My wife has Linux on her PC, and now she bitches less than she did with Windows, but it’s always a problem still.

Phones are also always a problem, but at least with Android I can point and say: “the rest of the world puts up with this, or worse: that iOS that can’t even map you to a place by its name…”

While the relationships may not be causal, there are literally millions of connections.

“Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.” - when people are busy and focused, it’s a lot easier for (most of) them to avoid ‘bad choices.’ This ranges everywhere from harmful recreational drug use to overeating, even to highly addictive behaviors like smoking - yeah, people take “smoke breaks” at work, but if they’re not at work / engaged with something most tend to smoke much more…

Thing is, you don’t have to be slaving away at a subsistence level wage job that you need for food and shelter in order to avoid bad choices, although the U.S. Puritanical culture seems to think that “those people” who are poor by circumstance must be saved from themselves by such a system.

There are so many factors involved that generalities barely paint any kind of accurate picture of any one individual. Statistically you can say that X% have “addictive personality” and Y% are “genetically pre-disposed” and so on, but it really is different for everyone. Some people get “addicted to sex with strangers” others avoid that trap through paralyzing fear of diseases… Some kick the nicotine habit based on early presentation ill health effects of smoking, some who experience even worse health effects don’t. Obesity sneaks up on you, oh - I’m just 5 points heavier than I would like to be, or 15, or 50 - don’t bother me! I love food.

How much pain is that? You gonna make your wife use Lineage OS too? Let me know how that goes.

For reference: auto-deletion of internal e-mails (after 2 years) has been standard practice at most big companies I have had anything to do with for many years now.

People are also just big complex machines - chemical pathways responding to conditions, stimuli and “memories” encoded from past experience or in their DNA - plus a host of microbes tagging along influencing them rather dramatically.

LLMs are simpler, but they use the trick of imitating people - responding in writing like people respond in writing, so the anthropomorphizations are inevitable.

Any apparent motivation attributed to AI is actually the motivation of the people invoking it

Don’t forget the influence of its training sets - that’s actually the scariest part is not knowing how much of the answer is coming from the prompt vs what the company has fed the algorithm.

When individuals claim that AI is compelling them toward a certain action, they are, in reality

Delusional, or just making excuses.

AI is propaganda. It provides a convenient mask for human agendas

Only when used as such, and it’s not much of a mask. What it does tend to do is develop and “pad out” writing covering all kinds of points that normal people wouldn’t have the attention span to formulate into a written response.

That 1 week in lieu of notice per year of employment must be “a thing” elsewhere, I’ve seen it many times.

By the way, as I read the summary above, Oracle did meet the statuatory requirement in Canada + 3 additional weeks of severance. Not that this is “good” of Oracle, they’re undoubtedly doing the minimum they can get away with - duty to shareholders over employees and all that.

I suppose it depends on your State, but most I have worked in have “Employment at Will” which they make you sign on the way in - basically means: you can be “let go at any time, for no reason whatsoever.”

The really crappy thing about Oracle doing this like this is that these people are hitting the market with 30,000 other freshly fired Oracle workers all looking for the same kinds of jobs at the same time - in a market where lots of other companies are doing the same.

Social media immediately fills that need, exactly like a drug.

In the late 1980s crack cocaine swept into Miami at bargain prices - but “real” cocaine was already all over the place… show some refinement/self-respect people, don’t smoke the crack. In terms of social media, maybe actually socialize instead of “smoking the crack” of Facebook? Yeah, Facebook is cheaper than meeting people for an activity (any activity) - but get your fat ass up and do something real, it’s better for you.

walk away from Google.

I can quit, any time I want to… (yeah, they’ve got their hooks deep). But, you’ve gotta carry a phone - right?

Craigslist is still limping along, it’s a smaller group of buyers but still has traction in some markets.

Cloudflare hosting everything

But it’s so cheeeeeep! My website (continuously hosted since 1996) used to cost me $15 per month, since I migrated it to Cloudfare they’re charging $0.01 ro $0.02 per month for the same hosting services - it’s been about 18 months now, I think - I just got last months “bill” - I now owe them $0.25, but they won’t charge me until it hits $1.00.

Free service? YOU are the product.

I never used Twitter in the first place, so I guess I’m not in the “addicted” category, but I did have an account, in November of 2024 I did actively cancel that X account. Google pushes me X links in my “news feed” I consistently tell Google “No more stories from ____ on X” (they won’t let you block all of X, I wonder why…)

Seriously, folks, how hard is it to just walk away? I was on BlueSky for about 3-4 months, got a little invested/addicted to the platform and took a hard look at what value I was getting from it - on balance: negative. Cold turkey, do I miss it? No.

Facebook holds a (solitary) users group I occasionally want to talk with captive, they acknowledge it’s a terrible platform but they’re too lazy to leave, so I log in when I need to talk with them and that’s it. Anybody “in there” I care about? Long distance phone calls are free these days, e-mail works, why should I be sharing stuff with people I don’t know just to communicate with people I do know?

What doesn’t strain the imagination is banks making loans to foolish young people who are setting themselves up for decades of debt service.

Define young. Define expensive.

16 year olds in a new custom Lambo? If you know more than one of those who “earned” the money for that, you’ve got an outrageously rare set of acquaintances - or a very distorted view of “earned.”

I bought a brand new Mazda Miata on credit my first week in my first job after University - was that given to me? Maybe the car wasn’t, but the education was.

It’s all relative - if you didn’t have enough money then you would have starved or died of exposure, so good thing you spent it on food and shelter instead of dying? (Or, you spent all your free time growing food and making your own clothing and shelter - how did you pay the taxes on the land then?)

The elderly who are lucky enough to have money they can spend spend an awful lot of it telling youngsters what to do.

Not one that wasn’t given to them by a rich daddy or mommy.

Better to have spent your money in your youth when you enjoyed it properly.

and there would be legal consequences if caught.

Like for driving over the speed limit? Or putting glass in the regular trash instead of the recycling? Yeah, just what I need in my life, another arbitrary law that’s enforced 0.0001% of the time as a flex by the people in power to target and abuse people they don’t like.