IT FUCKING BIT ME

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won't let you copy and paste:

We also forget that sometimes the "old things" we find fun, or at least not hard, are being experienced in a vacuum.

I love kneading my own bread by hand. I have very crackly knuckles, and the heft of the dough and the thickness as I pull the edges back in makes them feel better. Plus, I can put on some good music and knead in time, and it's fun.

....but once it's kneaded, braided, and rising I'll load the dishwasher and then sit down and have a cup of tea and a snack, and read or play a video game. If I'm feeling very productive I might throw a load in the washing machine. I might even take a nap!

Guess what my great-grandmother absolutely was not doing while her bread rose.

She was not napping. She was not playing games. She might be washing the dishes from making the dough, but her hands were in hot soapy water, not tossing a gel pack in a little holder and hitting a button and being done for two hours.

Once the bread was made the rest of dinner had to be started. No food processor for dicing or grating--she had to do it by hand and hope she didn't get cut. No premade pie crust or Shake'n'Bake--that stuff was being mixed by hand, rolled by hand, cut by hand.

If I was doing everything else the way she did it, I don't think I'd like kneading my own bread nearly as much as I do.

You cannot successfully understand why the fantasy is so ridiculous until you realize you're looking at ten minutes out of an entire day and calling it easy.

Sure, kneading bread is easy.

What about the other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes?

I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.

Absolutely never.

we genuinely do need to overcome this knee-jerk tendency to dismiss all generative AI content as slop if we ever hope to find the words to express why Copilot, specifically, sucks

I don't know if most people know this because most people probably don't work with microsoft licensing at any significant level but there are like a minimum of twenty different kinds of copilot and they all fucking suck and for the basic one they want as many people as possible to buy, you can only get it as a one-year commitment.

So I've got clients who have maybe wanted to try copilot for a month or two to see how it works who decide "hey fuck that" when I tell them that we can only do it in year long chunks.

I'm convinced that microsoft is doing this because copilot fucking blows and they know it and users mostly want to cancel after realizing they don't use it, but SO MANY people forget annual renewal dates that they just let it renew and get stuck with it again (because you can only cancel a microsoft license for 168 hours after renewal before you are locked in to whatever the term was, in this case one year).

A lot of people get caught up with how much they hate the useless AI features on Windows when the much bigger issue is that Microsoft is a predatory company that treats their users purely as a source of profit to exploit.