Yep, same. Or “not this Thursday but the next”.

What are you trying to say about Santa?

I’m wondering how much of it were the companies that spun up and never delivered (or delivered substandard products) since then. I never had to do a chargeback in my life until 2020 and I’ve been using a credit card since 1998.

I ordered a box from a clothing company. They missed my size, preferences, never called for the consultation, and sent accessories that were supposed to be specifically excluded.

They had a no returns policy. I was ok with that. But the box was entirely wrong. Exactly one item in it was the right size and style on the form I filled out.

I tried solving it through them. They wouldn’t call me back. Email was spotty. I said I was going to do a chargeback and they immediately called me to explain their no return policy means they can send me whatever they want and it’s my problem (in corporate speak). So I did a charge back with the call recording, screenshots of the styling stuff, call logs showing they never called me, everything.

Since then I’ve had roughly the same experience from a couple of other places where someone spun up a good idea with no plan, no support, and looked like they were panicking by trying to fill orders as close to the letter as they could get them hoping no one would notice. And none of them want to refund when they fuck up.

You said more than I did in my whole fucking rant. That’s exactly right.

Abso-fucking-lutely. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, it puts too many strange artifacts in the music currently, but it’s getting damn close to “good enough”.

Too many people think the danger is that it’s awful. The danger is that it’s mediocre. Because cheap, easily reproducible, and mediocre beats excellent, expensive, and messy every time because AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t go on a bender or get caught doing something reprehensible or burn out. It’s never late. It just sits there waiting to be told what to crank out next.

So you’ve got this thing that can’t move art forward. It can’t inject that one really fucking cool thing in there that changes everything. AI can’t hate a song it’s creating so it emphasizes things in a weird way.

Compare it with Max Martin productions. He didn’t invent manufactured music but he created a hell of a pipeline for folks to rhyme fire with desire. But even that relies on people who can sing with the timidity of youth and the confidence of a person who has been told the world is theirs. Or someone with no real understanding of a song singing it in a way that gives it a different meaning than the original intent. Or someone barely hanging on and pouring their entire person into their performance because they have nothing else.

AI can’t do any of that. It can’t turn a word into a god damned grenade. It’s going to remix everything that came before. Not in new and exciting ways. Not in thought provoking ways. But in algorithmic ways. It’s flat. The lyrics will tell a story that resolves. The rhymes will be perfect. You won’t get a banjo in metal or a calliope in video game music unless it’s a game about a clown. It’s not going to give you soul and wit. It will give you a snapshot of where music has been and is up to the point of its last training data.

I have an entire tangent about how it’s being used politically currently (go look up Danny Bones) and how it does not get tired or embroiled in controversy and being “good enough” makes it the perfect propaganda machine. But that’s for another day.

I block ads but only because they became super egregious and are a threat vector in some cases. My default state is “oblivious idiot”. It’s not that I’m not susceptible to marketing, it’s that by the time I notice it you’ve already broken the web page I’m on and now I hate you.

Trump is a deep cover leftist. He’s trying to get people and the system as a whole to stand up and tighten the system and show why right wing policies and authoritarian policies are bad. But no one is stepping up!

I really want to start planting this idea in conservative spaces.

Half a bald eagle wingspan.

And they’d get extra copaganda out of it! Look, we’re just fun loving guys playing with kids!

Subscription fees plus the double dip into selling bulk licensing of your thin client to companies who make computers.

Oh come on, most people like a little ass.

I’m drunk. I live in Texas. So it was very difficult to choose my username.

Hey! They also destroy communities by forcing them to pay for infrastructure upgrades while the companies get tax holidays in return for a bunch of jobs that only last 2 years during the construction phase and only add about 25-50 permanent jobs to the local economy long term.

Let’s also not forget bringing back mothballed coal plants instead of building new ones.

No, but you could probably port Firefox to Holy C.

I had a part time gig DJing at a strip club for a brief time. It gets old much quicker than people think.

Let’s not forget the sexiest of M&Ms.

Absolutely. I’m still rooting for it but it seems to be kind of petering out here.

I’ve noticed that lately. It went from being everywhere to nowhere and now it’s creeping back up. I’ll be honest here, I miss the word but if it’s hurting that many people who haven’t done anything then you’re a fucking piece of shit if you use it.

I was rooting for the “gay” renaissance where people talked about how gay everything was but changed it to mean awesome instead of shitty.

My sex talk and cooking talk both came too late and were both variations of “you probably know as much as I do”.

I learned to cook the same way I learned to have sex. Trial and error, usually by myself, sometimes with a partner, and I read some publications about it that had plenty of pictures.