Yes it feels awful to me. Seems like every Chromium and Electron app is sluggish and choppy, and as someone who uses Brave, VSCode, and Slack all day I am straight up not having a good time. Hopefully it gets resolved soon. This is on an M1 MBP Pro with 32GB ram.
I worked retail many years ago. I found the required fake cheer rather horrid. I was good at it, and every now and then I'd have an interesting chat. But I prioritized moving people through _fast_, because they didn't come to chat with me, they came to buy their stuff.
It might depend on the store. I used to get stuck behind cashiers and customers who obviously knew each other and would get into long conversations while I stood there waiting.
I too worked retail and dreaded having another interaction of forced/fake pleasantries, pretending to give a damn about what the customer wanted. Give me a digitized interaction or give me death.
My wife has like a 230 day streak in Duolingo and every time I speak any Spanish to her (I'm like early intermediate level maybe) she doesn't understand. She's just hooked on making number go up.
Duolingo is kind of garbage.
As a native french, for fun, I tried to quickly finish the whole french course. I quit well before halfway. Duolingo would refuse perfectly fine sentences. The accepted answers aren't flexible enough.
I didn't try english though.
Esperanto is super easy if you speak both french and english. But man there is less content on the internet than klingon...
Check out Dreaming Spanish, hours and hours and hours of free comprehensible input content, and then some premium content on top of that when you run out. It's been great for my listening comprehension.
I think the motivation here is that Twitter is charging about half a million dollars a year for access to their API when it was previously either free or close to free.
There are likely a ton of tools that are using the Twitter API in ways that helps Twitter and almost all of them are going to be locked out because there's no way they can afford $42,000/mo.
I'm on a slack channel of (mostly former by now) developers using the Twitter API, and the general feeling is that Twitter is dead for most. A few lucky ones are able to afford the new 42k/m price point, and everyone else has been kicked out without any respect by Twitter, and won't be coming back.
Plus with hedonic adaptation most people won't even feel happier or less stressed after they get used to the lifestyle (unless they're coming from levels of poverty that leave you with a high baseline level of stress at all times)
I personally don't want someone to clone my voice without my permission and then use it to make money. I imagine many people feel the same way.
I agree that I would prefer to move to a society where we don't have to work, but do you honestly think we're moving in that direction? We'll get the "there's no work" part, but not the "and here's some money" part.
I'm not advocating for a world where we don't have to work, more for a world where we only work on stuff that produces value.
I wouldn't worry about that work not existing. At the very least, with the population declining we'll need people to take care of the elderly and I don't think we're anywhere close to automating health care providers. Humans always seem to find more work to do.
Money largely gains its value from its ability to be used to pay taxes. If there is someone who controls land and an army and says "this is valuable and you have to pay a certain amount to me at certain intervals" then it is valuable, at least within that political configuration.
> Money largely gains its value from its ability to be used to pay taxes.
Even for contemporary fiat currencies today this is neither historically nor theoretically true. Currencies gain their value largely from being convenient in settling trades and being a measure of value when calculating costs, risks and profits. Ultimately, it does not really matter what this money is based on e.g. gold, paper or digital information.
For anybody interested in this perspective and in a more general criticism of fiat money I strongly recommend reading "Ethics of Money Production" by Jörg Guido Hülsmann. (1)
