Whenever I read stories like this about how hard it is for US people to keep getting the little they've been getting I think of people on the other side. It takes an evil compliance to be the Karen in this article. Zero empathy, zero compassion, you're a row in a spreadsheet. If they'd start caring a little and standing up to what is very obviously wrong, the US would be a much different place. Apply that same logic to "the deep state", military men, etc. It's pretty crazy how much of their situation is their own making, yet they'll happily blame the other side.
To an extent, I agree. At the same time, Karen may be in a similarly desperate situation. While the morally correct position would be to stand up to what is obviously wrong, Karen may need the paycheck to feed her kids. Karen herself is a row in a spreadsheet that the powers that be could replace in a heartbeat.
I'm not suggesting that this is any reason to support evil policies but I try to be sympathetic to struggles I may not be aware of.
We have no idea what "Karens" life is actually like. I can think of about 5,000,000 scenarios that make her the more empathetic person in this interaction. People need jobs, government jobs are low paying but secure. This woman isn't making $100,000 a year just to say no to blind people, she very likely could be just scraping by as well, working in a call center, in a soul destroying government office, getting what little she can without a college degree she has neither the money, nor the time to complete. Maybe she worked hard and paid harder and got the degree and then it meant nothing. Very likely her boss and her both know she is eminently replacable. If she stands up she will be the single blade of grass getting chopped by the implacable mower.
What I'm trying to say is yeah, she could've taken the risk and stood up and said something. He could've beared the pain and sent the correct documentation. He knows the process by now, he had to have known exactly what he needed to send! And yet he chose to needlessly inflict harm on someone who's choice it wasn't theirs to make. The reality of jobs these days is not a give and take, let's all make the world better by democratizing our decisions type world. It's much much worse.
Karen is forced to respect the law. The law around benefits is absolutely full of this exact bullshit in the US, because of 50 years of people screeching about "Welfare queens" which was an invented thing.
It doesn't matter what Karen thinks or wants. It doesn't matter if Karen believes the disabled person or not. It doesn't matter if Karen is physically capable of complex thought or not. If Karen breaks the rules for you, you will end up losing your benefits anyway, possibly forced to pay them back, and Karen loses her job.
Public sector employment pays terribly. People don't really do it because they enjoy it.
There is literal law all over that says "This information can't be in an email for privacy reasons". It's not policy, it's law.
Stop harassing low level bureaucrats and learn some damn civics.
Similarly, when I was a cashier in a grocery store, I had zero ability to refund you, to fix a problem, to bend any rule for example to help you with your WIC process, which was utterly miserable. Oh sorry the pamphlet this week says X bread is the only approved one, it doesn't matter that it causes your child GI distress, nobody is allowed to change it.
Vote for people who aren't trying to hurt disabled people and you will have fewer disabled people being hurt. Stop screeching about "Fraud" that doesn't exist if you want it to be easy for people to get the welfare they need.
All attempts to battle fraud will inherently add friction to the process. Find an optimization point that isn't so hostile to human beings.
I'm amazed Microslop let us keep GitHub this long. Probably because they're training AI on it? To have a direct line to developers? I don't see why else they would've bothered with something that was so anti everything they stood for
You can either have AI be honest or AI become a marketing tool. The two are fundamentally incompatible.
You won't get it to push your products when users ask what's the best XYZ - either because it'll be too honest to lie or because it'll be too expensive for you.
Honesty implies intent. People can use LLMs to amplify dishonest messages (see: marketing), but I don't think it's reasonable to claim that LLMs are lying to describe when they produce incorrect information against the will of both the creator and operator.
I read it a different way. There's less upside to an LLM being "honest", since they're already making false statements regardless of intent. They're already non-trustworthy. So there's less to lose by being marketing channels.
LLMs do not have a concept of “honesty”. Nothing they say is honest or dishonest. Anyway, “What’s the best XYZ?” is not a question that has a definitive answer for most XYZs.
It's hard to argue against contempt but... I'm gonna try. It feels like at the end of the line it's just a checkbox someone gets without having to consider the consequences of the changes. Either it's too big or there's too many levels where decisions get made and handed down to drones (or AI), but the people who decide seem to have no concept of what their products are used for and the people who implement features seem to have accepted that the system is so big that they can't understand all the impacts of their changes and have to rely on trusting commands from above - who may expect them to challenge from the POV of users or question things but never do. Anyway, this feels like what happens when managerial overhead and marketing KPIs smash into a complex product ecosystem. It all smells of IBM to be honest
Microsoft was always afraid of being IBM. They are more IBM than IBM.
When they started flying people in the beg that I buy 100 Surface Laptops, that was the confirmation of everything I had been thinking. All I could think of was IBM flying a dude from Italy in to talk for 15 minutes about their version of TeamViewer back in the day. We ended up talking about shoes.
Which is sad because the CEO's job is not to focus on the individual body parts but to make sure that the whole system is strong, beautiful, and healthy.
They can afford people who would do better. Windows 11 is trash. Azure is trash. Onedrive is trash. Outlook is trashier than it has ever been before, but it's not quite trash yet. Word is trash. Excel is rapidly enshittifying. Copilot is hot flaming radioactive tar cancer.
Does microslop even have a single thing left that isn't either completely terrible or worse than it used to be a mere 5 years ago?
Both. "New" outlook doesn't work with all of the add-ons and plug ins that "classic" outlook did. Both new and classic have copilot wedged into them. Classic has unasked for and unwanted Linkedin integrations that have to be turned off on a per-user basis, and it is patently clear that microslop has every intention of abandoning classic outlook the instant they believe that they can do so without severely alienating their userbase.
I don’t perceive benign neglect when they disregard UX for a product they’ve positioned so people essentially have to pay for and use it, while force-feeding them features they actively and vocally hate. Treating your customers as cash cows is fundamentally contemptful.
I was curious about this, so for anyone else who’s interested, here’s a KrebsOnSecurity article from 2019 about how easy it was to fraudulently register a .gov domain:
It's based on what Donald Trump (or any other US president, should it come to that) says, not on any evidence or ground truth beyond that.
The are motives for lying on this - for a start, if a president knows definitively they're going to say it, it's a free 81% return. Secondly, it's a pretty big dead cat to throw on the table to distract from any scandal and/or to keep themselves in the news cycle on a different topic.
We know for a fact that the US government has no evidence of aliens existing, because there's a 0% chance Trump wouldn't have blabbed about it during his first term.
Didn't pick up on that when I was there. But I'll say that Chichen is definitely worth a visit and only about a 2h drive from Cancun! You can do a tour with a group like Xcaret so you don't even have to drive there yourself.
It's a shame because Wayland has made complicated what most contributed to the growth of Linux in the last few years: gaming. I still can't run most of my library on Wayland without the added latency of XWayland. It's great if it's one step back to take a big leap, but this feels like two steps back one step forward without much of a plan for parity.
As the sibling comment said, with WSL becoming better and better, it's a dangerous game to play.
Except if you need WSLg, because then you can add RDP issue to all your Wayland issues, and, not infrequently, also xwayland issues! You can have all the fun!
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