The only AI company that responded to Ars’ request to comment was OpenAI, whose spokesperson confirmed that OpenAI is already working on a way to fight tarpitting.

Ah yes. It’s extremely common for one of the top companies in an industry to spitefully expend resources fighting the irrelevant efforts of…

One or two people

Please, continue to grace us with you unbiased wisdom. Clearly you’ve read the article and aren’t just trying to simp for AI or start flame wars like a petulant child.

Kathleen technically fills the specified criteria if you remove the context of the conversation, which is whether or not Lucas shared a morally acceptable portion of the billions of dollars of wealth generated by LucasFilm that he took for himself, including the $4 billion he made personally from it’s sale to Disney.

Your other two of your allegedly obvious examples are absolutely not from LucasFilm and one of them has a net worth of $20m, which is definitively not “hundreds of millions”.

I presume, therefore, that you either argue in bad faith or don’t try very hard. In either case, you aren’t worth my time anymore.

I could throw a dart on a list of names and get such a person.

Fascinating. You respond with the president of LucasFilm who started, more or less, months before LucasFilm was sold to Disney in 2012, an actor who has had an amazing career well beyond anything related to LucasFilm, and an actor with a career is admittedly most associated with the Star Wars Franchise (though he’s done a lot of voice work in unrelated franchises) but who’s net worth is only about 20 million.

So 1/3 are actually part of LucasFilm, and that one didn’t really work under Lucas. Ford did star in a two franchises under LucasFilm, but he is not part of LucasFilm.

Thanks for wasting a few minutes of my time.

If you can name another person from LucasFilm that also had, at some point, several hundred million dollars, I’ll make an effort to look into that claim.

If the people who worked on making money from the Star Wars franchise generated literally billions of dollars in value for George Lucas’s company and George still has billions of dollars then no, he did not distribute those billions to those people. How do you not understand? I’ll simplify this for you.

If I have 1000 employees and my company rakes in $4 billion in revenue, I’m not a good guy even if I give them $1,000,000 each and keep the remaining… $3,000,000,000. That would imply that I think my work was 3,000x more important and valuable then their work. I guarantee that some people that helped Lucas make billions of dollars were paid as little as possible, with many likely in foreign countries with much lower minimum wages.

Society likes to pretend that rich people earn their money. What actually happens is that rich people create a situation in which they are disproportionately rewarded for work done by many other people. Yes, it’s likely they did some work too (occasionally even good work), but not work proportional to their compensation. The fact that they insisted that they be the ones retaining a disproportionately large percentage of the surplus value is very telling.

Or he could have distributed the billions he made, as he was making them, to more equitably pay everyone who’s work generated that wealth.

That’s my point.

Where do you think he got his billions?

He owned the IP. He ensured that he’d retain merchandise rights and sequel rights via his contract for the original Star Wars film. He made his billions off of that. Mostly merchandise. Then he sold his company LucasFilm (along with those rights) to Disney in 2012 for a few billion in cash and a few billion in Disney stock (making him one of the largest shareholders).

So yeah, he did own the franchise first.

So instead of more evenly distributing the profit from the franchise to everyone who contributed, he’s going to hand the wealth to an already obscenely wealthy corporation so that he can have control over it again?

I think we could eliminate it if literally everyone put in a fairly minor effort - getting vaccinated, masking, washing hands, avoiding gatherings for a while.

Even in countries where the culture is to wear a mask when you are sick I guarantee significant minority selfishly ignores those practices - more than enough to spoil it for everyone else.

Also, masking helps lessen but doesn’t prevent the spread in all cases. Many of the cultures that mask when sick do so because they are going to work or are out and about while sick. The more time you spend with someone, the higher the chances of transmission even if you are both masking.

I think their point is that, with effort, it can be become a thing of the past.

However, so many are unwilling to put forth the effort because it’s either too inconvenient or they’ve been brainwashed into believing it’s a hoax.

You don’t even need bribery. You can just throw money at something and make things happen.

If you think something is true, you can pay the world to prioritize things as if it were true.

If you think vaccines cause autism and you are rich, you can create massive “education” campaigns and the like to convince people its true. You can buy ads telling people its true. You can amass an enormous following of people who believe you and change policy without bribery.

the same process

It doesn’t necessarily involve the middle man, who is ultimately the bigger fish that enshittifiers are looking to land. I think that’s relevant. Enshittification’s process involves capturing both a “retail” user base and a business user base and then squeezing both.

Edit. Enshittification is layered and more specific to industries and markets that are not inherently profitable. It starts with seed money being burned for that initial user base and fucks over everyone up and down the chain because the business is not really profitable otherwise. Skimp/shrinkflation is more about squeezing more profit than you are already making.

I’ve see it used a lot recently to describe the general degradation of quality in service of increasing profits. I think technically, it is not enshittification. Below is my general definition of the process enshittification describes. Repost from another comment.

1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

A word that includes the word “shit” in it has a very nice ring to it when describing things getting generally shittier in favor of profit. I suppose language can evolve rapidly and things mean what people believe them to mean.

Edit: As per Wikipedia’s Shrinkflation Entry:

Skimpflation involves a reformulation or other reduction in quality.

I see skimpflation as a form of shrinkflation. The idea is still that the price stays the same but to try and hide the cost increase from the customer they give you less. I guess fewer strawberries per “smoothie” is even more subtle than fewer ounces of the original “smoothie” formula per bottle.

To be a pedantic asshole, technically enshittification is meant to refer to online services that follow an inevitable process of…

1. Attract users/customers with high quality services/products to create a captive/dependent user base.
2. Attract business customers (ex. advertisers or businesses that can benefit from access to the user base in some way) by offering them high value services by fucking over your captive user base create a captive/dependent busiess customer base.
3. Fuck over your captive business customers to increase your own profit.

Admittedly, I see enshittification used colloquially meaning basically “business found a way to fuck over its customers more than usual to increase their profit”. Perhaps that is what you mean by “General enshittification”.

Fundraisers and charities, when you have a lot money, are rarely acts of charity. They tend to be PR campaigns and power plays.

Honestly, even when the acts have good intentions, they are often quite damaging. The involvement of the wealthy in charity is very similar to their involvement in politics. Their wealth buys influence and gives them a disproportionate say that allows them to ignore and overrule the will of the people and sometimes even reality.

For example, look into the impact of Bill Gates’s “acts of charity” in the education space. He poured money into charter programs that negatively impacted public education. Later studies showed that his programs were not particularly effective.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that a very rich person is convinced by some charlatan that they found the a means to produce free energy. The wealthy person throws tons of money at the idea. How many talented people will be taken from other legit programs because the paycheck at Bullshit Energy Nonprofit is better? These rich people are successful and think they know bestr. Their money ensures they get treated like experts because money makes things happen whether or not those things are helpful.

Oh man. While I was never a huge fan, I had the Tonka Hulk Hogan and Ultimate Warrior Plush/Pillow things. Is that what you mean?

Yeah, Hogan is another guy who is just nuts. I think he’s always been a piece of shit. I heard he notified management of Ventura’s talk of a wrestler’s union which killed it before it could gain any traction.

As a nerdy kid with longish hair and few male role models, I really, really looked up to this guy. Hercules, Xena, Kull, and then Andromeda.

He fell off my radar for a while but I was pleasantly entertained when I found him in the Mythica series. I’d always thought well of him.

Eventually I heard about God Is Not Dead and looked into the rest of his more right wing work… Its really heartbreaking when people you respected or even idolized as a kid turn out to be so… gross and just… weird.

Now he again pops up on my radar with stupid shit like this. So sad.

In maybe third grade I brought my collection of x-men trading cards as part of a sort of show and tell activity. It was in a sizable three-ring binder with those 3x3 slot cars sheets. I had a number of highly valued “foil/hologram” cards. The binder was gone when I got back from lunch. I was devastated and learned to never leave anything of value not locked up if I’m not watching it.

At work we have a kitchen/break room. I’ve had shit stolen from there a lot. Utensils, cups, bowls. Wash it after lunch, put it in the drying rack, come back in an hour to get it and it’s gone. Once my department had a leftover pizza from an event donated to us. I brought in a baking sheet to reheat it in the oven for a lunch morale boost for the team because we had to work that weekend. The sheet, left in a drawer and not visible to any casual observers, was gone by Monday. That was actually the first item I’d had stolen there but I thought I was just s fluke.

I’ve literally bought upgrades and utensil sets for the kitchen (maybe people “stealing” my utensils just forgot to bring a fork, borrowed mine, and brought it home by accident?). Stuff like drying towels, soap dispensers + large refill bottles, a microwave food cover… all stolen. I’d keep getting frustrated with, for example, people leaving the sponge wet in the sink. I’d think “its been a year since I last donated something, maybe it’ll be different this time…” and I’d buy an OXO sponge holder or something and within a week it would be gone. Everyone in my office, including secretaries and cleaning staff, gets paid at least a living wage with great health benefits. Some make well over 100k. I just imagine someone making twice my salary seeing a nice soap dispenser and taking it home… lost a good bit of faith in humanity and affected me way more than it should have.

I found a solution though. Whoever was stealing this shit couldn’t deal with the shame of being reminded that they stole it. I started labeling the donated items using my organization’s acronym with a permanent marker in big visible letters. None of that’s been stolen. I was going to engrave my utensils/dishes but decided instead to look like an asshole and bring my own towel when washing my dishes, drying them immediately, and taking them back to my desk immediately.

Sadly, old Google doesn’t work either thanks to the efforts of SEO and the AI generated garbage.

The problem with search is that the motives of those being searched aren’t to provide you with the most helpful answer. The motives are to get you to visit their website then stay/click/buy as much as possible. They’ll tailor their content to match whatever algorithm the engine is using.

That’s why Google’s new plan is to collect all of the information ahead of time and skip the “visit other websites” step. Then you can stay/click/buy on their website as much as possible.

Seriously though. Just skip all this nonsense, you selfish piece of shit, and open your wallet so the hungry corpos can feast on its contents - they have poor, innocent, starving shareholders to feed… you monster.

AAA devs publishers are spending too much money making games people don’t like and then making devs design them to get every penny out of customers that they can, then fire the devs if the project doesn’t turn into a fire hose of infinite money. If it does, the sequel better earn infinite^2 money because unlimited growth is the only acceptable success.