Your grandparents lived in an era where it was common for men to build their own homes.

Your parents lived in an era where it was inconceivable for a piece of furniture to not come fully assembled in their per-fabricated home.

We now live in an era where homes are made in mass scale and we assemble our own furniture. Did I make an IKEA table? I don't know. I paid for it, drove it home, and assembled the machined parts and added the same size Allen key to my collection. It's certainly not a table without my contribution. But I couldn't have built it myself from scratch.

I now tell the computer with the magic words please and thank you because I skimmed a research paper saying it'll be more cooperative in completing my tasks.

Did I make a game in unity where I just mishmoshed the preassembled assets together? I don't know. The only difference between IKEA furniture and my game is the permutations of my asset combinations, really.

On one hand aggressively punitive copyright claims stifle creativity and innovation in transformative art. On the other hand, generative AI reopens that transformative creativity.

But I also, I guess, kinda just have a dumb thought about this whole ordeal. Broadly speaking, we are in a position where we, the general public with the backing of the government, want to change how a private corporation uses it's products that it sold to us. Not for any other reason that would shield us from harm or prevent risk, but rather because the corporation's products are so successful a lot of people use them too much! But wait! That's not actually true because there's enough products on the market that we don't actually need to use this product...but we like it because its incrementally the best and the chat bubbles are blue and applications run better and seem higher quality (which is a selling point of the product we are now actively dismantling but I digress...)

I know its tiring to use food cliches, but imagine if like, I make a business selling apple pies and my apple pies are incredibly successful and everyone eats them all the time and now all of a sudden I need to also guarantee that my business can make cherry pies because my apple pies sell so damn well. But truth is, its not really about the apple pies at all. It's about my baking trays. We actually just want to make sure that the baking trays of my business are now capable of also cooking for cherry pies even though that's got nothing to do with my fucking business. I sell apple pies. I'm so confused

This happened to me, and it was by far my worst interview ever.

Early on in my career right after graduating I got interviewed for a Jr. Sysadmin position at a high frequency trading firm of approx ~1000 employees. The first few behavioral interviews they repeated the exact same questions, including some soft linux knowledge questions (what would you use to troubleshoot network problems lol). Then they took me for a 4 hour on-site gauntlet where they asked the same questions, again, and then I had to do a python leetcode whiteboard problem which I immediately bombed because I hardly did much coding back then. The application said "familiarity with bash/python scripting". If I remember right the problem involved binary search trees which I had no idea about at the time. I didn't know my ass from my hole.

Suffice to say after that, we had lunch. all 4 employees on my team. And all 4 employees that were in the office at the time, which was pretty much empty, because apparently nobody really went in. They gave me a really cold, wet, and soppy burrito. This was the off the mark "vibes" interview where they shot the shit and pretended to be friendly to gauge my personality. I embarrassingly had to play along even thought we all knew it was a total waste of fucking time.

Afterwards, I was shuffled into a big empty meeting room where the CEO interviewed me on screen from California. I was asked the exact same fucking behavioral soft questions down to what I would use to troubleshoot network problems, then he asked me to walk through an example. But at this point I was pretty much mentally blown up from the whiteboard problem and had no motivation to continue. My mind went blank. I could visibly tell he was upset he even had to talk to me.

Fastest rejection response I ever got.

Want hotel quality and safety with apartment perks? Just go to an apartment hotel! It costs more than a hotel/AirBnB but you're also not at the whims of random hit-or-miss listings and shady shit. And they clean your room if you want them to!

One thing I noticed about commercial build quality: simplicity. No touch bullshit. Small LCD displays. Here's some buttons and maybe a rotating knob. knock yourself out.

turns out all that crap was just what everyone expected it to be: fabricated lies. And also Russians are really bad at conducting war and resorting to meat wave tactics. For a board that cares about firearms and military tactics, it didn't take too much of a far reach to dislike and laugh at Russia.