Story time?

My experience with them was bad. Somehow they automatically moved me from a plan for just vpn (which is pretty cheap) to one that included a bunch of bullshit I didn’t need, want, or even know I could use. The new plan was over $30/mo. There are ISPs who charge less than that!

My previous VPN service has been about $36 per year or something. I remember it was small enough that I just paid it annually out of pocket change, which also lowered the price in comparison.

I stopped sailing the seas, as it were, and dropped it. Then I needed to briefly, and tried Nord. Meh. Anyways it’s strictly land-lubbing these days.

Good luck enforcing that.

Look, it was a miracle I got myself laid, now you want me to tell you how? I don’t know, the 80’s were kinda crazy wild. Not like the 60’s or 70’s, but nothing at all like today.

10’s I’d say go play with the home team — gay hookup culture looked crazy from the outside — but now? Maybe AI can get you laid, but I sure as hell can’t.

Uh… Military spree killing? Mass death-infliction? Wholesale slaughter? Yeah let’s avoid calling it war.

I always make sure to tell my audience to remove any smart glasses. It’s just creepy doing it in front of them otherwise.

“By downloading this software, you agree you are a very naughty boy or girl.”

I’dn’t’ve known.

Clearly should’ve been whoms’s.

Making windows worse, AI, and forced CPU upgrades in this economy? There really is something for everyone to hate here.

VC Lawyers insist. Not worth it for the company to fight for something (not going to arbitration) that no one will notice or care about if it doesn’t change. Or maybe they didn’t care.

I’m just saying capitalism ruins everything because investors only care about maximizing profit and minimizing risk, this forces bullshit like this onto everyone downstream. One solution is not to use the product. Better solution is to change the law to make mandatory arbitration illegal. Best solution is to throw billionaires into the ocean and stir the solution until the solid is fully dissolved.

Born in 1973. Can confirm nothing happened prior to 1997.

Yeah, someone could do the difficult work of putting all of my MagicShel accounts together into a single aggregate person, for whom a fair bit of demographic data would be available if you combed each account. That being said, none of it is PII and connecting me to my actual identity would likely require cooperation of a couple key sites. I think if you compromised (or subpoenaed) a minimum of 3 separate services you could put it together based on who made donations in my name.

Point being, no random internet asshole is going to be calling my phone or knocking on my door, and I’m not interesting enough to be worth the effort for any rational actor.

I don’t use non-pseudononymous social media.

I give people a lot of grace when it comes to these things. Sometimes they are lazy or incurious, but other times they may lack confidence in the documentation or their ability to understand/execute it. Still other times, they may have other tasks they are dealing with that are pushing them to their cognitive capacity.

But, yeah, laziness is annoying when it impacts your ability to get your job done or even just relax if you have some downtime.

The environmental cost is not enormous because I’m not using it on a massive scale. I kill more of the environment playing PlayStation than I do using AI. I also don’t use AI to get exposure to art, I use it to critique my writing from a different perspective. I’m a good enough writer to know what feedback to accept and what not to, same as when I use it for programming: I’m an expert with 30 years of experience and I can evaluate the quality of the code, however sometimes it points out things I’ve missed because I’m also human and can make mistakes.

I’m a better writer than 95% of the planet, which isn’t good enough to be a professional, but is more than sufficient for social media. However I do appreciate an outside perspective and believe me I am well able to recognize bullshit feedback that doesn’t align with my style or intent. I also rarely use it for that in any event because I rarely look at what I’ve written and have a sense I’m missing something — but it does happen.

It is comforting, in a dystopian way, to see that the world continues to operate as expected. Remember when Bill Gates started being cool and sending people Xboxes on Reddit ands everyone was like this guy is pretty cool for a mega-rich and those of us who have been around were like yeah this is really weird and I don’t trust it.

Then it turns out the guy was a sex pest and a friend of Epstein and we were all like… okay yeah this all makes sense again.

Similar thing.

In general, we try to avoid recurring payments, whether debt, rent, or what have you. When we can’t, we can’t. But we’ll buy used, we’ll do whatever we can to avoid this shit — generally. So in my opinion which is undoubtedly a bit self-serving and should be taken with a grain of salt, grandparents aren’t going to just roll over and accept computer as a service. The market for own your own computer will always be there, and so someone will sell it.

Who said I rely on it? I accept suggestions when they are good, even if the source of the suggestions is a slop generator. I accept what it is right about and reject what is wrong. And why not? It costs nothing.

And, at 52, I write the way I write. I enjoy the process, I enjoy playing with language. I enjoy the juxtaposition of literary flourishes with a crude fuck you thrown in as punctuation and counterpoint to what might otherwise seem inaccessible or deliberately obtuse.

But do you know what I’ve found? I can be a little overly self-indulgent. For example, you didn’t want all this, you just wanted to throw your glib little “lrn2write” and garner a few upvotes from the vehement AI haters and give yourself a self-righteous pat on the back.

Sometimes I need another perspective to suggest restraint. As you can see, this, like 98% of my writing, is mine alone, else I’d’ve taken what would undoubtedly be good advice and held back on the more acerbic bits, and made sure I wasn’t posting some knee-jerk defensive self-indulgent 100% man-made slop.

But here we are.

Grandparents don’t want to rent shit. They want to buy it and be done. Source: this old fuck right here.

I sometimes use LLMs to help me with brevity or clarity. But the input is my own words and the output is almost always edited so that I sound like me because sometimes, while the output is serviceable, it’s just… bad and uninspired.

Plus it’s like “this doesn’t sound professional”. Well, fuck you, it sounds how I want to sound.