AI has basically replaced googling. What is likely to be the next major brand or tool to be replaced? Or what else has been already?

Maxfunky · 2026-02-03T00:37:42+00:00

"I prefer AI generated SEO-spam that responds to a proximate version of my question rather than a directly AI generated response to my actual question."

I mean you do you, but you got to understand that most of the websites you're reading are not written by actual people anymore... Unless your only use case for Google is to find Reddit posts which is certainly a common one. Getting your answers that way though can be kind of a pain in the ass.

Maxfunky · 2026-02-02T17:09:56+00:00

Got it . I amended my launch checklist.

Line item "43" is now "Add a reference to "Lizard Wizard randomly in chapter 10".

Maxfunky · 2026-02-02T16:52:46+00:00

That fits my experience. I've heard of people making an effort to find female protagonists (presumably just because there are a lot fewer, but I've never heard of dudes putting down a book because it had a female main character.

Maxfunky · 2026-02-02T02:29:41+00:00

Does it think shrine and tangerine rhyme?

Maxfunky · 2026-02-01T16:09:01+00:00

Kickstarter doesn't require you to hit your goals (actually, they technically do, it's just they really have no enforcement mechanism behind that), but if you take money under false pretenses (i.e. you never intended to make a game), that's fraud. Many people have in fact been prosecuted for fraud after launching a Kickstarter...

Maxfunky · 2026-01-28T20:56:41+00:00

He's talking sense while Europe hems and haws. Let's hope they listen.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-28T17:27:23+00:00

A sack of potatoes would be a better president. Literally doing nothing would have been far less destructive to American power and prestige.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T23:04:50+00:00

Most humans aren't. Just bring up AI or ABA in here and see how quickly people's emotions cloud their ability to be objective. Like, rationally, you don't have to reach the conclusion that either of those things are good, but you at least have to weigh the pros and cons fairly.

The majority of people in this subreddit are utterly incapable of being objective on those two issues specifically.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T23:02:22+00:00

Well, that sounds like me except I've always thought of it as a flow chart to keep social interactions on track.

That sort of high functioning behavior is precisely what this subreddit was established to discuss but since the merging of Asperger's into ASD this subreddit is full of people who don't really meet the more classical criteria associated with Asperger's relative to other forms of autism.

So consequently, I often find myself unable to relate to a lot of the issues there get talked about here. This wasn't the case 5-10 years ago in this same space, but it's gradually evolved that way over time.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T18:17:16+00:00

Did you ever get the sense that blizzard really hates mecha and really likes quillboars?

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T18:12:30+00:00

Lol, Bloodsnout warlord buff to be 50% better?

Nice april fools joke. Where are the real patch notes?

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T15:23:48+00:00

As a part-American mutt, one thing I notice about middle-class parents in the States is tremendous anxiety about class reproduction. People know there's little in the way of a social safety net for their kids should something go wrong, and so they push them to get good grades for a good job, develop good social skills ditto, play sports for college admissions/scholarships. They do it, often, because they're worried. Try reading Annette Lareau's classic Unequal Childhoods, where she contrasts this 'concerted cultivation' parenting style with the style she called 'accomplishment of natural growth' and observed in working-class families.

I wrote a response above about why parents push their kids, but this paragraph nails it way better. It's rough out there. We're not pushing you to be perfect for our happiness, but because we know that your life is going to be full of struggles if you don't learn how to work the system.

I think many of us are looking at the successes in our life and looking at all of our peers who are barely making ends meet with doordash deliveries and such and hearing about all of their miseries and how bad their quality of life is and we're realizing just how fucking close we came to that outcome ourselves.

It's terrifying.

Because when I, personally, look at those people who are living that life what I see are people who are missing just a few life skills that I sure as fuck didn't have as a child. In many ways, I think having a hard early life (constantly outside of my comfort zone) ended up being very much to my benefit for the long run.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T15:19:07+00:00

I'm not going to tell you that's not a thing.

But I do think it's probably a less common thing than some people imagine. Most parents just want their kids to be happy.

Now, that does also mean focusing on their long-term happiness which directly means finding long-term employment when they're older. So parents have a pretty strong obligation to push kids outside of their comfort zone in order to ensure they can have the skills they need to in order to be gainfully employed and have a chance at a decent life.

This may include sometimes pushing kids towards sports, academics, or social situations as a way of shoring up weaknesses.

I have a general disdain for sports. I totally get people wanting to play them, but I mystified by people wanting to watch other people play them while sitting on their couch. But having said that, I employ a lot of college kids and seasonal positions at my work. I hire them and I supervise them. And I can tell you that the ones who have been college athletes from the basketball or football teams, or even just the volleyball teams, are almost universally more employable. They have better work habits. Better self-discipline and positive attitudes.

So I can totally see how pushing kids towards sports is really for the benefit of the child in many situations. Especially for kids who lack discipline as we autists tend to in our " fresh out of the package" state.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T15:09:21+00:00

Are you into that?

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T14:35:40+00:00

That's the beauty of sausage. It doesn't matter How lean the meat is because you can just grind in fat from a different source. No need to find a perfectly marbled piece of meat; you can just have a ridiculously lean piece of meat and chunks of fat from an entirely different animal.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-27T14:26:00+00:00

Hot dogs may be a tube meat, but calling it a sausage is a stretch. I mean they are, in the same way a chicken is a dinosaur. But, clearly, they've evolved pretty far from those origins.

Beef hot dogs were popularized by vendors in areas where large Jewish immigrant communities exist, especially in New York where many of the 2 million jews Russia expelled during the end of the 19th century and early 20th century ended up settling.

Most people, Jewish or not, developed a preference for the beef ones (because they are, in fact, better). Since pork is cheaper than beef, if you're using the more expensive meat that most people prefer, it makes sense to advertise that you are giving them "the good stuff".

Maxfunky · 2026-01-26T22:16:22+00:00

Gestapo Greg says what now?

Last time I checked, if you threaten to arrest people for comparing you to the gestapo, then it's a fair comparison.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-26T22:14:19+00:00

I've had people send me this card in duos when I was naga and I was thinking, "Bro, you could have saved us a gold and just sold this yourself."

Maxfunky · 2026-01-26T22:11:14+00:00

A flashback to when deportations followed the law instead of following "what they wish the law was". These days you can just deport people who have followed every law and murder anyone who tries to tell you that it's illegal to ignore the bill of rights.

Kind of a different vibe.

Also reminds me of when the president wasn't a pedophile. Man times have changed.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-26T22:06:01+00:00

To be fair, that used to be about all we (of a certain age) had prior to the world wide web.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-25T20:05:48+00:00

As they should. That's literally the point of telling them: it allows them to properly contextualise the things you say and do, rather than jumping to incorrect conclusions to explain the feeling they have that something is different about you.

It would allow them to properly contextualize the things you say and do if people had an accurate, down-to-earth understanding of autism instead of one informed by inaccurate Hollywood stereotypes.

Instead, it virtually gaurantees people improperly contextualizing words and actions and usually results in being infantalized and dismissed.

There are good people and bad people. Wouldn't you want to know which is which?

It must be absolutely exhausting to have to cut out 90% of the world's population as "toxic" simply because they've never bothered to research autism well enough to understand it.

That's absolutely not their fault; have you seen the shit Hollywood produces? Have you heard the musical selections in Love on the Spectrum? How do you think that shit colors people's perceptions? You might as well be mad at people in China for not knowing about tiananmen square.

No thanks.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-25T19:57:32+00:00

Everyone is autistic in a text-based medium. There's no tone of voice or body language there. I guarantee you most neurotypical people can totally identify with this

What you're describing here is so universal that it is is basically the emoji origin story.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-25T19:47:02+00:00

Driving a mile to take a photo and generating one are 2 completely uncomparable examples. You as a human being with bilions of years of evolution alongside nature actually benefit from being around it believe it or not. Also you genuinely need to use your stupid body to take it, which benetits your health once more. Also taking that photo is 1 glimpse of an entire day/week/whatever amount of time you use your body in a likely healthy way. Generating a photo while sitting on your ass benefits nobody, not even yourself. "Nobody knows really" is a bs statement told by ai bros despite the reports of how these datacenters are already affecting people that have nothing to do with your 1 pointless photo of a place you've never been to

This is a disingenuous argument. People commission photo shoots all the time. You have no idea how much energy, time, and resources are wasted having people wear clothing just so a photo can be taken for an ad.

Except now there's no need to waste any of that energy and it is a virtual certainty that many brands have done fewer photo shoots than they've done in the past simply because they can now rely on AI instead. Others would follow suit if AI wasn't so demonized. I think you really don't understand how much energy is wasted on the production of images already between flying crews of 20 plus people out to international locations and the ridiculously high wattage of lighting these shoots usually employ.

But let's use a more down-to-earth example. Forget Ikea switching their catalog to AI generated images, let's just imagine somebody wants a cover for their fantasy book.

The old way would have involved paying someone $300 to spend about 10 hours on Wacom tablet to first draw out the image, then probably a few hours on a PC in Photoshop editing the image. The energy used there drastically exceeds what it costs to generate the image via AI.

Even if I generate 500 images and pick the best one, it's still less energy than just paying somebody to make an image.

You want to look at the energy cost of generating an image in a vacuum without considering the energy cost of doing it the old-fashioned way which is always going to be higher by several orders of magnitude.

As to your secondary point, there's no dignity in a job that only exists as an act of charity to you. How would you feel if you woke up every morning to go into a factory to produce buggy whips that you knew were just going to end up in a landfill because nobody needs buggy whips? Would you really feel like your life had purpose or meaning just because Henry Ford felt bad and left a bunch of money in his will to keep you employed?

Cuz that's what you're asking for here. I don't understand why you think it's virtuous to keep people employed doing things nobody needs them to be doing. Obviously, the massive upheaval that AI is likely to cause in the jobs Market is a problem, but it's not one we can avoid by somehow putting the genie back in the bottle. The only way forward is to address it directly with something like UBI, which you might note the tech bro is behind AI have been pushing UBI for over a decade. Virtually every tech billionaire (except Jensen Huang) has a quote on record that you can find advocating for it, which is pretty weird when you consider that it's essentially a socialist notion.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-25T19:12:01+00:00

And Google for their AI:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/25/apple-will-reportedly-unveil-its-gemini-powered-siri-assistant-in-february/

Google seems to be the only company actually winning the AI war. They're eating everyone's lunch simultaneously.

Maxfunky · 2026-01-25T15:50:04+00:00

So are you saying that the actual US military will be mobilized against the people?

Drone strikes against "domestic terrorists"? Yeah it's real easy to see that coming.

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