I’ve worked at big software companies long enough to know how this would play out as a bug. Users report the issue. Engineers think oh thats a simple fix. However this is Google so it’s likely these tickets are triaged in a way that someone like a project manager has visibility into it before deciding to dedicate time into it.
the project manager asks “is this a bug, though?” not because of homophobia but because they want to know how many users experience this as being an incorrect suggestion vs a valid suggestion. so they call the data scientists in and run some queries, and lo and behold because there’s more straight couples in the world of course the data shows this is only affecting a very small amount of users. this is working fine for most users.
but the engineers and other stakeholders point out why this isnt as simple as what the data days and it’s more of a UX thing. call the project managers in for whoever’s in charge of like, grammar analysis and not just the system that flags it. an epic is created in jira. meetings are scheduled. don’t forget experts in other languages
five weeks later you’re running an A/B test on not correcting users when they write “his husband” to see if DAUs drop when your grammar suggestion engine considers that gay people can be married
Car-to-car communications are developed so that cars can negotiate manoeuvres on the road
Someone (let’s face it: GM) adds a transaction system so that you can pay someone to get out of your lane if you’re in a hurry
Navigation systems are used to implement a stock market trading convenience and speed in real time on the road
People realize that if you cause traffic you can be paid to get out of the way
Grifters form into roving packs that intentionally slow down traffic to extract tolls from cars
As a result, commuters group cars together and pool funds to purchase passage through swarms of grifters at a lower overall cost
Major corridors consisting of large packs moving together become the only viable way to navigate even moderately sized roads and all highways.
Size competition between grifter packs and commuter packs, commuters start scheduling coordinated travel between population centers so that a large enough pack can be formed to outcompete grifters
oops that’s a train
OP, this is a brilliant demonstration of how
a) science fiction writers work out story ideas per Theodore Sturgeon’s edict to “Ask the next question,” and
b) how late-stage capitalism creates cyberpunk dystopias
ALT
The future…is now.
Oh of COURSE it’s a Honda Insight. The legendary hypermiler has found another way to reduce fuel costs: make someone else pay for it!
So just into Just Cause 4 and there’s a settlement created out of shipping containers stuffed into a huge crevasse-spanning bridge
which reminded me of William Gibson’s Bridge trilogy (and the Johnny Mnemonic movie, even though the short story was set in the Sprawl trilogy)
and at first I was wondering “wait, is there a real place these were both based off of? I thought Gibson based the bridge on Kowloon Walled City”
And then I realized that Virtual Light predated the game by 25 goddamn years and is old and famous enough to inspire other artworks in its own right
BONUS: the “setting” paragraph from Virtual Light’s wikipedia page:
The setting is California in 2006,[4] part of a dystopian world where the middle class has essentially evaporated leaving only multinational corporations and their exorbitantly rich elite and the poor who are mostly security officers, couriers, or otherwise work in minor service positions. Many of the poor live illegally and entirely outside the normal economy in places like The Bridge engaged in dubious enterprises such as theft, drugs, weapons, gambling, prostitution, and operation of unlicensed restaurants and doctor’s offices. Others pursue livelihood in innocuous yet unregulated commerce such as by running antique shops and barbershops.
It’s literally exactly what it looks like: eighty pages of improperly sourced photos of
Boeing CH-47 Chinook
military transport
helicopters and/or chinstrap penguins, run through a shitty Photoshop edge detection filter to produce a crude facsimile of a colouring book.
I cannot conceive of who this benighted thing’s intended target audience is.
Well, apart from me, apparently. I feel privileged to have a friend who took one look at something so objectively awful and immediately thought “Dave would love that” – because so help me, I do love it. Unironically, even.
I could imagine this being marketed to boys, but not to adults.
The fact that “Chinook” and “chinstrap” are adjacent to each other in an alphabetical list implies to me that this is a procedurally generated coloring book series with thousands of entries.
Well, of course. Somebody wrote an algorithm to steal photos from Google Image Search and other zero-cost sources, run them through a series of Photoshop filters, and package them up into “coloring books”. They then dumped an alphabetised list of animal names into it and walked away, and human oversight was either too absent or too indifferent to pick up on the fact that all of the top image search results for “chinook” were for aircraft rather than fish – and the result is a shitty colouring book full of deep fried JPEG artifacts with the utterly inexplicable subject matter pairing of cute penguins and military transport helicopters. Like, this is it. This is the inassailable culmination of everything deep-fried memes aspire to be, and it was devised by a brainless machine. We live in the stupidest cyberpunk future, and it is awesome.
checked out of the supermarket today, March Umptyump 2018, and the checkout guy (younger and hipper than me) noticed I had [skincare product] but suggested if that doesn’t work wrap the inner skin of [produce also in my cart] to my flesh and bandage it overnight for three nights
you just speak things into existence now and they come true through the power of like (metal gear rising voice) memes or the cybernetic basilisk or whatever. it is indistinguishable from magic and people are not respecting this power. this, this, the florida arming teachers thing
i know you all wanted shadowrun magic where you get to like shoot energy bolts or do clairvoyance or whatever but this is the shitty cyberpunk future so these are the inscrutable powers we have to work with
Today I walked into the technology repair shopfront that has a beton brut/raw wood esthetic with 80s computers in the waiting area and while the guy replaced my iPhone screen I watched these two guys
Bellied Slav in a neo-tracksuit and balding Korean in floppy Nike style, jeans too long and turned up to show a different color inside
talk with the neo-tinker repair bro, them both Amazon contract workers talking about how now Amazon wouldn’t recognize their lazily jailbroken phones, about all the tricks warehouse and delivery people use to steal packages
ALT
