Blog 4.0

I've been washing my dishes by hand for more than sixteen years now. At first I didn't mind it too much, but as the years have gone by I've increasingly soured on this particular chore. Part of it was that whenever we visited someone else, everyone and their mother seemed to have a dishwasher, reminding me of what I'd left behind. However, the bigger part of my frustration was probably that my husband developed chronic back pain and (justifiably) noped out of doing the dishes ever again, leaving it to me at all times, even when he was on holiday and I was working - meaning I still had to also do the dishes at the end of a tiring work day, and I hated it. I started talking about getting a dishwasher and was always shot down with the argument that "the landlords would never agree to getting the plumbing for that in", which was probably true, but I couldn't help being wistful about it. The other day I was watching a Technology Connections video about dishwas...

Look, I'm not even talking about the environmental impact, even though that's huge. I'm putting copyright concerns aside, even though those are also huge. But just... the general insanity of it all is getting to me. I'm now running into people in real life who will insert "I asked ChatGPT and" into regular conversation and expect me to treat this like it's something normal and insightful. At this point just seeing or hearing that phrase from someone I know triggers a visceral response of revulsion in me and it's getting tough to deal with. At work, we use the Microsoft suite, and the moment I noticed it, I turned CoPilot off. Since then, Microsoft has decided that my lock screen needs two separate ads for CoPilot on it, and added a greyed out button for it to my Outlook UI - which is otherwise customisable, but this new button for a feature I've turned off can't be removed. If these chat bots are so great, why are you so desperate to shove them...