> What if, instead of having to reach out to the big players, the economics of having a software developer or 2 on staff make it such that you could build custom-tailored, bespoke software to work "with" your company and not against?
The behemoths exist especially, but not exclusively, in that space because regulations (correctly) are steep. In the case of hospital systems you're talking both the management and protection of both employee and patient data. That's not to say of course that the behemoth's are particularly good at that, it's merely that if the hospital rolls it's own solution, as you suggest, they then take on the liability should that system go wrong. On the other side, if Epic has a data breach, every hospital shrugs it's shoulders. It isn't their problem. And, even more fundamentally, if Epic as a product sucks ass... well. The employees didn't choose it, neither did the patients, leadership did.
You see these relationships (or lack thereof) all over the place in our modern world, where the people doing the work with these absurdly terrible tools are not given any decision-making power with regard to which tools to use. Hell, at my workplace, we actually have some in that leadership asks if we're happy with our various HR softwares and things, but fundamentally, they all pretty much suck and we're currently sitting at the least shitty one we could find, which is far from a solid fit for our smaller company. But it's the best we can do because none of these suites are designed to be good for people to use, they're designed to check a set of legal and feature checkboxes for the companies they sell to.
Honestly I don't know how you fix this, short of barring B2B SAAS as an entire industry. Time was, when you wanted to run a sales company, you had to run your own solution to keeping track of internal data. Salesforce didn't exist. You had rows upon rows of file cabinets, if there was a fire data was a lost, if a disgruntled worker stole your sales list and sold it to a competitor, that was it's own issue to deal with. Now crooks can crack the locks off of NetSuite and steal your whole fucking business without even knowing where the hell your HQ even is or caring for that matter, and our business universe if you will is bifurcated all to hell as a result. Companies are engaged in constant games of "pin the legal responsibility on someone else" because to compete, they need internet and software based sales and data management systems, but building those systems is a pain in the ass, and then you're responsible if they go wrong.
One of my most guilty indulgences is the various TV programs about hoarders and hoarding. They are of course sensationalized all to shit and they basically provoke mental breakdowns out of their subjects to make good TV. The guilt isn't just that it's bad like all reality TV- you can tell these people, a lot of them anyway, have serious mental difficulties that a TV show showing up with 4 1-800-GOT-JUNK trucks and parking them out front of their homes before pulling all their shit out for neighbors to see and then yelling at them for being distressed about it isn't addressing. They offer "therapy" as part of it, after they've traumatized the fuck out of someone already struggling. Woo.
But I watch. I have a mother who's started down the path. Maybe I'm like... training myself for what's probably due in about 15 years. Or maybe I'm just making excuses for indulging in trash TV.
The article is definitely correct: these people need help. They also usually need money. They usually need a lot of both. A lot of those shows take place in dilapidated parts of the world where you can tell, obviously, that the hoarding is certainly an issue but an even more pressing one is poverty. People keep everything when they're broke, far long past the point of reason, because they've found themselves needing... who knows, a tooth brush, a can of food, and had it kept from them by money so many times that they psychologically can't bear to throw one out, ever. Even if it's rotted away.
And what's worse: because throughout any attempt at helping them, anyone, is then a threat. They become animated, angry, and any action that can actually help them is like playing Russian roulette with 5 bullets in a 6-shooter. They'll tell you with a straight, red face that yes they fucking need the mayo that's been in the diner packets for 10 years because it's still fine and usable. It's hard to feel sympathy for people so insufferable, and it's not even just you, the helper. They're often estranged from family and have no friends because their behaviors strain every relationship beyond repair.
It's... tragic, in every sense of the word.
FWIW, I also watch a lot of YouTubers who do this in a way that isn't evil. But also the content is less engaging because, well, reality TV wouldn't poke people the way it does into acting the way they do if it didn't make fucking good content. But yeah, I feel notably less disgusting consuming that at least.
My mother went down this road (she, fortunately, had enough resources that it wasn't a catastrophe), but last year was forced to downsize due to a medical condition. I filled 2 20-yard dumpsters with the trash, donated another truckload, and put the rest (anything she might actually value) in storage. Since then, I've been going through that remainder with her and I think she's finally coming around to the absurdity of her situation. It turns out she isn't actually attached to her parents' monogrammed (but moth-eaten) linens, or the contents of her grandmother's sewing box.
In my strictly non-professional opinion, as a watcher of this stuff: the hoarders stuff almost always replaces something. Maybe it's a person who is gone, or was driven away. Maybe it's a purpose they only had before they retired. Maybe it's an event that drove them to crazy places to get by, and even though it's past, it's scars remain. Maybe it's merely the abstract concept of control, and agency; this one crops up a lot with the older female subjects of the shows, who's abusive husbands controlled them their entire lives, almost with regularity exhibiting all the classic signs of Battered Woman Syndrome.
It's hard for me to disentangle this with the inhumane way modern life lets people live.
It's not for everyone, but I found I was keeping a lot of things "for the memories". I started taking pictures of the thing then getting rid of it. Serves similar purpose and easier to let it go.
Also scrapbooking. I've really gotten into that lately as I struggle to get rid of like, strange things. Parking passes and tickets for concerts, receipts from dinners on trips, that sort of thing.
Scrap booking is wonderful for such things. And when I need a boost, I pop it open and get a rush of memories from all the lovely things I've gotten to do.
Genuinely: What profits!?! The only company profiting from AI has been nVidia. Every indicator we've received for this entire alleged industry is companies buying hundreds of millions of dollars in graphics cards that then either sit in warehouses depreciating in value or, worse, are plugged in and immediately start losing money.
The tech industry has coasted on it's hypergrowth story for decades, a story laden with as many bubbles as actual industries that sprang up. All the good ideas are done now. All the products anyone actually needs exist, are enshittified, and are selling user data to anyone who will pay, including products that exist solely to remove your data from everyone who bought it and probably then sell it to some other people.
This shit is stupid at this point. All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices and sustainable models of generating revenue that in most other industries would be fantastic, and they're absolutely apoplectic about this. They are so addicted to the easy, cheap services that upended entire other industries and made them rich beyond imagining that they will literally say, out loud, with their human mouths, that it is a bad, undesirable thing to simply have a business that makes some money.
The people at the top of this industry are literally fucking deranged and should be interred at a psychiatric facility for awhile for their and everyone else's good.
If you're not the shareholder, you're the product.
The business model of any publicly traded corporation, at least in 2025, is to increase the value of its circulating stock. No more and no less. The nominal business model of the company is a cover story to make line go up. The reason why the stock price matters is because of access to capital markets: if a business wants to buy another business, they are not going to dip into the cash on hand. They are going to take out a loan, and that loan is collateralized by... the value of the business. Which is determined by the stock price.
So if you can keep the line going up, you can keep buying competitors. But if you act like a normal, mature business, you can't.
Profit as a concept is a concern for capitalism. But these businesses are not interested in capitalism, they're angling to become the new lords of a growing feudal economy. That's what "going meta" really means.
Right on. You might like the Better Offline podcast by Ed Zitron, although the two of you seem to be so closely aligned that you might not learn anything new.
>All Silicon Valley has to do is to grow up into a mature industry with sensible business practices
Negative sum game: Growing up is easy if it doesn't kill you. The problem with being ethical when everyone else is unethical is that you'll likely go broke.
The next issue is we're seeing, is not that Silicon Valley is ever going to improve, but the bullshit is spreading to eat up every other industry in the US. Engaging in outright fraudulent behavior is A'ok in the US (I mean we even elected a president convicted on a pile of counts of fraud).
Effectively industries cannot manage themselves, we need regulations to prevent them from being bastards. Problem, we elect bastards that cannot keep from committing fraud themselves.
> It might be frequency-bias, but of the companies downsizing/closing in my area I see almost all of the published explanations are blaming wages.
And lest we leave it merely implied, the problematic wages for the company are the workers, who make the products being sold. The wages of middle management + executives who allegedly steer the ship are magnitudes larger, but those are completely fine.
I would say no. UPS bought the planes from Boeing. Boeing built them, Boeing identified the flaw, Boeing notified it's customers, and said it wasn't an issue.
Respectfully, this is cheap cope. The bomb maker didn't know when he made the bomb, maybe. Now he knows, as do all the people turning the gears on this meat grinder, including a bunch of people here.
If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country, but without an ounce of hyperbole, the human race, then keep your head down. If you don't, fuckin DO SOMETHING.
You know all those times you've said or heard others say "well if I was in Germany in the 30's...." well, guess what, games fuckin real now. So act like the person you want to be.
>If you value your comfy life over the well being of others and the future of not only the country
For people who think borders are just lines, our country as geography doesn't even exist. It's just lines. For people who think that all people are the same, everywhere, and deserve to go where they please, our country as a people doesn't exist either.
So if that's your conception of a country, why should I care about it at all? It's just a random place I happened to be born, and its disloyalty to me outweighs any I might show it. I inherited a house jointly with the rest of you, and you keep letting squatters live here for free. Once they're here, you screech if anyone tries to evict them. If I complain about them punching holes in the drywall and shitting in the kitchen sink, you tell me I'm racist. Whatever else, you and I are incompatible, and I am out of options.
I believe in borders; my taxes fund my government, and not someone else's. However, there is no US-American "people" aside from the indigenous people who have been massacred. Ever since, it has always been whoever has been here.
I don't believe borders should exist, but they do. If you say otherwise you are simply in denial. Borders are promises of violence made by nation-states, which I also don't believe in, which nevertheless exist and are harming people.
Whatever ideological differences we may have, need to be shelved. We can bicker about that later. For now, the border of the U.S. exists, and it's killing people.
> Whatever ideological differences we may have, need to be shelved. We can bicker about that later. For now, the border of the U.S. exists, and it's killing people.
The ideological differences are, in no small part (directly or implicitly) over whether the border should exist and whether it killing the people it kills is a good or a bad thing. Can’t really just shelve that.
We are all experiencing this, just at a larger scale. To call it a metaphor is to deny the reality, nothing about this is metaphorical.
It hurts all of us, but those on the left are willing to endure the torment if it they think it hurts their opponents more. They're willing to endure it if they think that tihs will swing voting numbers in their favor in the coming decades. The right to live within the United States, as an actual inalienable right and not just some temporary privilege is called citizenship, and those without it have no such right.
When those of you vote me down so you can pretend that everyone disagrees with me, you're setting yourself up for failure in the future. You will believe your own echo chamber and be sure that the Democrats will inevitably win, once and for all, because how can they not when they never hear anyone disagreeing with them? The numbers aren't on your side at all.
The main differentiator I've noticed is: how much work is the tool doing, and how much work is the artist doing? And that's not to say that strictly more effort on the part of the artist is a good thing, it just has to be a notable amount to, IMHO, be an interesting thing.
This is the primary failure of all of the AI creative tooling, not even necessarily that it does too much, but that the effort of the artist doesn't correlate to good output. Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
Any other toolset I can become familiar and better equipped to use. AI-based tools are uniquely unpredictable and so I haven't really found any places beyond base concepting work where I'm comfortable making them a permanent component.
And more generally, to your nod that some day artists will use AI: I mean, it's not impossible. That being said, as an artist, I'm not comfortable chaining my output to anything as liquid and ever-changing and unreliable as anything currently out there. I don't want to put myself in a situation where my ability to create hinges on paying a digital landlord for access to a product that can change at any time. I got out of Adobe for the same reason: I was sick of having my workflows frustrated by arbitrary changes to the tooling I didn't ask for, while actual issues went unsolved for years.
Edit: I would also add the caveat that, the more work the tool does, the less room the artist has to actually be creative. That's my main beef with AI imagery: it literally all looks the same. I can clock AI stuff incredibly well because it has a lot of the same characteristics: things are too shiny is weirdly the biggest giveaway, I'm not sure why AI's think everything is wet at all times, but it's very consistent. It also over-populates scenes; more shit in the frame isn't necessarily a good thing that contributes to a work, and AI has no concept at all of negative space. And if a human artist has no space to be creative in the tool... well they're going to struggle pretty hard to have any kind of recognizable style.
There is an AI plugin for krita that lets you define regions, selection bounds, sub-prompts, control nodes, and lots more control over a given image generation model than standard Automattic or comfyUI workflows...down to 'put an arm wearing armor here' for example in my RPG NPC token writing.
It has full image generation mode, it has an animation mode, it has a live mode where you can draw a blob of images and it will refine it 2-50 steps only in that area.
So you are no longer doing per line stroke and saved brush settings, but you are still painting and composing an image yourself, down to a pixel by pixel rate. It's just that the tool it gives is WAY more compute intensive, the AI is sort of rendering a given part of a drawing as you specify as many times as you need.
How much of that workflow is just prompting a one-shot image, vs photoshopping +++ an image together until it meets your exact specifications?
No, the final image cannot be copyrighted under current US law in 2026, but for use in private settings like tabletop RPGs...my production values have gone way up and I didn't need to get a MFA degree in The old Masters drawing or open a drawing studio to get those images.
> Sometimes you can get something usable in 1 or 2 prompts, and it almost feels like magic/cheating. Other times you spend tons of time going over prompts repeatedly trying to get it to do something, and are never successful.
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art."
But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
AI is the same.
The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder, but there's a lot of hand-made art - especially on fan sites like Deviant Art - which has some basic craft skill but scores very low on original imagination, unusual mood, or unique personality.
The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
Some people are better at that than others, and more willing to dig deep into the medium and not take it at face value.
> That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
For me, the artist, sure. I've not yet had a day where Affinity Photo just doesn't have the juice, and I don't see the appeal. Photoshop, for all it's faults, doesn't have bad days.
That's the difference between the artist and the artists' tool. A difference so obvious I feel somewhat condescending pointing it out.
> I spent some of the 90s and 00s making digital art. There was a lot of hostility to Photoshop then, and a lot of "That's not really art." ... But I found that if I allowed myself to experiment, the output still had a unique personality and flavour which wasn't defined by the tool.
"People were wrong about a completely different thing" isn't the slam dunk counterpoint you think it is.
Also as someone else in that space at that time, I genuinely haven't the slightest idea what you mean about photoshop not being real art. I knew (and was an) artists at that time, we used Photoshop (of questionable legality but still) and I never heard this at all.
> The requirement for interesting art is producing something that's unique. AI makes that harder,
Understatement of the year.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique. AI-made art mechanises the mash-up, but it's still up to the creator to steer the process to somewhere interesting.
The difference is the lack of intent. A "person" mashes up what resonates with them (positively or negatively) and from those influences, and from the broader cultures they exist in, creates new and interesting things.
AI is fundamentally different. It is a mash up of an average mean of every influence in the entire world, which is why producing unique things is difficult. You're asking for exceptional things from an average machine (mathematical sense not quality sense.).
That's normal for any kind of creative work. Some days it just happens quickly, other days you keep trying and trying and nothing works.
Usually this means I have forgotten to eat, or that I need to take a step back and consider whatever I’m doing at a deeper level. Once I recognized that the “keep trying and trying and nothing works” days vanished for good.
> The reality is that most hand-made art is an unconscious mash-up of learned signifiers mediated by some kind of technique
Yeah, no. Competent artists are not generalizable as "unconscious", solely "mashing up" influences or input, or even working with "signifiers": many are exquisitely aware of their sources; many employ diverse and articulated methodologies for creation and elaboration; many enjoy working with the concrete elements of their medium with no concern for signification. Even "technique" does not have a uniform meaning across different fields and modes.
It's also worth noting that willpower in general is constantly being whittled down by how stressful and, for lack of better term, fucking annoying modern life is. I'm reminded of a quote from my favorite article from Ed Zitron:
> In plain terms, everybody is being fucked with constantly in tiny little ways by most apps and services, and I believe that billions of people being fucked with at once in all of these ways has profound psychological and social consequences that we’re not meaningfully discussing.
And I think one of those psycho-social consequences we're not discussing is everyone is just... fucking annoyed now, constantly, about shit that it doesn't feel right to really complain about. Like, you plus or minus live on your phone, and I'm very much including myself in that statement. Every time you get logged out of an app you use every day to, for example, board your morning train, or park your car, or have to reset a password to pay your power bill, just like, all of that? Every time your day is interrupted with stupid bullshit from Modern Life takes a tiny bit of that energy, and I dunno about everyone reading this, I have a quite well managed and streamlined life, and I still have just... dozens of these. Every single day. I can't fathom being one of the folks who ISN'T as well versed in tech as I am, existing for them must be utter HELL.
And that's the essentials, that's not even going into how most tech products now are constantly begging for your attention, for your engagement, trying to pluck the strings of your psyche into making you angry, or horny, or whatever. Engage with platforms, buy these products, watch 9 TV shows so you're not out of the loop, you've been added to an SMS spam group, and everyone is replying to it saying they're not interested, on and on and on.
Sorry this turned into more of a rant than I really envisioned but yeah. I can easily comprehend a day where I try and go to my gym, and the fucking app doesn't work right and I can't get in, and I just quit because I've already solved 20 fucking captchas today and I simply lack the energy to do another, to help train some goddamned AI, for a company I don't know, you know?
I just got a new phone which meant I had to read-login and set up every app and account.
It was an intense deluge of SMS codes, flipping back and forth to the Authenticator, dismissing welcome popup modals, security email notifications.
I was frazzled by the multitasking and can only imagine how hard it would have been for some senior citizen that was badgered into updating their device.
Also just.. boring code. Like I'm probably more anti-AI than most, but even I'll acknowledge it's nice to just be like... "hey this array of objects I have, I need sorted by this property" and just have it work. Or how to load strings from exotic character encodings. Or dozens of other bitchy little issues that drag software dev speed down, don't help me "grow" as a developer, and/or are not interesting to solve, full stop.
I love this job but I can absolutely get people saying that AI helps them not "fight" the computer.
I've always believed that the dozens of 'bitchy little issues' are the means to grow as a developer.
Once you've done it, you'll hopefully never have to do it again (or at worse be derivatives). Over time you'll have a collection of 'how to do stuff'.
I think this is the path to growth. Letting a LLM do it for you is equivalent to it solving a hard leetcode problem. You're not really taxing your brain.
My point is that it's tempting and irresistible (based on other comments in this thread) to move from basic attribute sorting, to basic CRUD, SQL queries, CSS/Tailwind, typescript error resolution then using it for Dijkstra, because why not?, it's so nice.
Then we're just puppetmasters pulling the strings (which some think this is the way the industry is going).
The behemoths exist especially, but not exclusively, in that space because regulations (correctly) are steep. In the case of hospital systems you're talking both the management and protection of both employee and patient data. That's not to say of course that the behemoth's are particularly good at that, it's merely that if the hospital rolls it's own solution, as you suggest, they then take on the liability should that system go wrong. On the other side, if Epic has a data breach, every hospital shrugs it's shoulders. It isn't their problem. And, even more fundamentally, if Epic as a product sucks ass... well. The employees didn't choose it, neither did the patients, leadership did.
You see these relationships (or lack thereof) all over the place in our modern world, where the people doing the work with these absurdly terrible tools are not given any decision-making power with regard to which tools to use. Hell, at my workplace, we actually have some in that leadership asks if we're happy with our various HR softwares and things, but fundamentally, they all pretty much suck and we're currently sitting at the least shitty one we could find, which is far from a solid fit for our smaller company. But it's the best we can do because none of these suites are designed to be good for people to use, they're designed to check a set of legal and feature checkboxes for the companies they sell to.
Honestly I don't know how you fix this, short of barring B2B SAAS as an entire industry. Time was, when you wanted to run a sales company, you had to run your own solution to keeping track of internal data. Salesforce didn't exist. You had rows upon rows of file cabinets, if there was a fire data was a lost, if a disgruntled worker stole your sales list and sold it to a competitor, that was it's own issue to deal with. Now crooks can crack the locks off of NetSuite and steal your whole fucking business without even knowing where the hell your HQ even is or caring for that matter, and our business universe if you will is bifurcated all to hell as a result. Companies are engaged in constant games of "pin the legal responsibility on someone else" because to compete, they need internet and software based sales and data management systems, but building those systems is a pain in the ass, and then you're responsible if they go wrong.
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