Or if you allow it put a warning like the surgeon generals warning on tobacco. Clearly state that most people lose money.

Smoking is legal but advertising cigarettes is illegal. I grew up in the 1980's where smoking was everywhere. We even had a smoking area at school. Today I don't know anyone that smokes. Obviously people still do but it is much less common

It is probably a second source deal for a popular chip or a support chip in an older process node like a power converter.

I now live in an area with about 2.5 million people and there is far more to do and the people are more educated and open minded. I will never move back to a small town again.

I loved maps and geography as a child and still do. I've never met anyone in real life that likes it as much as me. But on the internet there are places were I can discuss it and other people share fascinating articles, pictures, etc.

Stuff started moving to web site forums which I still don't think are as good as a Usenet newsreader. slrn was my favorite.

Then reddit came along and a lot of online forums started dying as people moved to reddit.

Just this morning on reddit I reported 4 separate posts as AI slop to the moderators. They need to change the categories as I flag it as "disruptive use of bots"

For 2 of the posts the moderators agreed with me and about 5 hours later the posts were removed. For the other 2 the moderators haven't done anything.

It's a losing battle.

Some of the posts start by asking questions like "I was thinking about this and... [long rambling paragraphs] Your thoughts on this?"

I waste a minute reading then another minute skimming the rest of it and then realize I wasted 2 minutes of my life. Then another 30 seconds reporting it to the mods.

This has exploded in the last 6 months.

Then there are all the repost bots farming for karma. Some subs have a rule that you can't repost something in the last 30 days or 6 months. But it is really ridiculous when something get 500 upvotes and then literally the next day a bot reposts the same thing and it still gets 300 upvotes. I think it is just a bot farm upvoting stuff.

Here is an X terminal from around 1990.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal

It displayed everything over the network via X11 from a more powerful workstation / server.

> Datapro wrote in 1991 that X terminals could provide windowing capability, high-resolution graphics and relatively fast processing for prices starting around US$1,500, compared with workstations that could cost more than US$10,000.

I see a headline on reddit and click on the article. I spend 3 minutes reading it and the article says nothing new and doesn't even have a point.

Then I go to the comments and see people arguing about it but also people calling it AI generated slop.

Then I click on the account that posted the article and their account history is spamming the same article to 10 different subreddits and I subscribe to about 5 of them so I have to see the same dumb post 5 times. Then I realize the account is just an AI bot spamming AI generated articles to generate upvotes or display ads to generate money.

It's all so annoying and a waste of electricity, bandwidth, and my time.

There are also subreddits mainly for photos like nostalgia places where bots just repost popular posts from a year ago or 6 months ago but now they repost stuff from 3 days ago. It's completely out of control and AI has made it this easier to do.

So now I am spending less time on these sites which is maybe a good thing so I can thank AI for making using the Internet so annoying that I stop and find something else to do.

It's basically Dead Internet Theory becoming reality.

https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/v6.1/cdrom/packet-writing.ht...

https://reactivated.net/software/packetwriting/

And in my googling for those links I find that Jens is still the block device maintainer and submitted a patch in 2025 to remove support for packet writing.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-To-Remove-pktcdvd

> "This driver has long outlived it's utility, and it's broken and unloved. The main use case for this was direct mount with UDF of cd-rw drives that required 32kb packets. It would collect writes into that size and write them out in multiples of that. That's not a common use case anymore, the world has moved on from those kinds of media. To make matters worse, it's actively breaking setups where it's not even required or useful."

People want to buy a new GPU, add RAM, a new SSD, or hard drive. All of these have doubled or quadrupled in price in just a few months.

Then there are reddit threads every day where I think 30% of the original posts and comments are AI generated spam. If I see a post with emdashes or anything that ends by asking for "thoughts?" I just down vote and report as spam. I want to interact with actual humans not AI bots.

Then we see posts about AI data centers and electricity use which will lead to higher electric bills for ordinary people if demand is higher than supply.

This is ignoring all the stuff about people losing jobs.

So why should the video game playing population or even the general population be in support of AI? Of course it has uses but there are so many negatives right now it is easy for me to understand why people are already sick of it.

I actually bought one of these Panasonic PD Phase-change Dual drives in 1995. It was $500 and the cartridges were $30 for 650MB. I formatted them as ext2 and used the standard cp / mv / rm commands. This technology later evolved into the DVD-RAM standard. DVD-RW and DVD+RW were very different.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase-change_Dual

https://imgur.com/a/cDLoeZm

I've been in the industry for 30 years and I've worked at companies with fabs were demand was high and customers would only get 30% of what they ordered. Then just 2 years later our fab was only running at 50% capacity and losing money. It takes about $20 billion and 3-4 years to make a modern new fab. If you think that AI is a bubble then do you want to be left with a shiny new factory and no products to sell because demand has collapsed?

Floppy disks were tiny and slow

Zip drives in 1995 were around $200 and 100MB disk for about $20

CD-R burners in 1995 were $1000 and blank CD-R were about $15 each

By 1999 CD-R burners were around $125 and blank discs were around $1 and dropping fast. I remember when they were $0.10 for a 700MB disc in the 2000s

We wrote assignments by hand using a pencil or pen.

Is that really complicated?

When I got to college and everything had to be typed I still wrote everything by hand on paper and edited with an eraser and a red pen to reorganize some sentences or paragraphs. Then I would go to the computer lab and type it in and print it out.

It takes 2 seconds to look at google satellite view of the area and see lots of desert with strips of green

https://maps.app.goo.gl/R8HuWBi66548Jq5BA

Of course you already know this but for everyone else it is called the Basin and Range province. You have desert areas and then a mountain range with much higher elevation with cooler temperatures and more precipitation which means trees and forests and green in color

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basin_and_Range_Province