As someone who also attended (both as a table and speaker) this last VCF Midwest. The biggest problem that event has is the base mercantilism.

If I'm attending that event, I want to see cool machines doing cool things and hear the stories and things people love about them.

I don't wanna see a bunch of AI slop coffee mugs and tee shirts of various old video game consoles taking up an entire fucking wall

As for mercantilism, I must confess I did buy some of those.. for my kid I swear!

As The Onion put it eons ago [1]

"There's no shame in being second best!"

[1] https://youtu.be/53tGLKlsQv8

Oh, you want "libertarianism" then. Not the original kind, the Ayn Rand kind

That always works out well. Until the bears come [1]

[1] https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...

He didn't say what he "wanted". We're so blinded by partisan stupidity we can't even be bothered to read, understand, and think anymore.

"This is the thing I think of when X"

"Oh, so what you're describing is Y, actually"

"HE NEVER SAID HE WANTED Y! STUPID PARTISANS!"

Okay buddy

Never underestimate the power of the fourth estate

I think they made a movie about that

Time to grow some gills and dive for sunken oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. . .

This could go so many directions

Careful now. Criticizing the slop machine is a great way to get harassed on this site

Do you work for IBM? [1]

[1] In IBM there's a religion in software that says you have to count K-LOCs, and a K-LOC is a thousand line of code. How big a project is it? Oh, it's sort of a 10K-LOC project. This is a 20K-LOCer. And this is 5OK-LOCs. And IBM wanted to sort of make it the religion about how we got paid. How much money we made off OS 2, how much they did. How many K-LOCs did you do? And we kept trying to convince them - hey, if we have - a developer's got a good idea and he can get something done in 4K-LOCs instead of 20K-LOCs, should we make less money? Because he's made something smaller and faster, less KLOC. K-LOCs, K-LOCs, that's the methodology. Ugh anyway, that always makes my back just crinkle up at the thought of the whole thing.

No, never worked for Big Blue. ;)

The problem (particularly on places like HN) are that if you are openly Anti-AI the people who disagree will flex their ability to downvote you (which contravenes HN's rules [1] [2])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49605192 (currently at -1 but went as as low as -7)

You go on other sites like Reddit and posit a question. Someone will inevitably reply "So I asked $insert_AI_bot and it said"

It's like second hand smoke. Those of us who don't want to smoke are still subjected to the externalities of the people who want to smoke in public

Not to sound like I'm criticizing them too harshly. But I do wonder what the poor souls Facebook hires through a litany of contractor and sub contractors are actually told to remove

I've reported images of Swastikas, hate speech such as the N-word in comments and all other manner of vile interactions

I have yet to have seen them remove any of it in over a decade

But I've had my comments removed for "Get the fuck out of here, you're a moron and attitudes like yours are part of the problem".

So who the fuck knows.

Removed By Facebook or removed by a group admin?

That seems to be an "April Folks Joke"