Can y’all IT people please stop with the condescending “you don’t know how stupid people are about computers”, it seems like there is always one of you showing up in a comment thread to tell us that we can’t have the future literally all of us want including you all as well… because WE are too stupid and lazy about computers.

I helped a grown ass human who was my age at 40yo how to install a Firefox extension.

Were you as condescending to them in person as you are being in referencing them right now? Why is not knowing how to install a Firefox extension some indicator of foreclosure on the possibility of that person becoming computer literate along whatever metrics you define? There are plenty of smart people out there who can learn how to use a computer for very complex tasks who have just simply never learned about extensions for Firefox. This is a very feasible and normal reality.

Do you know how to change the oil on your car yourself? Do simple plumbing jobs? Could you run a classroom of middle schoolers and keep them all focused while keeping your eye on the shy sad kid in the back who tends to disappear if you don’t engage them? What about basic healthcare changes or cooking? What about outdoor work or basic small engine maintenance? Do you even know shit about the most basic species of trees in your backyard? Do you know the species of songbirds you often hear outside your window? Do you even pay attention to that? Do you know how to drive a dirt bike extremely fast on a rough dirt road? Do you know how to adjust for the violent explosive power of turbo lag in a car with a turbocharger so that torque oversteer doesn’t launch you off the road? Do you know how to sew and repair basic garments? To weave? Can you even fish? Like could you literally even just catch a fish to save your life right now if I handed you a fishing rod unassembled with no instructions?

My point is, don’t go looking for confirmation of how stupid or lazy people are or how limited their capacity is to evolve and grow by casting the shapes of their ignorance onto the floor and trying to read some magic language from that.

Maybe they don’t know because they are hopelesssly stupid, but maybe not? If they are intelligent and they don’t know computers then those are the perfect people to teach linux. Then it is their first language instead of windows, many linux distro are perfectly fine for this at this point.

See here is the bottom line, legions of IT people show up online always arguing they think they know that the average person is too dumb, lazy and uninterested in computers for Linux adoption to seriously take off in the personal computer market and challenge Microsoft, but y’all don’t know shit about humans. You are experts in computers who think that makes you experts in human potential.

Go take some theater classes (or get an degree in education) and get educated before you start drawing conclusions about people when you really haven’t spent time closely studying how people engage with their potential and what situations facilitate that in basic human interaction and framing of conversations (both literal and abstract).

I’m sorry if I snapped at you but I think it is existentially important to recognize here that we don’t know what people are capable of, you can’t know the essential capacity of people to change, don’t try to predict it. Focus on creating the material opportunity for change and the rest may follow depending on what people desire, no matter to us, we desire to create that positive opportunity for change because it is the right thing to do, not because we like the future growth charts of the things we believe are important and vital.

Windows Phone was never given a chance to pan out. There wasn’t space for Windows Phone to force its way on the scene when it finally began to fire on all cylinders as a smartphone OS but they were building a critical mass of loyal users that would have set up Microsoft longterm to successfully exploit the opportunity to when it came.

It is wild to me that upper management at Microsoft was too dumb to understand that and just killed their perfectly good apparatus for gaining a foothold on the mobile market. Simply put a tech company that large should always be thinking seriously about maintaining a practical entrance to an industry as important to their bottom line as this.

They are fools and they ultimately threw mud in the face of the small amount of windows phone fans (of which there definitely were loyal fans especially for the great Nokia cameras and extremely focused UI) who could have delivered that initial burst of energy and excitement/growth when the opportunity eventually did come. Thus they have actually sealed and barricaded the door to Microsoft ever EVER being in the mobile space since they betrayed ALL of the early adopter nerds who would have stuck around for the rough beginning.

Hell yeah, it is so much easier than it used to be right?

How was your experience?

Any tips for someone who might be about to do the same?

Did you create a ritual pyre of Microsoft jewel cases and old manuals and stuff and burn it while dancing around it chanting burnnn babyyy burnnn?

If MS is overinvesting to ride the AI hype as a middle man, while letting their core business capabilities (Windows and Office) decline, they will be in trouble in the long term.

They aren’t just overinesting in AI, they are foreclosing the future of programming and software design as a prestigious, respectable and valuable career.

It doesn’t matter if the AI works or not, it just matters that programmers sat there and took it because they thought they were special and the ruling class would never betray their trade.

Well here we are kids if you want a realistic career that will pay the bills dont follow your heart and go into programming and computers, that is a passionate hobby you shouldnt expect to be highly paid for it. Go into the trades, anywhere else, programming as a career is fucked (and again it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not).

Hopefully they will be so shortsighted and suffocate themselves with this Ai hype.

waves from over in the linux corner seize the day, and microsoft’s throat :P

I’m talking from a perspective of reality. What you “predict” or “feel” or imagine the industry is or going to be, doesn’t really interest me much.

Damn… not sure how you work in an industry that requires good interpersonal skills with an attitude like this but you didn’t really listen to what I was saying at all. I am not defending AI or even claiming it can actually replace human graphic designers in any serious fashion longterm.

Let me lay this out for you really simple, this is a class war, and vapid MBA majors who will always placed by the ruling class in charge of most graphic design jobs don’t give a flying fuck if AI is a scam, the whole point of being a business major is to scam people. At the end of this when the AI hype bubble bursts most of yall aren’t getting your jobs back, and even if you do those jobs will longer be the good quality sustainable jobs they used to be because you will be now seen as an expensive temporary stopgap to AI (independent of the reality of AIs inane bullshit), a temporary “return to using horses while we get cars figured out better” approach that never treats the horses as worthy of a future…

It is hilarious given that you are a storyteller and artist by trade that at this late stage in the game you actually genuinely believe the truth actually matters here compared to the overwhelming roar of economic narratives set by the ruling class…and yeah you mighttt personally get lucky and be fine for the rest of your career but how cruel and naive to use your experience as a device to divorce your empathy from less talented/experienced graphic designers fighting tooth and nail for the privilege to follow in your footsteps.

Stop being a coward and hiding behind the niche little square you have cut out of your industry to support yourself, stand up and actually defend the futures and quality of life of the countless younger versions of you getting ground to dust by the industry before it is too late and the decent future of your career is rationalized away to capitalists and the path you walked in life becomes a mocking foreclosed dream to the next generation.

Like wake the fuck up please, this is catastrophic for graphic designers and it has nothing to do with whether AI works or not

I get sooooo much schadenfreude from programmers smugly acting like their jobs aren’t going to be obliterated by AI… because the AI won’t be able to do the job correctly, as if that matters in this late stage of collapse and end state capitalism.

Y’all (programmers and tech people) cheered this on and facilitated the ruling class destroying countless decent, good careers and now it is everybody else’s turn to laugh at programmers as they go from having one of the few non-dysfunctional careers left to being worthless chatgpt prompt monkeys that can never convince management they are valuable and not just a subpar, expensive alternative to “AI”.

This is going to be awful, but that doesn’t mean I can’t find the silver linings!

Maybe if programming wasn’t full of overconfident naive libertarian adjacent people y’all could have stopped this by unionizing but again… just check hacker news and all the boot licking for the ruling class there to see why that didn’t happen lol.

Not only are you a fool, you spit in the face of people trying to begin careers in your field because you are so naively confident that this massive change in the labor market conditions of your industry won’t affect you or other graphic designers negatively.

Please retire, change careers or at least keep your mouth shut and actually listen to less experienced people in your industry. Stop acting like a boomer, it is just embarrassing yourself and publicly committing your online identity to words that will age so terribly it will make your future self’s head spin.

Almost, the likeliest answer is that CEOs and the ruling class have no fucking clue whether AI can be good enough to replace graphic designers but they also know that this was never the point, AI is a weapon of class warfare, and a nuclear one at that.

Even if the entire industry crashes and decides it does actually have to hire lots of human artists back, those artists will be hired as alternatives to cheap AI and graphic design will have permanently been dissected and destroyed as a decent career for hardworking people who may or may not be the most talented people in the world.

If you (as in anybody reading this not who I am responding too) think this isn’t happening you need to shut your mouth trap and go read a book about the Industrial Revolution not written by an apologist for the ruling class.

Your attitude says more about you than your supposed knowledge does, if you think AI won’t have a catastrophic impact on the value of your work, of the artistry of what you do in relationship to being valued by society, you are an utter fool.

What they are trying to point out is that as self confident as you portray yourself in your skills, at one point you sucked and you got hired anyway.

The new reality is you never would have been able to get into this industry because nobody would have given you a chance.

First problem, that URL link goes to a dead website for me, which is a major issue given the name of Paint.Net is it’s URL…

But yeah I mean sure Paint.Net is good in terms of functionality!

I wouldn’t recommend it over Gimp though, sure Gimp is annoying but Paint.Net is a shovel where as Gimp is a fully featured construction crew with excavators and equipment. Different uses and design goals but the important bit is you can easily ask a construction crew to dig a random hole for you whereas it is much harder to ask a shovel to clear a building site and dig out a pit for a foundation for you… so I tend to recommend familiarizing yourself with Gimp and just skip Paint.Net unless you have a specific need where it fits better.

Learn Gimp once and use it the rest of your life, shrugs it is the nature of successful Open Source projects like this that after they reach a critical mass of functionality from two decades of development or so there just isn’t a great reason to go with anything else in my opinion (unless you want to drop money on a paid image editor from a company less shitty than Adobe).

Gimp will be around, being developed and used all over the world long after you are dead. Paint.Net mightttt be if it continues to grow.

Don’t forget Inkscape!!!

Inkscape is amazing for vector editing

https://inkscape.org/

Krita

https://krita.org/en/

GIMP

https://www.gimp.org/

Valve is a business, they don’t give a shit about vibes, when Valve gets sold off and it will one day (probably sooner than we expect) none of these “vibes” or “culture” are going to matter one single tiny little bit.

That is the point of this whole system, we receive assurances up down left right and in every which direction that entities like Valve won’t be ripped up and destroyed by venture capital, private equity, or whatever the fuck the current grift the 1% has us in… and they are empty promises by design.

A company is not legally defined as the will of its creator/creators, rather the labor and particular genius of a company’s workers is purposefully rationalized into a structure that we are supposed to accept is fundamentally designed to be ripped from our hands brutally because “that is just how the adult world works, shut up and get back to work”.

Justification of unnecessary violence and destruction is one of the primary products of the system.

In a world that isn’t drowning in late stage capitalism what we call that is the overwhelming gift given to us by the generations before us so that we may in turn give it to the next generation. Video games are only a tiny subsection of those gifts compared to everything else we just get handed for free.

Wealthy US boomers brutally executed that way of looking at the world though, so literally any form of passing on gifts to the next generation other than being rich as fuck and directly leaving an unbelievable amount of money to your kids is unfathomable or framed as unfair or absurd in modern day society.

shrugs framing it this way feels like a finance industry tactic where business people attempt to seem intelligent and beyond the public’s capacity to understand by taking concepts and renaming them to finance concepts and then pretending their grift is different than every other con man’s grift in history.

Steam sells games, that is far as I need to zoom in, any farther and business bros are just wasting my time with their sandcastles made out of PowerPoints and economic spiritualism that is grounded in absolutely nothing other than absolving the person running the business for the harm they may enact in doing so.

Just because it is wrong and obviously contradictory to other established precedents doesn’t at this point mean that it won’t be enforced unfortunately.

Please refrain from low effort derisive responses like this when people are having an adult conversation you don’t like, it is childish and makes you look like a fool.

Then how do we most effectively fight wealth inequality along the axis of software, fediverse software in particular?

You can’t drop a mean comment like that and not expand on what you specifically mean by it.

What makes my post brain dead then specifically ?