• s38b35M5@lemmy.worldEnglish
    28·
    2 days ago

    I already forgot where I got this, but… Yeah.

    Be sure to use AI when making your next, I don’t know, meal plan, for example. Definitely do not call your friend who loves to cook and ask her for her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals, because you will end up talking for longer than you had hoped, hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or even what she’s planted in her spring garden and then lost with the early frost.

    And be sure to use AI when planning that next camping trip, the last one you will take with this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail, because you might end up texting back and forth for the rest of the day or even meeting up late for a beer and hearing how he has ended each recent night black-out drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how his cousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe just that he repaired his own washing machine and is pretty damn proud of that.

    And be sure to use AI when your next child gets married, so that you can write them the perfect toast or poem or speech or song because no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent (you) who changed hundreds of diapers for said child or fed them in the middle of the night from your actual body. Or cried when they were late home because you were positive they were dead. We don’t want those words—we’d prefer the sterile words of a machine that never lived, never had an original thought, never felt the pain of miscarriage or broken relationships or the joy of a friendship restored or of seeing spring’s first robin dancing on frost.

    And be sure to use AI when working on your next book or essay or piece of art or photography, and then smile or even laugh at your own cleverness when you see how good it is, and how easy, because who the hell has time to work at something, to give time to craft, to create with their own minds, to spend years being mediocre. Why do that when mastery, or at least competency is so simple only a good prompt away?

    How magnificent the funeral song our children or contemporaries will write for us, a song they will make by taking our obituary and Facebook posts, plus random quotes from our algorithm, and feeding them into Chat or Gemini or Claude. The tears that will fall in the face of such sanitary sweetness!

    Be sure to use AI

    and while you do I’ll be over here in my 50th year, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest, my arm falling asleep because I dare not move lest I scare away this moment, lying here melancholy about my older children moving out and my middle children no longer needing me, at least not like they used to, weary about this body that fails me now in ever increasing ways that will never be restored. Sighing over stories I tried to write but never hit the page the way they felt in my mind.

    But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend, the natural order of things?

    the longing for something that could always be a bit better

    or the way that anything worth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful, especially at first

    or hearing another human voice and somehow realizing the beauty of life is found in all of these subtle imperfections

  • uuj8za@piefed.socialEnglish
    58·
    3 days ago

    The whole speech is actually pretty good. He struck a chord when he said:

    Make sure your offline world is better than your online one.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
    15·
    2 days ago

    I’ve seen his speech everywhere. I’m kinda surprised they had him do the speech, or they just didn’t know what they were getting when they signed him on. He’s not the typical speaker they have. Sure, some speakers have historically sorta strayed from conventional paths to take a few shots at social issues, but it’s most always reeled back in to “you are the future” niceties.

    Ronny just unapologetically ripped on all kinds of issues.

    It was great.

  • heartSagan5@lemmy.zip
    3·
    2 days ago

    These are really good jabs. And I wholeheartedly agree. Also, some people delegate to AI and their skills shrivel like raisins.

  • thesdev@feddit.org
    55·
    3 days ago

    Well said. I can share it with exactly zero people around me though as that would destroy the relationship.

  • LSNLDN@slrpnk.net
    12·
    3 days ago

    Awwww man fuck the UK government and their stupid online safety act, can’t watch this vid cos they’ve scared off lemmy.zip from being accessed in UK :(

    • teft@piefed.socialEnglish
      71·
      2 days ago

      Becoming a lib? John Stewart has been very liberal since he first aired. His whole shtick with colbert was he was the lib to colbert’s fake over the top conservative persona.

    • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
      41·
      2 days ago

      The Ellison’s had to go like $89 billion into debt to make this merger,

      Not really. They have the money. It’s not like they borrowed it from the bank, and now they have to make a go of this new business, or the family goes bankrupt, and the kids can’t go to college. They’ve probably already replaced the money they spent.

      You’re thinking like a regular person. It’s not like they really spent money on anything. They made a deal to acquire an enormous revenue stream. Is it really spending money, when you convert a few billion dollars into trillions of dollars until the end of time?

      • howrar@lemmy.ca
        3·
        2 days ago

        In regular people terms, it’s like if I saved up $100 and spent it to buy shares of an index fund. Yeah, it’s going to take a while to make back the money I spent, but those $100 didn’t just disappear. I can sell those shares and get back approximately what I originally spent on it.