I’m sure Orwell didn’t really expect telescreens to become a real thing, but we have very literally welcomed surveillance devices into our lives and homes. Now, it’s just a matter of who starts actively using them as a monitoring device.

I am old enough to appreciate that reference.

Every case of a random person hiring a “hitman” that I have heard of has, in fact, been someone hiring an undercover cop. And the people soliciting the services went to jail for a good long while.

There’s a big cake mix manufacturing plant near where I grew up, and I knew a lot of people who worked there. They all confirmed that the only difference between the name brand cake mix and the store brand they made was the box they put it into at the end of the process.

That’s because there will alway be new 10-year-olds who are just discovering “new” parts of the Internet. They are growing up with the enshittification, so they don’t know that things were better before they were born.

A lot of my favorites have already been mentioned, but I don’t see “Caper” yet.

“Thanks for stopping by; thanks for breaking my cow lamp,” is still common parlance in our household.

And “The Cheat Is Not Dead” is a classic Strongbad hit.

I wonder what would happen if the world found out that Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone (or any other celebrity/athlete/role model) was using Chat GPT to respond to fan mail. My gut feeling is that people would find it disingenuous at best – and there would probably be significant outrage.

Where’s the AI that does my dishes and cleans my house so I have more time to write, create, and connect with others? That’s the technology I want – not one that does the meaningful part and leaves the menial stuff up to me.

The convicted felon?

We also would have accepted Rusty Shackleford.

For real. Every time I’m scrolling through a news article and I see a rectangle with an X in the upper-right corner, my initial reaction is, “Oops. Ad. Scroll past.” I’m quite certain I’ve missed some embedded tweets that way.

This is something I wish that more people understood. In almost any other democracy in the world, Bernie Sanders is only slightly left of center. On a global scale, US Democrats are a center-right party and US Republicans are a far-right party. There are no successful left-wing politicians in the United States.