The Ever-Receding Pocket

At a previous job there was a museum/display to the previous era of how they produced the newspaper.

It has the last master plate, and some photos of how it all looked on the last day. There is a photo of a technician sweeping up on presumably the last day before the plant was shut down. He looked distraught

Most of those people retired.

The young ones didn't get as gooder jobs, because the system they had mastered was replaced by a different more efficient one.

80% of my skillset has been automated away. However I am lucky in that I have high scale HPC/web experience that is not that readily available in the training set. but for how long?

My backup plans involve being a machinist, but there isn't much scope for that (even though I am a reasonable CNC/CAM operator) There is electrical engineering, but that too is not far away from significant upheaval (well more than being completely outsourced to china)

I am being replaced, by heartless feudalists, and there is shit all I can do to stop it.

    It feels so surreal watching all these things. People are still going to work. People are still planning vacations. And you know what. Maybe they are right and I am wrong. Maybe in their lifetimes, they won’t see any meaningful changes.

i am so desperate for people to properly title articles about ai because as it stands i feel i am quite literally being clickbaited by them

i always think "oh boy a brief reprieve from the ai hellscape discourse" only to find myself stepping on the ai-enabled rake like I'm sideshow bob.

At this point I have to operate under the assumption that if the title of an article or blogpost isn't 100% clear its likely just yet another piece of AI slop trying its hardest to "not be like the other girls".

Me: "Claude, give me a fair taxation system that supports a balanced budget in a debt-free federal government."

Claude: "Dude. Do I look like Lloyd Schumer[1]? Lay off the dope, son."

[1] Via Grok, since Google has chosen to forget this:

Lloyd Schumer (also spelled Schumner or similar variants; sometimes referenced with “Sr.”) is a fictional character from The Onion, the satirical news site. He was presented as the byline author of their classic absurdist horoscopes: a “retired machinist and A.A.P.B.-certified astrologer.”