Observe their interactions with other people and what their motivations seem to be. For instance, I have a friend who likes hanging out with people who are entertaining, but if it’s someone who has something additional to offer him - people who stream and have a larger audience, women, people who might donate to him - he seems particularly excited even when there’s nothing about their personality that would seem to lead to that. So, does he like me for me? Probably because I don’t have a lot to offer him. But does he really like this one streamer with 50x as many subs as he has? Probably just because he wants to use them to boost his own profile.

That does happen, but mainly through automated mass means like phishing and ransomware. Individuals also get targeted by tactics like romance or finance scams. I think you could probably see how a large corporation would be a more lucrative hacking target worth a lot of dedicated time vs. one individual.

I had a gf who considered herself Christian. Not someone who talked about it a lot, but I guess she has some belief. I have a fairly negative view of organized religion in general. She really wanted to start going to church and I was um, wow, sounds horrible. She looked around found a church with surprisingly cool people - not at all bible thumpers, or full of pretentious nonsense, hell and brimstone, none of that. They support LGBTQ, operated a homeless shelter, gave sermons about pro-abortion rights and astronomy. I was pleasantly surprised. Still I ended up determining that I didn’t want to wake up at 7:30 each Sunday to go there. I figured out that she viewed church more as a social club and some sort of tradition from her family.

If it was someone drastically different, like talking constantly about reading the bible and telling me I had to convert and basing half their life around it, absolutely not. I not only am not interested myself but I think it would illustrate some negative aspects of their personality that I don’t want to be around. I had a gf who owned a retail store and people would come in and tell her ridiculous stories about Jesus healing people when they were missionaries in Africa. Later she’d tell me and ask “Do you think that was true? Jesus really DID THAT?” and I’d have to be um… no. That lady sounds like a liar or a psycho, sorry. Not great for a relationship. It turned out it was just some feel-good thing for her. She didn’t read the bible or really know anything about scripture. Just thinking “magic jesus loves me” made her feel good. I’m only really vaguely religious but still I can’t respect that.

“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Ah, the butt stuff tent. Legendary in Denver

Cream cheese. Hot sauce. Even just salt

Put a space after it? Like before the next sentence?

Those quickly became scripted and fake reality too, if any of them were ever even not that.

Sure , of course those subs don’t serve any real purpose besides entertainment. The effects of AI making up stories could be to subtly confuse people about how others think and make decisions at most. Though of course it’s useless to give advice to an AI OP, thousands of people still read and discuss what people write. Who knows, the AI stories could even seem less fake than fictional stories.

The communities like AITAH and relationships on reddit are completely cooked. There is so much AI nonsense and as noted, people completely eat it up.

Compared to how long ago? I haven’t noticed any changes.

Basically the Yukihiro Takahashi song “Grand Espoir”

Tons of restaurants serve premade stuff from US Foods or Sysco. Lie about it, too. I worked at a BBQ restaurant whose secret sauce recipe was adding smoke flavoring and red wine vinegar to 5 gallon buckets of Cattlemen’s.

It’s really insane how some truly wealthy people waste everyone else’s money. Like, claw and fight to get more and screw everyone else over, then just waste their money on stuff like that. I know a guy who got very wealthy from starting a health insurance plan in the 80s (first PPO in a Midwest state). He owns this gigantic 20 million dollar house in the mountains in Colorado and is there for 2-3 weeks a year. Pays people to watch it, clean and maintain it. Such a stupid waste of resources.

Similar strategy to software companies, who buy upcoming competing companies and then kill the products.

Only if I have something else I need to do and/or someone rushing me. Otherwise I just chill out and observe things.

It might be where you live. When I visited So Cal for example, I was amazed to see Starbucks and McDonald’s and gas stations with super long lines… doesn’t happen at all in other places I have lived. Maybe short lines at a coffee shop at very busy times of day.

Another aspect is that businesses, for capitalism reasons, have majorly skimped on employees in the last few years. They’re trying to get away with the least staff possible purely for profitability. It’s pretty vile… customers get worse service, employees get burnt out, and execs and owners just don’t care because they feel like people don’t have a choice. McDonald’s, for instance, operates with far fewer staff at once than they did 20-30 years ago.

No idea why, but earlier the links looked like box outlines with a question mark in the middle.

The names come up as dead images for me.

In my experience, people are generally unaware of current events and history. They don’t understand basic math. They are very poor at critical reasoning and don’t comprehend things like evidence or facts, so they’re easily convinced by hunches or baseless claims prominent people make.