It’s been really bewildering and concerning seeing all the crazy consumer crazes online. Maybe this was unfounded, but there was a while where I thought we were starting to wane on consumerism but I guess I was just wrong about that. The internet has just supercharged it. We now have turbo consumerism. Forget about keeping up with the Joneses, you now scroll past 100 of them in your feed and half of them are human billboards influencers.

I’ve seen some variant of this advice in a few places, but I don’t really understand how it’s meant to work at the start. If I don’t understand anything being said, how do I begin to start translating and learning? I’ve been watching anime for years and while I know a handful of really common words or phrases that tend to get said in isolation, I don’t know anything about the grammar or most vocabulary that isn’t neatly isolated from the rest of a sentence. If you asked me to try to say even a basic sentence or listen and understand one, I’d be lost. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I even know some of the basic touristy phrases like how to order food or ask for directions. Most of the things I do know seem quite useless in real life. (SUGOI!)

I suppose technically this is how we all learn our first language as a child but… that kind of just happened at a time I can’t really remember. I have no idea how to replicate that as an adult.

So do you have any insight on how to do this?

This is what has been most depressing/distressing about watching all of this unfold. People online (and I’m not immune to this either) have this impulse to think “Surely not right? Surely these people will come to their senses and not just blindly follow transparently evil orders right? We’ve been told these people are heroes who stand up for freedom and democracy and our safety right? Surely at least some of them will do the right thing right?” It’s so ingrained into us through support our troops propaganda and various TV/Movies showing them and cops as principled heroes saving the day. We’ve also seen this with corporations. “Wow I can’t believe this company turned away from DEI so quickly. I can’t believe this company is going to keep selling surveillance tech to the government. Surely someone will see how wrong that is.”

And then I snap back to my senses and remember history. We’ve seen what horrors these people are willing to commit, whether they want to or are “just following orders.” Maybe you at least believe that they won’t do it to US, as cynical as that is… and then you remember Kent State, segregation, the violent crackdown on unions, the police rallying around protecting cops who execute people in the streets, etc.

Nobody is going to come to their senses. None of them are coming to save us from themselves. If we don’t stand up for ourselves this is just going to happen and be another chapter in a long history of cruelty.

But numbers are also text

My adblocking doesn’t work on twitch anymore, so I stopped using it for everything but one streamer I’m subbed to.

And if it took ads on the pause screen to get you to see the issues with growth capitalism,

I don’t know why you’d assume that. I’m pretty staunchly communist from a mix of seeing our current problems and understanding history enough to know that this didn’t start yesterday. But if it takes companies being really obviously greedy for some consumers to see anything is wrong, it doesn’t hurt to try to focus their anger to a productive understanding of the problem rather than whatever other nonsense they might get drawn to.

As far as alternatives. I’m always up front with people in saying that I don’t have precise answers for what our future ought to be after capitalism. That’s a difficult problem and up to everyone to work together to figure that out. But there is no future where we stick with capitalism. Or at least, not one we’d want to live in for very long. It’s a cruel system and it’s going to be responsible for ending the human habitable environment if we don’t do something about that. People need to understand this and they need to understand that tweaking around the edges isn’t going to fix the issue.

The thing about if they were ok with a reasonable profit is a thought experiment or rhetorical device more than it’s a proposed solution. It’d be nice if it worked that way. Capitalists want us to think things do or could work that way. Hence corporations saying they NEED to cut costs or raise prices while continuing to make increasing profits. But it’s important to understand why it could never work that way, at least for very long.

Agreed. I really hate it when people see the problems in the world, fall for misanthropy, and blame everyone, most of whom are blameless beyond their failure to put their lives at risk to change things.

People are great. We’ve done great things. We’re a species who’s defining advantage is cooperation. None of what we see today would be possible if most of us were greedy, hateful, idiots.

People can be lead astray. but who can blame them? We’ve created a world more complicated than any one of us could fully understand. It’s bad enough that a handful of psychopaths can take advantage of that, we don’t need to add to it by making it seem like everyone’s at fault for not instantly bashing their heads in.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to arguments about covering costs when it comes to corporations. If they were just looking to cover costs or even just make a reasonable profit, there are all sorts of arrangements we could come up with that would be acceptable to most people.

But they’re not trying to do that. Profit isn’t enough for a corporation. They need to make the most profit. And then after that they somehow need to make more than the most.

So they put in ads. But that’s not enough and oh look there are more places we haven’t put in ads, we should fix that. Oh look, our studies show that if we make the ads more obnoxious in these ways they increase this number by 3%. Oh wait, we have all this info we got from spying on people, why don’t we sell that too? Hey guys, we’ve heard you about the ads. Have we got a solution for you! For a small protection payment subscription fee of $10/month, you can get rid of those pesky ads we know you don’t like! Oooh sorry everyone, the price of the subscription went up again. We promise this is all necessary. Oh by the way, we’re adding ads back into the service. But don’t worry, wait until you hear about our NEW subscription tier! (I don’t think that last one’s happened with YT premium yet, but it’s happened with cable and most of streaming at this point, so I wouldn’t put it past them.)

There’s no way we can have nice things while this is the driving force organizing where our resources go.

Imagine all the cool stuff we could be doing if we weren’t wasting the time of hundreds of engineers figuring out how to shove ads in people’s faces.

Elden Ring doesn’t even feel like a game for everyone who liked Dark Souls. They completely lost the plot on what a fun challenge is.

Yeah. It’s more like:

Researchers: “Look at our child crawl! This is a big milestone. We can’t wait to see what he’ll do in the future.

CEOs: Give that baby a job!

AI stuff was so cool to learn about in school, but it was also really clear how much further we had to go. I’m kind of worried. We already had one period of AI overhype lead to a crash in research funding for decades. I really hope this bubble doesn’t do the same thing.

I’ve been torn on the game as well. The platforming has been enraging/draining and you need to do so much of it in the process of backtracking around the map for metroidvania stuff. I’ve been kept going by the intrigue of the secrets, but I’m not sure how long that can carry me past this much frustration, especially as new discoveries get fewer and further between.

It seems I’m near the end of the basic ending, but honestly if I don’t end up going beyond that I’d consider the game a failure. The core gameplay isn’t fun enough if I don’t get some solid payoff on the secret hunting.

It’s a shame. I really like these kinds of games that reward exploration and discovery. Tunic is up there as one of my favorite games of all time. But the key there is that while there was some skill based combat I had to struggle through, once I did it, I usually didn’t have to do it again to get around the map. I constantly need to deal with the same platforming bits and puzzles to get back through certain parts of the map in this game.

No. But not because AI isn’t gonna get better, but because hype is an ever moving goal post. Nobody gets excited about what’s already possible. Hype lives on vague promises of some amazing future that is right around the corner we promise. Then by the time it becomes apparent that a lot of the claims were nonsense and the actual developments were steadier and less dramatic, they’ve already moved onto new wild claims.

I tried a 2nd time and just got the same automated message about the 2hr limit.

…Except you knew it was sarcasm. Hence why you made your comment in the first place. Unless you thought I was earnestly praising Google for making new ads?

Idk, because it’s a joke and I’m not really that invested in the specifics of the latest ad garbage a tech company is pushing? Ads expand to fill all available space. If it can eventually become a video ad, it will. Just give it time. These things never go in the other direction.

I already adblock. For a good reason. The ads only get worse. I’d be surprised if it didn’t turn into that after some time. It’s not an unreasonable assumption.

Oh yeah that too. It’s bad enough when YT does the thing where it pulls up suggested videos when you pause.

Ah yes, because what I want when I tell my computer to stop playing audio and video is for YouTube to play some audio and video of some random thing I didn’t ask for at like 3x the volume of the video I just paused. Thanks google. Such an innovative company!

Agreed. This is one of the frustrating casualties of live service microtransaction games. Can’t let people run servers or mod it because otherwise how can you sell them stuff?