The Texas state government overrode city ordinances and attempts by private businesses to enforce masking for in-store shopping. Simply saying it was wide open like the rest of Texas is extremely inaccurate. Here’s the EO which refutes, like, every single weird point you’re trying to make:

https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/EO-GA-38_continued...

Consuming animal proteins that cause cancer and promote zoonotic diseases are not “one of the healthiest things you can do”. Got anything peer reviewed? Share away.

Regardless, the general sentiment about this hardware is obviously not great, anecdotally I know zero people who own these (or they at least refuse to wear them), and they are exceptionally rare in both US major metros I frequent.

Perhaps their popularity exists moreso in print than reality?

the vonnegut quote is hitting hard today -

“why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is, is we’re here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals.”

> it's universally something that should have been possible online without talking to anyone

why do you think it is the case that quite literally zero medium+ sized companies have no customer support? do you think it’s possible that not every single iota of knowledge or edge case is immediately digitized and ready for consumption by an LLM?

is it also possible that customers that pay serious money for a service don’t want to click about on a website to solve a problem they didn’t cause? wasting someone’s time like that when you already fucked up is a very quick way to lose a customer; one throat to choke, as they say.

but since you’ve drawn the rest of the owl with those stages, I can only assume you’re raking in mad consultant fees for companies like Meta - they certainly haven’t had any issues replacing their humans with AI recently!

This kind of reductionist take is an immediate tell that one has no experience in that kind of role. More worryingly, it hints of something antisocial and misanthropic. Do you not enjoy talking with other people during your day? Have you never experienced the resolution of complexity or ambiguity from a person that is intimately familiar with a product, its documentation, or internal processes?

On one hand, you have smart people are doing cool and interesting things like dang referenced: breathing life into old projects and cleaning out old bugs in EOL hardware.

And then you have people who use it to do things like "chatGPT can this trailer pull this car?", "gosh, my electric bill is high I should use an LLM to figure this out" or "please write this email to my subordinates".

So yeah, it's cool that LLMs can work on software(. And now, the profession that intersects between highest earning potential and least amount of schooling is able to be done significantly faster, so wages will be diluted faster than the workers will ask for raises commensurate to their output).

But it's more obviously terrible because a large chunk of people are losing their critical and creative thinking abilities rapidly, obviously, and with seemingly no end in sight.

One must imagine how many claims have been denied by insurance companies for doing something like this...

If you already have a domain and know what an MX or CNAME record is, it takes less than thirty minutes to set up.

Migrating critical correspondence / autopay / etc. may take some time, but observing how much spam continues to flow to your old inbox will certainly be surprising. Now, it is exceptionally easy for me to keep all messages read, and only use my google account for junk signup forms.

https://support.apple.com/guide/icloud/add-a-domain-you-own-...

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102540

The good news is that we can adapt our thinking and behavior in light of new evidence.

fish swim happily upstream,

while rocks sink down fast.