this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2025
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ShowerThoughts
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Sometimes we have those little epiphanies in the shower.. sometimes they come from other places. This is a home for those epiphanies.
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The car, a famously uncontroversial invention. Never killed anyone, poisoned anything, or changed any climate.
What you're doing here is tantamount to telling early hit-and-run victims 'I woulda just dodged. How hard is it to move out the way?'
These are 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people's eyeballs, as often as they'll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?
I think you've completely missed the point. I was making an analogy to road rage. Drivers face many irritations while on the road and very few of them lose their minds over it.
Neat.
These are still 800-pound gorillas dictating the fine details of how you experience modern life. They do A/B testing for whether Save goes before or after Cancel, to optimize some desired metric. And every god damn one of them has put this in front of people’s eyeballs, as often as they’ll tolerate, or worse. Do you think candy in the checkout aisle is there for your benefit?
I am not bothered by candy in the checkout aisle. I just walk by it and don't buy it. It's not "in my face."
If they're doing such careful testing then don't you think they'd notice if their "shoving" was causing significant numbers of users to rage-quit?
Oh sure, because unless you quit Google forever, you can't possibly be pissed off about some new bullshit. If you'll tolerate abuse then it's not real.
We agree about the underlying tech - which is why it's baffling that you'd deny people had a bad reaction to this rollout. No amount of 'well they shouldn't!' will change that they did. Predictably, repeatedly, and in my opinion justifiably. If explaining why, at length and in detail, just sees glib variations on 'but but but they shouldn't,' why do you bother to speak? What do you hope to accomplish, through words? You won't change how millions felt. I think you're wrong to expect they should shut up and take it.
That /r/firefox thread I mentioned earlier was full of people claiming they were rage-quitting Firefox forever and storming off to various other browsers.
I'm not denying that some people have a bad reaction to the rollout, I'm saying I don't believe the explanation they're giving for why they're having a bad reaction. I think they're flipping out over the mere existence of AI, and are making excuses to justify that reaction.
And I also don't believe that "millions" feel this. This loops right back to the root of this whole comment thread; these social media bubbles we're in here give a skewed view of what the general population's feeling on this stuff is.
One million Americans is 0.3% of Americans. Millions is not the point to fixate on, when broadly discussing the people developing negative reactions to the bullshit foisted upon them. Insisting it was foisted gently is equally missing the point. This is an ongoing impact from every goddamn angle. Search is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). E-mail is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Messages are worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Social media is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out). Fucking porn is worse because they forced AI (and you can maybe opt out).
Repeatedly insisting 'I don't think it's that big a deal' is not an argument. This frustration and annoyance is REAL. It's strong enough and widespread enough that some people assume it's universal! At what point do you at least consider it a user experience pitfall?
We're just going in circles now. They haven't "forced" AI on all those things. No more so than candy's being forced on me at the checkout aisle.
Speaking of "repeatedly insisting" things.
Again: what the fuck would forced mean, if not this?