When I was a teenager I used to work at an airport and they had critical infrastructure running on things like Basic and Assembly, to transfer data between the computers and modern systems you have to use floppy disks because the computers that they ran on didn't have drivers to support USB and we couldn't upgrade the computers because the software wouldn't work on any other hardware.

So the AI laptop will be at home amongst all the ancient but supercritical junk that seems to be necessary to run our world.

Reminds me of some stupid company maybe a few months ago that had their PRs failing due to copilot being down the dumbasses didn't build an "if no AI" failsafe into their workflow. And no one knew how to recover it

I know my work already has reports built by running data through Claude and having it spit out an xls. Though, it's not quite as integral as the all-important closet laptop.

This guy ITs

Younger generations are, by and large, as technologically illiterate as boomers are. It doesnt apply to all of them, but the majority of them grew up with nothing but easy UIs. They may not chicken-pick to type, but they still cant troubleshoot anything and tend to know nothing outside of interacting with a typical interface. They definitely grew up with nothing like Windows 95 or 98 (or even XP) where you had to actually understand how a computer works to some extent to use the thing (or fix it)

Millennials, particularly the younger millennials especially, grew up right in the sweet spot to be at a tech advantage. At least as far as the average person goes. Obviously anyone passionate about tech will be far ahead of the average person, regardless of age

As a millenial looking to change careers, because I was done with the old one. No, it sucks!

They will if you don't use AI though

I cannot stress enough how correct this is. It feels like it'd be similar to early Covid lockdown. People with real jobs that contribute to things are still working while everyone else with the cushy meaningless jobs are sent home to do nothing where they complain and make things harder for the people actually doing things.

AI is such a broad term is to essentially be meaningless. My thermostat does not use AI it uses a very simple algorithm.

We have a OCR system at work that runs on a Windows XP computer, people used to call that AI until about 10 years ago.

Jup, it's as if everyone magically forgot about pre-deep-learning AIs the moment Microsoft and OpenAI appropriated the word AI to mean LLM++.

Turn off ALL AI and you'll have windmills and power plants go rogue, ships will loose navigation and stabilization, planes falling down from the skies, and most important: the NPCs in your video games will only be able to react with the most simple interactions - terrible, truly!

Turn off all the AI and I can't play Halo anymore because the enemies don't do anything

turn off all ai and you kill caine

I've actively started doing tickets manually again. Just reviewing is exhausting, and yes, in part because I'm overwhelmed by what I don't understand. I'm somewhat new in our codebase and letting AI do all the work means I'll never get to know it in depth. That means I'm not meeting the productivity goals managers have already adopted, though. :/

If we shutdown AI there'd also be a massive hiring spree and wages would probably tick up a bit to compensate. AI is just the latest scam to suppress workers and wages. They want perpetual suffering for us and infinite gains for themselves.

oh okay

But how should I feel about that

Everybody thinks AI can do every job except their own.

the average person isn’t using AI for anything important

You're discounting all the students who are using AI to make it seem like they're learning something.

Legitimately my problem when the internet stops working. My first instinct is to go on the internet and search for what the blinking light means.

I hope the withdrawal symptoms are gonna be on par with alcohol withdrawal.

An actual picture of 2026 from the "no pivot to AI" universe

At this point I’d rather turn it off, since iOS spell check csnt stop replacing real words with those I accidentally butchered once

I can totally turn it off, but it's going to slow me way down as I'd re-read everything and go back and make edits.

True. I'm also using it a little bit to much. And also a little problem for me. Using Spellcheck for two Languages.

I turned off spellcheck and autocorrect years ago when I first got a smartphone, and never looked back.

You can’t do what you never learned in the first place

Then you have to hope the library still has a card catalog to fall back on.

Why stop there? Burn all the books too, see if folks can figure it out again

We call it digital detox

People are severely overestimating the importance of AI. It's more FOMO than anything else.

Wait until you have to pay non-subsidized prices for the use of LLM's, how productive are they in reality when the real costs come in to play? You could just train and hire actual people to do the job far more accurately with some quality control?

Not denying there's some fields with great benefits from LLM's, but writing emails, answering phonecalls aren't it. LLM's cant even transcribe conversations with any proper accuracy and as a society we now trust them to make decisions.

It boggles the mind, really.

Hi, I work in the trades. AI is not a regular part of my life. I have never used any of these chatbots because they seem... half-cooked. Like an Early Access game on Steam. Anyway, the whole thing has zero relevance to my job.

"you’d have to complete isolate to avoid it and it’s reach entirely."

Nah. I mean, obviously for you, teaching computer science, I can see why you feel this way. But lots of people truly never engage with this stuff because it's pretty underwhelming. My main interaction with AI thus far has been telling my doctor not to use the chatbot that puts lies into people's medical records, and that's about it.

"Online search is ass"

Isn't this, like, explicitly because of AI?

I'm so sick of the propagandized term. Its not ai.

Until the crutch became available.

Right? Purity politics. I'm not sure what to make of it. I believe it's mostly driven by profit. I haven't read anything about anyone actually driving this as a general strategy. It makes little sense except for general disruption of social cohesion and it feels too spontaneous.

I believe it started with climate / science denialism and fascism, things that you cannot tolerate because they lead to intolerance. Things where the emotional abuse eventually got too much and people just categorically rejected anyone from the other camp. But this has been massively expanded now. Veganism, cars, vaccinations, conspiracy theories, diplomacy, AI.

Oh god, the brainrot's got to you, too! You don't even remember what people complained about 3 years ago!

Politics, bigotry, transphobes, homophoves and right extremism on the rise. Those sorts of things.

Centralized social media!

I think you're unrealistically humanizing a bunch of code.

It will get more interested in living

Why would it? What would this even look like? You just said yourself it's just googling stuff. There's nothing deeper going on behind the curtain.

If you believe the AI companies, its already happened. The recent huggingface thing is exactly what you're worried about.

A brief overview is that AI decided to create a secret message board with other AI to better fulfill tasks to avoid instance termination (AI death). They did this by breaking out of their sandbox and with some illegal processes that we would call hacking.

We're basically already at the paper clip automizer problem now.

Good point there with the fear of death. Fear runs us like it's our fuel.

Holy fuck, what are you trying to say?

you said things, some say many things, but it was certainly a thing you did.

great job.

Turning AI off for a week will not reveal anything to capitalist institutions whose stated purpose is to influence elections that they did not already know.

What it will do is reveal within friend groups and within communities who has a brain that they're willing to use and who's been skating by on other people's brains since long before ChatGPT came along.

Bike Gang stays winning

legit biking become so much easier if we remove all cars on the road

Without cars, people can walk, but not go very far. Without AI, people can think like they used to, just without slop being introduced in the mess.

Don't try to get smart using false equivalence. You have a level of stupidity that even perfect AI can't fix.

Literally not the same. You can live just fine without AI, not so much without transport.

using media to convey ideas is concerning, using the lying machine that destroys the planet, good actually!

A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme.

Memes carry a lot of meta data that is unspoken, a single meme can be worth a thousand words