Now you got me remembering my 2MHz “big board” Z80 computer I put together in the 80s from a kit. First computer I ever owned. On first power-up nothing seemed to happen, then I turned up the monitor brightness and a choir of angels sang.

Brodie’s, eh? I’m intrigued and will try!

Another recent favorite of mine is Thompson’s Titanic Tea. Very full flavor. Big picture of the ship on the label, but only because their grandfather’s tea shop in Dublin was “a stone’s throw” from the shipyard.

Now and then I enjoy a cup of Lipton with a lot of milk in it, because the flavor reminds me of childhood. My mom called it “Cambridge tea”.

How many lights do you see?

I still do. At one job my manager said, “Don’t forget your coffee,” that I had left on his desk, and I proudly said, That’s not coffee, it’s Tea, Earl Grey, Hot." He took a closer look and said, “It doesn’t look like tea, Earl Grey, hot.” I replied, “It has milk, two percent, cold.” Sigh, you don’t see days like that anymore.

The system that’s trying to dumb you down LOVES when you really believe an image can tell you everything you need to know.

Keep thinking that way, and don’t forget your Brawndo!

“One math, please!”

Loo-seeeeeeee!!! You got some splainin’ to dooo!

And then the teabag last?

You use so much milk and so little cereal that the cereal would float?

Teabag and sugar, then drown it in a scalding stream of boiling water.

I’m a 40-year software dev. Looks like we’re having two different arguments. I approached the “no AI” rule as a prohibition against using AI to pass a software dev competency test, not to write a cover letter. I haven’t used AI myself in coding, but several of my colleagues - also with decades experience - use it routinely, and according to them it’s very helpful. Since a software dev for an AI company would presumably be writing code, is it a stretch to assume AI coding tools would be used in that work? Incidentally, although I’ve never worked on an AI project I’ve been reading about AI and expert systems since the late 1980s, but that doesn’t seem relevant to the discussion. Anyway, there’s no need for condescension or insults - they never really make a point except about the speaker.

The evidence is all right there in HuNtEr’S LaPtOp ! ! !

I get it! Kyle Rittenhouse didn’t kill anybody, fast-moving bullets did!

Well said! Many companies have the attitude, “You’re lucky we let you have this job, and we can take it away any time!” And many employees totally believe it, no matter how talented they are. But you can’t live other people’s lives for them. After switching to contract work my only regret was that occasionally there were people I wished I could have worked with longer. But that’s life.

I actually took a google screening test around 2010, and they did call me back to go to the next step, which was kind of an ego boost. Other things came up and I never followed through, so no idea if they would have hired me or not. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Again, AI doesn’t do anything, any more than hammers and saws build houses. People use AI to do things. Anyway, profiting from investors and speculators without giving creators a piece of the action isn’t a consequence of AI, it’s how our whole system already works.

Stripping away your carefully crafted wording, the differences fade away. “Hitting a randomizer” until usable ideas come out is an equally inaccurate description of either human creativity or AI. And again, the contention is that using AI violates copyright, not how it allegedly does that.

I guess some people get off on go team go, but to me looking at market share is very corporate thinking. If lemmy is better than reddit (which I think it is) it will just naturally grow, which is great. Whet I’m cheering for is that developers of federated platforms are slowly taking social media away from the business world by doing it better for free - whether that turns out to be lemmy or some other software.

The issue being raised is copyright infringement, not the quality of the results. Writers “borrow” each other’s clever figures of speech all the time without payment or attribution. I’m sure I have often copypasted code without permission. AI does nothing on its own, it’s always a tool used by human beings. I think the copyright argument against AI is built on a false distinction between using one tool vs another.

My larger argument is that nobody has an inherent right to control what everybody else does with some idea they’ve created. For many thousands of years people saw stuff and freely imitated it. Oh look, there’s an “arch” - I think I’ll build a building like that. Oh look, that tribe uses that root to make medicine, let’s do the same thing. This process was known as “the spread of civilization” until somebody figured out that an authority structure could give people dibs on their ideas and force other people to pay to copy them. As we evolve more capabilities (like AI) I think it’s time to figure out another way to reward creators without getting in the way of improvement, instead of hanging onto a “Hey, that’s Mine!” mentality that does more to enrich copy producers than it does to enrich creators.