No, youre just stuck in the mindset of the ruthless manipulator. No good thing came about though ruthless capitalism. Capitalism feeds on the rotting corpse. The left overs of innovation.

One of my secondary school teachers once remarked that you need at least 3 hugs a day. She also qualified that by saying you get to decide what counts as a hug, because some people are more comfortable with handshake (or analogous) than a hug.

I like hugs but wont go in for one. People scare me, or really, they make me anxious.

Not unless you can afford the pro plan

Bah. The best search results were clearly more than a decade ago. Even a decade ago too much SEO manipulation (and search engine collusion) was showing up in the search results we saw.

I don't agree that the best search was regular expressions and Boolean combinators ala AltaVista. Early Google was quite the improvement (and still had some advanced operators), and even the first release of Bing was almost as good. Anyone remember the Bing v. Google challenge MS encouraged people to do? I picked my own niche interests and while Google won, Bing put points on the board.

I think it was sometime after AdWords and DoubleClick merged when things went downhill. I don't remember the exact timeframe, but eventually the advertisers and SEO parts started directing search from the inside, things steadily decreased in quality. Adding "reddit" to the end of a search was a entry-level way to fight against that, not a return to old or new peak search quality.

The problem back then is there was not a lot of content. It was just a sheer lack of credible sources for common topics. Reddit and Wikipedia bridged the gap but of course they want to rape Wikipedia and have already dismantled reddit.

Gptsus, he subscribed and account shared so that we all may slop.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons the "Free Hugs" persons at PLUR-positive festivals and events exist. They want to give hugs to the people that want them but are scared to initiate. The sign is supposed to puncture the anxiety cloud, but it doesn't always work.

I hope you get all the hugs you want, even if you never find the "courage" to go in for one.

I have kittens, they are less scary and more cuddly.

I agree Wikipedia was a pretty poor hit in '98, but by '06 it was pretty decent.

The one thing I will admit is, game guides migrating to YouTube and not just some text file I search through has ruined the format irreparably.

I guess wikis help but they are often too much of a project then just writing it out so they go undeveloped.

Amen. GameFAQs >>> Wikis > YouTube. Video is just a bad medium for reference material; to make it even passable you have to pair it with a TOC with timestamps.

One of the first things I ever got off the Internet was a detailed GameFAQ-style document with all the secrets to the arcade version of Killer Instinct, not understanding how much they changed for the N64 version. We didn't even have Internet at home, I printed it out from ... either summer math camp or the computer lab at the local community college. I referred to the GameFAQ for R-Type Final to 100% the game (again) on the lead up the to R-Type Final 2 release, so they were still high-quality fairly recently. (Had to dust off the PS2 and lucky the CD drive still worked 9/10 times.)

human innovativeness ensures there's always new things that people want to do.

People don't love their families though. We saw that during COVID when parents went nuts because they were force to stay home with their kids.

exactly, parents use K-12 schools as daycare and parenting, disciplining. thats why some grow up dysfunctional in some form or another(usually way after HS).

also getting pets for the wrong reasons during covid, to cope, and when its lifted they were back at the shelter eventually.

the only ones making millions as influencers, are usually people that are already well off, or rich.

In america

Having a 5 year old, 3 hugs a day is insane. I get more than 3 hugs in the first minute of my kid waking up.
I'm already scared knowing their cuddliness won't last forever. The first time I've spent one day/night away and I got so touch deprived by 5 pm I almost started cuddling my friend.

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins as before. But the world does not need twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacture of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work. There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all round instead of being a universal source of happiness.
Can anything more insane be imagined?

--Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness

I loved having us all home together, and I actually grew closer to my kid during COVID. Our relationship got stronger as father and son because he saw me so much more since I wasn’t in an office and commuting for like 10-12 hours of my day. It was so fun to do little science experiments and teach him some fun life lessons.

I’m an outlier though. I love being with my wife and kid, and they love being with me. So many parents are always bitching about their kids or spouses and then pawning the kids off on others. Our house is the hangout house and so many of my son’s friends feel safe stopping by just to say hello on their way home from school.

I guess this is why I have successfully made a career switch to teaching. I genuinely think kids are pretty cool and worth our time!

Seems like we still must work the same amount regardless of how much we'd "like" to do other things though. What you're talking about happened, but happened a long time ago.

We see it every summer when parents ship their kids off to summer camp.

In most cases people get paid by the hour. The wage is compensation for your time, not effort. If a new technology comes along that increases your work productivity you'll still end up working the same hours because that's what you're being paid for. I'd say that there's still a real difference between spending 8 hours a day swinging an axe compared to running a chainsaw. Same amount of time is spent working but the effort needed goes down while productivity increases.

However, this isn't always the case. I work in construction and it's not untypical that someone has a fixed price for completing a job. There you are not compensated for your time per se but effort. If you're quick you do get to "go home early." However this doesn't lead to people working less either - quite the opposite. They get greedy, hoard too much work, rush it, the quality suffers and they tend to get really stressed out and easily irritated.

This guy is part of the real problem.

Our little chimp brains equate power over others with success, detached from results.

If someone isn't hurting, it's not working, so the infinite leisure created by automation becomes infinite time to discover how to hurt people and torture each other.

If it's not suffering, it's not hustle.

What fresh new horrors await when results are even MORE detached from individual power trips.

All that stuff is coming. It’s taking longer than people would have expected, but it’ll happen sooner or later. You’re right that we seem to be stuck with the dystopia, though. We’ll fight over an ever dwindling pool of work until there’s nothing left, and then we’ll die or live at the sufferance of those in charge. The only hope is complete systemic change, but that seems further away now than it has ever been, mainly because not enough people even care. They’re pacified by their streaming content and drip fed carefully cultivated outrage-bait to keep them from even imagining that uniting is a possibility.

I don't agree with that at all, "it's a luxury to have a job"? There are many problems still needing to be solved. Most people work out of necessity.

The ruthless manipulator is the dominant group. I've grown empathy on purpose over decades, so yes it's natural that i understand bad people better than people who didn't work hard to do so

I'll repeat myself, learn regular expressions. it'll unlock real interest in you, and banish a lot of your mysticism

Most people work out of necessity because they need money, which is a separate issue.

I'd just rephrase what you wrote to be correct, "it's a luxury to have a high paying job that you enjoy doing". And then I'd say "a lot of jobs are worked due to necessity".

And then to top it off I'd say "AI is making those high paying jobs that people enjoy doing less necessary, while leaving the harder manual jobs for everyone to scramble to compete for".

It doesn't even have to be a high paying job that's enjoyable, just having a stable job where youre not abused is a luxury lol

Because no one thinks the owners of the tech would be so benevolent.

Give me an example

The dominant force is only 30% of whatever group. The other 70% are sympathetic. The foundation is held up by belief and fear. It would only take a small group with a united message to shake it to the ground.