than the Out-Group, and the Out-Group MUST be destroyed, no matter what, and any questioning of that directive brands you a traitor to the Party and a member of the Out-Group. They’ll continue down that road, purging and screaming and oppressing and exterminating until the only thing left is a room of Party leader corpses full of bullets from each other’s guns. Or until they’re stopped. Whichever comes first.

Vermont? I remember that that’s a thing there.

Let me guess, South Carolina? Been through there twice, and the change was jarring and immediately noticeable crossing into Georgia or NC.