Shared today on BlueSky — apparently this is the result of asking ChatGPT to illustrate what its core values are. So, there’s probably not much cause to be worried that ChatGPT is going to steal your job, because most jobs out there require communicating in, well, *a* language, and not some weird babble invented by randomly throwing syllables together.
I wonder if he ended up getting the job! (via BlueSky)
The footwear world was stunned today at the announcement that Donald Trump is now making self-branded clown shoes. Have a look, they really look even worse than you think they will.
Trump launches a sneaker line (NBC News)
This week’s weird aviation episode involves… maggots. I kid you not.
Delta flight forced back to Amsterdam after maggots fall onto passenger (CNN)
This year’s biggest scandal doesn’t involve anyone named “Trump” for once. The 2023 Hugo Awards has been hit with such strong and well-documented allegations of vote fraud and vote rigging that many prominent sci-fi authors are questioning whether that organization will be able to survive at all going forward.
Check it out the whole story here (boingboing.net).
How bad is the US health care “system” that it’s pretty much become a meme?
This sign makes me want to open this very store in my city…
I was laid off from my job recently.
Apparently I have lots of company there. The big tech giants all decided to spontaneously lay off thousands of people at once, so that there is now a surplus of roughly 250,000 IT professionals who “became available” all at once. Frankly if the IT industry as a whole was trying to make sure to fuck over these people as hard as possible, well, they could hardly have done better.
In previous layoffs I’ve been fairly stoic. In most cases it was easy to see things coming — in one case I was working for a company that everyone knew was slowly but surely going out of business. In another a company I worked for was bought by a venture capitalist firm that didn’t seem to have much idea what we did or what to do with us. But this time is different. I’m not so stoic. There really was no reason to have layoffs, and the company I was working for, Microsoft, is not dying or even losing money.
In short, there was no reason for these layoffs. Microsoft just went ahead with it because other companies were doing it too.
To be honest, I feel betrayed. Only a few days before the axe came down the team I worked for was told that these layoffs were something we “didn’t have to worry about”. Well, that was clearly bullshit. It seriously leaves me with the feeling that in this last job I ended up trusting people I shouldn’t have trusted. People whom I thought had my back. Guess I was too naive to realize that they were holding knives behind theirs.
Anyway, I guess the lesson to be learned here is that IT is an industry that’s now well within the hands of parasite capitalists, amoral beasts who justify every action in terms of share prices. Employees? who cares? they’re just “human resources”. Cannon fodder. Nothing more.