Similar trajectory for me, but I’m now being micromanaged on the daily. We got a new CIO recently who is micromanaging his direct reports and our culture has evaporated overnight. The shit is indeed rolling down hill and the writing is on the wall to leave. I know it’s not just me either. There will be an exodus when rates get cut and hiring picks up again. This place is fucked.

But that’s the key. If you can find something and lay low with minimal annoyance, hang onto that for as long as you can.

His supporters won’t see it this way.

I mean via the official channels, you’re right. But you will immediately have conspiracy theories running wild that Hillary had Trump killed or something stupid. In a land where there are more guns than people and a small minority own them…the rest of us probably don’t want to see what happens.

Timothy McVeigh blew up a chunk of OKC for less.

For me it’s the “Stop responding” button. Sometimes I’ll neglect something in my prompt, such as the fact that I’m stuck on ES5 javascript in my job (ServiceNow). It’ll spit out ES6+ with let declarations or something like that, and I have to go back and qualify my limitations. So I click stop responding. What used to happen was that it would stop and allow for additional prompting. Now it’s just like a client side trick. It hides the output but the server is still returning shit in the background, so if I try to re-prompt or add context it finishes what it was originally saying first, then tacks the new answer onto the old one without pause, separation, or human readable formatting that would indicate that there is a new output. It’s an awful experience.

I’ve been using perplexity.ai but my company thinks its agreements will stop Microsoft from training their AIs on our proprietary data, so I have to be more careful with perplexity than Copilot.

I’m just glad no one has succeeded. There is no telling what his deranged supporters will do if someone succeeds.

Chuck Palahniuk leaking into my writing like the carrot out of the protagonist’s ass in Guts.

Lmao my job announced layoffs a few months back. They continue to parade their corporate restructuring plan in front of us like we give a fuck if shareholders make money. My output has dropped significantly as I search for another role. Whatever code I do write now is always just copy pasted from AI (which is getting harder to use…fuck you Copilot). I give zero fucks about this place anymore. Maybe if people had some small semblance of investment in their company’s success (i.e.: not milked by shareholders and beaten to dust by shitty profit driven metrics that take away from the core business), the employees might give enough fucks to not copy paste shitty third party code.

Additionally, this is a training issue. Don’t offload the training of your people onto the universities (which then trap the students into an insurmountable debt load leading them to take jobs they otherwise wouldn’t want to take just to eat and have a roof over their heads). The modern corporate landscape has created a perfect shitstorm of disincentives for genuine effort and diligence. Then you expect us to give a shit about your company even though the days of 40 years and a pension are now gone. We’re stuck with 401k plans and social security and the luck of the draw as to whether we can retire or not. Work your whole life for what? Fuck you. I’m gonna generate that AI code and enjoy my 30s and 40s.

A workforce trapped by debt, forced to prioritize job security and paycheck size over passion or purpose. People end up in roles they don’t care about, working for companies they have no investment in, simply to keep up with loan payments and the ever increasing cost of living.

“Why is my organization falling apart!?” Fucking look up from the stupid fucking metrics that don’t actually tell you anything you dumb fucks. Make an actual human decision and fix the wealth inequality. It’s literally always wealth inequality.

My posture is shit and I tested the leaning back and breathing thing and it did feel pretty good. But yeah, nothing wrong with drawing some inspiration within reason.

Example being Jordan Peterson. Cleaning your room if you can muster the will isn’t a bad thing. That doesn’t mean pronouns are a Neomarxist plot to control language or that you should only eat meat and get hooked on benzos.

Don’t let their perceived expertise in one subject cloud your judgment over other subjects where they haven’t the scantest idea what they’re talking about. That said, it would be nice if everyone was forced to take a media literacy course or three in schools.

A former prosecutor selecting AOC also suggests a semblance of growth on the part of the prosecutor.

Yes, she put away a lot of people on drug crimes and I’m sure other BS. The conservatives are already circulating memes with a collage of black faces she put in prison. As if they give a fuck about black people in any capacity outside of when it’s politically expedient. They’ll be in the camps with the rest of us if Trump wins.

Someone like AOC diffuses some of the Israel and ACAB criticism. Or it could be turned to say AOC is a sellout, which I think is a hard argument to make. No one saying that should really be taken seriously given her record.

In this political climate of violence, it’s basically also a giant “fuck you” to the right. You’ll get this centrist woman, or you’ll get this left leaning woman. It hints where a Kamala Harris admin is wanting to take the country in the future and could also serve to finally motivate the youth vote.

AOC seems to understand realpolitik better than the many on the left, and I think she’ll eventually save us all. I know she probably won’t be on the ticket, but manifestation is a thing right?

This for real. Wish commutes weren’t so god damn awful and long that in office jobs weren’t so soul sucking. Or god forbid we get compensated for our commutes or having to live closer to offices and pay exorbitant rents/taxes.

Like okay, your office is downtown in a major city. It costs $3k or some dumb shit for a studio apartment but the job only pays $80k a year and of course no overtime. So either I have to live an hour out and take a slow ass dirty train or drive in (and pay for parking too?!), or you let me work from home and I save two hours of my life per day. You as a corporation should be lobbying politically for more housing to bring down prices and providing a housing allowance or something if you want me coming in. “Nobody wants to work anymore!!” Like dude pay my rent and I’ll be in the office every day.

I think it would do me some good to have some in-person interaction, but I refuse to take a job where it’s forced upon me because it’s just too expensive to the point where even if the salary is $50k higher I don’t think I would go back to an office even on a hybrid/part-time basis. Work from home is the practical solution to this problem, because the other solutions are too radical for corporate America to try on a wider scale.

Project for a New American Century - “Rebuilding America’s Defenses”, anyone?

We order a lot of baby stuff on there. They’ve accepted returns on everything that didn’t work or wasn’t what we anticipated. We can walk to a UPS store from our house and drop it off. Anecdotally, they also have the best deals about 50% of the time on PCPartPicker.

It does take longer to fulfill some orders for us. But others show up a day or three early even though we don’t pay for Prime. I used to work for the post office before they switched to their own delivery, and they would drop off their pallets to us in the mornings to be taken out for the last mile by our carriers. It seemed like that was a better experience. It has definitely enshittified somewhat since their golden days.

Yes but I don’t want to type my billing details every time I need some thing. I don’t want to wait 6 weeks. I don’t know if other sites are reputable. I don’t want to pay shipping. I like being able to wishlist stuff or store stuff in my cart for later and read lots of reviews on products (I’m aware many are fake).

There’s also the fact that nearly every website runs on AWS, so even if I boycott Amazon (I’m sure they’ll miss my $100 a month in purchases), I’m still providing them money by visiting the sites that are hosted on AWS. Pretty hard to completely avoid them in this day and age.

I don’t use a single Meta product on purpose. I’m sure they scrape my data despite my best efforts to not be tracked online.

I still unfortunately order things from Amazon for the convenience, use Windows for gaming and at work, and occasionally use Google search with heavy boolean search, custom search engines, and browser extensions for filtering out the garbage. I also still use Google Maps and I have an Android based tv where I occasionally watch SmartTube.

Hell I even get Netflix included with my T-Mobile subscription. My wife watches that.

And for now, I have an iPhone SE until it dies and I make the switch to a Google phone or something.

Typing this out makes me wonder what I’m waiting for to find alternatives for this FAANG garbage, but I have no idea how Facebook still exists.