Where I live, it’s a bathroom for other people’s dogs.

I’m gonna go patent Marxism lol. Maybe I’ll patent irony at the same time.

I mean, it’s bad coming from actual human beings involved in the funeral home business because you know that they absolutely do not really give a fuck in the slightest (not something I really hold against them because they have to be like that for their own sanity). But coming from AI is just next level awful.

I’m so thankful that I got to retire from the programming profession before this AI shit took over (although I did get to spend a couple of decades burdened by junior developers, which is basically the same thing). If I were still in the shit, I would use LLMs for their proper purpose: proving to management that I’m using AI.

My dad died last November and when I called the funeral home we’d picked out to come pick up his body, the answering service was fucking AI. It had a weird non-specific accent with strange background noises going on, and when it repeated my father’s name back for confirmation, it said “Robert common name R-O-B-E-R-T, Smith common name S-M-I-T-H.” I was like “WTF? Common name?” I’m still made at myself for not telling them to go fuck themselves and using a different funeral home. For bonus points, the funeral home owner (with the same last name as one of the characters in The Sopranos) kept cracking jokes when we met with him, and then he ghosted me for two weeks and finally delivered the urn with the ashes in it at 8 pm the night before the interment ceremony, leaving them on my porch and splitting before I could talk to him.

But the fucking AI thing was the worst. I keep replaying the “condolences” it offered in my head.

Bah. You’ll know he’s actually dead when it shows up on Polymarket.

Time is an infinite loop.

My fear is that they’ve already been doing this for a while now, with a combination of impersonators and deepfakes – and thus “Trump” will never die.

he conspired with Hanoi to sabotage LBJ

Oh, c’mon. Next you’ll be telling me Reagan conspired with Iran to sabotage Carter!

liberals are bloodthirsty warmongerers who worship Khorne

Excuse me? It’s spelled “Koɿ n”.

It’s not that strange an idea given the extent to which the pharmaceutical industry essentially bribes doctors to prescribe their drugs, or the frequency with which health care organizations defraud Medicare and insurance companies, fraud which often takes the form of unnecessary medical procedures. Blindly trusting any professional is the strange idea (I agree that constant distrust is probably unhelpful).

One time I was scrambling to finish my tax return on April 15th before midnight (they kept the post office drive-thru open until midnight back then) and couldn’t find my W-2s anywhere. I had also been without weed for weeks so I was pretty irritable. Finally I opened up the bottom drawer of one of my filing cabinets and found not only the W-2s but also a big bag of weed that I knew I had put in the top drawer but which had fallen down to the bottom drawer at some point. I naturally got baked as hell while finishing my return and then drove to the post office. I was so fucking high that I drove right past the dude who was collecting the returns by the front door with a “what the fuck are you lookin’ at?” expression on my face. I had to go around the loop again and the dude just smirked at me.

Fraud happens in red states, too, I guarantee it.

I worked as a programmer for a number of companies involved in the defense industry and government in Louisiana and Mississippi. It is nothing but fraud down there. Well, fraud and crawfish.

My mother does two things whenever I take her to a doctor’s appointment:

1. Complain to everyone if she has to wait even a few minutes for her appointment to start
2. Endlessly ask the doctor pointless questions, repeat herself over and over again with the preface “and as I said”, and generally babble so her own appointment goes long past its scheduled length

I used to live in Daytona and one day a shop opened up in a strip mall selling nothing but Super-Whippers. A Super-Whipper was a $1 plastic whisk. This shop had two metal trees in the windows, one loaded with a few white whisks and one with black. They were never open and there was a hand-written sign on the door that said “we’re closed – if you want a Super-Whipper, the salon next door has some”. They were less than a quarter mile away from three dollar stores and a Publix, all of which sold plastic whisks.

Maybe coastal Florida had some sort of severe, unmet demand for plastic whisks, but I remain skeptical of the legitimacy of this business.

I always thought Lemmings would have been cool if they had released a good level editor and let people design their own. Might have turned into something like crossword puzzles where it just became a continuing thing with endless variety.

He doesn’t get enough abuse for doing the Mussolini face at the same time.

That’s beyond the pale!

seeing how delicately the mortuary handled the event

I sure wish I’d had this experience with the funeral home I picked out when my dad died. I called them to arrange to pick up his body, and the answering service was AI and obviously so. I gave them his name and the voice read it back to me to confirm it as “Robert common name R-O-B-E-R-T, Smith common name S-M-I-T-H”. Then the owner ghosted me for more than a week and only delivered the urn with the ashes in the night before the internment at 8:00, left it outside and split before I could talk to him. 8 grand well spent.

There’s a commercial for Rocket Mortgage that runs during NBA games. It shows some schlub walking into his house with three bags of groceries while a voiceover says “those three bags of groceries used to be six bags”. Then the house starts talking and reminding him that he can take a second mortgage on his equity and use the money to buy groceries. The schlub becomes ecstatic and dances into the house. It’s astonishing that RM is able to convince people that taking on debt to pay for basic necessities is a great thing.