There’s also this link in the comments. Basically, Black Mirroresque satire.

JFC, this comment:

Gives me PTSD from my 2014 job search. I’d already left Facebook for the first time and wasn’t getting any responses to applications. After sleuthing around online, I learned this was now an HR thing where if they couldn’t find your full personal history on social media, immediate round file.

Gritting my teeth, I created a new account but did nothing with it. Still didn’t move the needle. I ended up having to take the pay cut to move to Texas, as being a known quantity with GateHouse got my foot in the door.

Neither I nor my then-wife wanted to leave Oregon for … Texas. But Facebook’s dominance forced it. In an alternate reality, I’d still be housed and in a place I actually like, possibly with my marriage not falling apart.

Fuck Facebook.

I’d not say this is a story about Microsoft. Far more time is spent on journalism than MS.

To start, Zitron is simply better at this sort of analysis than I am. Which isn’t something I like to admit (I want to be the best at everything!), but he has more dots to connect than I do. He basically stitches together about six columns and blog posts I’ve written over the years and effectively synthesizes them into one coherent narrative.

Management has become completely unhinged from production, unaware of what the fuck we actually do and uninterested in wasting time improving anything other than their own image. Fuck the product, I got mine.

In a way, it’s oddly … soothing? Like, I’m not crazy but perhaps a bit too aware of where late-stage capitalism was going a bit earlier than most. Such awareness doesn’t exactly buy beer.

Maybe she’s just holding out for an RV from the Catholic church.

Adobe’s '90s pricing made the definition of “usury” insufficient. Things did not improve.

I still run CS6. I’ve little reason to use it these days, but I don’t have to pay monthly to open an old file. What they did by switching to a subscription model in my case was lose a customer for life.

With all the ATS bullshit, I ended up having to go back to Word because neither LinkedIn nor Indeed could parse my InDesign resume. Both would tie incorrect roles with dates and job descriptions because “PDFs are hard” essentially.

It is what most use. I left the field after 20 years because of how that started tipping the scales. Independent media are where journalism is being committed these days.

A few thoughts here as someone with multiple suicide attempts under his belt:

• I’d never use an “AI therapist” not running locally. Crisis is not the time to start uploading your most personal thoughts to an unknown server with possible indefinite retention.

• When ideation hits, we’re not of sound enough mind to consider that, so it is, in effect, taking advantage of people in a dark place for data gathering.

• Having seen the gamut of mental-health services from what’s available to the indigent to what the rich have access to (my dad was the director of a private mental hospital), it’s pretty much all shit. This is a U.S. perspective, but I find it hard to believe we’re unique.

• As such, there may be room for “AI” to provide similar outcomes to crisis lines, telehealth or in-person therapy. But again, this would need to be local and likely isn’t ready for primetime, as I can really only see this becoming more helpful once it can take over more of an agent role where it has context for what you’re going through.

Past performance is famously not indicative of future results, but throughout recorded history, the rich and powerful have not liked the idea of ceding either money or power.

Quite the read. There are lots of unknowns with any technological development throughout history, and as the article points out, we don’t yet even know where we are on the energy demand curve from AI.

Something that confuses me is that geothermal is mentioned only once. These companies have the money to site datacenters near EGS plants or even build their own, grid connection optional, and have upfront capex sted power bills for the life of the center.

This would admittedly require long-term thinking, which shareholders are completely uninterested in when infrastructure investments ding their dividends and buybacks.

There is. It’s just not going to happen. UBI in an unregulated economy will simply mean rents go up commensurately, and the money still filters to the top.

Beehaw is the Lemmy instance we’re talking on. And ad-supported is far from the only model for journalism.

There’s a very different proportion on Beehaw. I just scrolled through the first page of U.S. News posts to make sure I wasn’t talking out of my ass, and four posts (five if you lump the AP into this mess) are from the sorts of sources you name.

I personally fled the leading U.S. newspaper conglomerate after 22 years in the industry because of what had started in terms of quality years ago. WaPo was canceled after the endorsement fuckup. And I’ve not had cable since moving out of my parents’ house.

So, where does it come from? People who know what they’re talking about. We have a slightly higher standard than “as far as I can tell.”

In this economy, they’re only hiring junior Heat Transfers.

Oddly enough, this is a result of Trump. Before him, presidents left office and stayed out of politics. Sure, they did private speeches and ribbon-cuttings at their libraries – along with being available for advising the new incumbent across party lines, which we rarely heard about in full – but that was it.

God forbid adults who enjoy sex talk about it and share consenting media.

Mike Johnson’s going to have to stop talking to his son.

All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online.

… but probably not.

Can you imagine just how apoplectic the GOP would be with Harris ascending via this outcome?

Dallas does not have a monopoly on grassy knolls.

It’s likely for the best I can’t link that GIF from Airplane! here.

If finding out his identity weren’t that hard, it would be in the story. It would otherwise be extreme journalistic malfeasance. There’s an old newsroom saw: “Get the name of the dog.” That’s never relevant. The name of a defendant, though? That’s sort of what news does so long as they aren’t a minor, which doesn’t seem to apply here.

But yes, the whole thing is irritatingly light on details.

I have a strange idiolect. “Dealt” seems correct, but “learnt” and “spelt” do not. Neither would lead me to raise an eyebrow; I’d assume I’m interacting with a user of British English.