thedirtyknapkin

makes me think,

for thousands of years all of our cooked meats would have been roasted over open wood fires. they'd be smoky delicious barbeque. I'm sure some ancient people were even covering it in making it intentionally smoky.

do you think the first stoves got pushback from people that liked the smoke? i mean it must have been weird the first time they tasted things that weren't smoky.. then again, I'm sure there was plenty of stuff that just didn't get that smoky on the open fire. and the convenience of not needing to go outside was absolutely worth it. and we eventually figured out that some things are quite a lot better without smoke...

i suppose all of this is why we still have grills and smokers today, even though most people also have a stove. people really like that taste. so yeah, i guess everything was bbq before a more convenient option became avaliable. we all know how much people love convenience. I'm sure that was just as true 1000 years ago as it is today.

only one of these could be called a hero.

leon is at BEST a very dark shade of morally gray as a former child soldier who was raised to be a hitman by the mob.

and the dude is just the dude. he just wanted his damn rug back.

some additional relevant statistics

united states barely saw 1% growth year over year and are projecting that growth to continue to slow.

India has nearly 3x the users of the United States. the u.s. is still second because it's the country it started in, but it's not far ahead of the 3rd and 4th place countries. India is an extreme outlier.

unfortunately they don't break down the age demographic by region, but I'd bet that if we specifically look at daily active users in the United States the age demo would skew much older.

so, it seems like it's similar to what many fast food restaurants have been experiencing lately. the growth opportunities in the United States dried up so the decided to push like hell everywhere else. i bet the growth they saw in India over the last decade was explosive. probably bigger than anything they had ever seen before. bigger than when it was still growing in the u.s.. meanwhile they project that over the next decade in the u.s. they'll see maybe 8% user growth and that's pretty optimistic.

so we probably won't actually see much Facebook marketing in the u.s.. the only way they can capture more u.s users is by buying more apps, like when they bought Instagram.

this does seem to imply that the part of the world where Facebook has become a fact of life is very specifically India. I'm sorry to hear that for them.

i primarily use lemmy these days, but still have to use a few other things.

I still browse reddit for this like episode discussion threads for amine and other tv. lemmy will have maybe 5 responses in the threads for the 3 biggest shows of a season. it's just not there yet.

I'm also a videographer, in our modern age that means i NEED to be on Instagram, YouTube, and tiktok because those are the platforms everyone wants me to make things for. can't know how to make things for a platform I don't use, sadly. especially since "just make something good" doesn't work on any of them. in fact making something that looks good is often more of a hinderence these days and it kills me.

i hate short form video. i hate every mainstream social media platform. i just want to make pretty videos and not have to deal with tiktok trends. I learned 10 ways to attach a lav mic secure and tidy in school. I must now hold the lav mic in my fingers because that's what's trendy and following the trends is the ONE thing that DEFINITELY works.

I hate what has come of my profession. at this point I'm just ready for the ai to take my job so i can blow my head off in peace.

it's it's gotta be something very difficult that no one has ever fund before.

that's basically the approach that all of popular culture had been taking since like 2008. like that was the attitude of the last 20 years. show these bigots that if they at least pretend to play nice we can all get along and be more prosperous for it.

they hated it. it's the "woke mind virus" to them now. I genuinely don't believe people like this will ever be ok in a kind and accepting world. I also don't think that trying to get rid of them will solve this problem... i don't know if there is a solution to some people being mentally incapable of empathy, but it certainly doesn't help that it's so baked into our culture now.

capitalism is highly compatible with a lack of empathy. it's a system that inherently promotes those with no scruples. the less you feel bad about being a piece of shit for money, the more money you'll be able to make. it's a predatory system where those most willing and able to cannibalize everyone and everything around them for personal gain will gain the most. those that gain the most are then also in a position to manipulate both political votes and public opinion. they blatantly bribe our politicians and they own our media platforms. this is especially problematic on social media. if you were a young American on tiktok in the last u.s. election you probably saw numerous vague tiktoks about kamala starting WWIII. no quotes, no context, just "me and the boys after kamala starts wwiii" type shit. as I understand it nearly every major election around the world since then has seen tiktok flooded with "memes" like that supporting the right wing candidate. we're certainly not going to make any progress on this issue while that's the world we live in.

maybe a stable enough government with keen enough regulations can at least try to keep these people from completely raiding the hen house. we'll have to see how things play out with Germany and the afd ban, but I'm not too hopeful on that playing out well in our current situation.

IDK, I'm half convinced that humanity is eternally doomed to repeat the same mistakes. with long periods of everything sucking because too few have or want too great a percentage of what humanity has claimed their own and the occasional period where things are accidentally not that bad.

we are currently leaving one of those brief periods of "not that bad"

it's tough to know what you're seeing without seeing it. can you post a side by side showing one image at 160 and another at a bigger iso where you aren't noticing this effect?

the only reason to write that book would be for when i would inevitably get to post the "don't create the torment nexus" meme for tons of social media impressions.

though knowing what impressions are pegs me as a creative who won't get to post on social media from the mines.

the robots won't be equipped to fix it. there will be no one left to tell they got it wrong.

same reason harlan ellison wrote i have no mouth and i must scream i suppose...

nah, it's going to be the opposite.

if other computer technology has been anything to go off of then only those who lived through is adaption and watched it progress will know how to spot it. those who grow up with hard to spot ai will just accept that they can't see it and think we're weird for trying so hard to prove things are ai. they'll also think we're weird for caring.

our boomer trait will be doing art instead of asking ai to generate images and video, or wanting things made by people when the ai generated thing is "good enough".

we'll be getting eyerolls for gifting a nice art set or a camera to our niblings. we'll embarrass our grandkids when we get upset at the ai point of sale system that mcdonalds starts using. "back in my day they had big touch screens where you could manually select your toppings on the burger, now you just yell into a box and MAYBE gets it right"

actually, if social media tech is anything to go on we won't even have that much control. your order will be algorithm based. chosen for you based on your recent ad footprint. the ai obviously knows what you want better than you do. the kids won't see it as weird. they'll transition straight from their parents deciding their meals to corporations doing the same, but we're going to hate it. the corps will push it anyway because it's so massively profitable with the demographics that like it and every restaurant will be owned by like 2 companies. they'll just force it on everyone else. we'll bitch about it, but most people will still keep going.

edit: had more thoughts on this in the shower.

we'll get to the point where we barely even have to pick a place to eat. there will be 2 apps. one owned by disneycokemcdonsldsalibaba, one owned by pepsifoxraytheonamazon. we will all be either a coke person or a Pepsi person and will likely just follow whichever brand our parents did. they'll be inherently political and each have a sponsored candidate in every election. it will define the entire world you live in. when it's time to eat you get a notification and the app orders you your meal.

it'll start as a service for when you can't decide what to eat then after it gets a critical mass of users it will start to enshitify into forcing what you eat before selling to the disney megacorp who will then push it into everything they own.

this is only for the rich people that these brands cater towards of course. we who would have once been creatives will be working manual labor at the camps for the underemployed. afterall, we're better off with the structure. it helps us be productive towards society. it's what's best for us....

only because people never stopped asking it to be able to id birds.