Namespace

Generally, a lurker online. This is the only place where I post things really.

[portraitoftheoddity]

My favorite part of youtube is the part of it that is middle-aged-to-old guys with zero production value who have made a simple, low-quality video on their phones about how to repair the exact fucking appliance that has been giving me grief so I can fix that fucker myself instead of spending hundreds of dollars to hire someone.

These men are all my honorary uncles and I love them.

[hooperdrivestheboat]

Peanuts, December 7, 1964

[adicttive]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Code is a liability (not an asset)

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-intelligence

Code is a liability. Code's capabilities are assets. The goal of a tech shop is to have code whose capabilities generate more revenue than the costs associated with keeping that code running. For a long time, firms have nurtured a false belief that code costs less to run over time: after an initial shakedown period in which the bugs in the code are found and addressed, code ceases to need meaningful maintenance. After all, code is a machine without moving parts – it does not wear out; it doesn't even wear down.

This is the thesis of Paul Mason's 2015 book Postcapitalism, a book that has aged remarkably poorly (though not, perhaps, as poorly as Mason's own political credibility): code is not an infinitely reproducible machine that requires no labor inputs to operate. Rather, it is a brittle machine that requires increasingly heroic measures to keep it in good working order, and which eventually does "wear out" (in the sense of needing a top-to-bottom refactoring).

To understand why code is a liability, you have to understand the difference between "writing code" and "software engineering."

"Writing code" is an incredibly useful, fun, and engrossing pastime. It involves breaking down complex tasks into discrete steps that are so precisely described that a computer can reliably perform them, and optimising that performance by finding clever ways of minimizing the demands the code puts on the computer's resources, such as RAM and processor cycles.

Meanwhile, "software engineering" is a discipline that subsumes "writing code," but with a focus on the long-term operations of the system the code is part of. Software engineering concerns itself with the upstream processes that generate the data the system receives. It concerns itself with the downstream processes that the system emits processed information to. It concerns itself with the adjacent systems that are receiving data from the same upstream processes and/or emitting data to the same downstream processes the system is emitting to.

"Writing code" is about making code that runs well. "Software engineering" is about making code that fails well. It's about making code that is legible – whose functions can be understood by third parties who might be asked to maintain it, or might be asked to adapt the processes downstream, upstream or adjacent to the system to keep the system from breaking. It's about making code that can be adapted, for example, when the underlying computer architecture it runs on is retired and has to be replaced, either with a new kind of computer, or with an emulated version of the old computer:

https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/05/hpux_end_of_life/

Because that's the thing: any nontrivial code has to interact with the outside world, and the outside world isn't static, it's dynamic. The outside world busts through the assumptions made by software authors all the time and every time it does, the software needs to be fixed. Remember Y2K? That was a day when perfectly functional code, running on perfectly functional hardware, would stop functioning – not because the code changed, but because time marched on.

We're 12 years away from the Y2038 problem, when 32-bit flavors of Unix will all cease to work, because they, too, will have run out of computable seconds. These computers haven't changed, their software hasn't changed, but the world – by dint of ticking over, a second at a time, for 68 years – will wear through their seams, and they will rupture:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/23/the_unix_epochalypse_might_be/

The existence of "the world" is an inescapable factor that wears out software and requires it to be rebuilt, often at enormous expense. The longer code is in operation, the more likely it is that it will encounter "the world." Take the code that devices use to report on their physical location. Originally, this was used for things like billing – determining which carrier or provider's network you were using and whether you were roaming. Then, our mobile devices used this code to help determine your location in order to give you turn-by-turn directions in navigation apps. Then, this code was repurposed again to help us find our lost devices. This, in turn, became a way to locate stolen devices, a use-case that sharply diverges from finding lost devices in important ways – for example, when locating a lost device, you don't have to contend with the possibility that a malicious actor has disabled the "find my lost device" facility.

These additional use cases – upstream, downstream and adjacent – exposed bugs in the original code that never surfaced in the earlier applications. For example, all location services must have some kind of default behavior in the (very common) event that they're not really sure where they are. Maybe they have a general fix – for example, they know which cellular mast they're connected to, or they know where they were the last time they got an accurate location fix – or maybe they're totally lost.

It turns out that in many cases, location apps drew a circle around all the places they could be and then set their location to the middle of that circle. That's fine if the circle is only a few feet in diameter, or if the app quickly replaces this approximation with a more precise location. But what if the location is miles and miles across, and the location fix never improves? What if the location for any IP address without a defined location is given as the center of the continental USA and any app that doesn't know where it is reports that it is in a house in Kansas, sending dozens of furious (occasionally armed) strangers to that house, insisting that the owners are in possession of their stolen phones and tablets?

https://theweek.com/articles/624040/how-internet-mapping-glitch-turned-kansas-farm-into-digital-hell

You don't just have to fix this bug once – you have to fix it over and over again.

In Georgia:

https://www.jezebel.com/why-lost-phones-keep-pointing-at-this-atlanta-couples-h-1793854491

In Texas:

https://abc7chicago.com/post/find-my-iphone-apple-error-strangers-at-texas-familys-home-scott-schuster/13096627/

And in my town of Burbank, where Google's location-sharing service once told us that our then-11-year-old daughter (whose phone we couldn't reach) was 12 miles away, on a freeway ramp in an unincorporated area of LA county (she was at a nearby park, but out of range, and the app estimated her location as the center of the region it has last fixed her in) (it was a rough couple hours).

The underlying code – the code that uses some once-harmless default to fudge unknown locations – needs to be updated constantly, because the upstream, downstream and adjacent processes connected to it are changing constantly. The longer that code sits there, the more superannuated its original behaviors become, and the more baroque, crufty and obfuscated the patches layered atop of it become.

Code is not an asset – it's a liability. The longer a computer system has been running, the more tech debt it represents. The more important the system is, the harder it is to bring down and completely redo. Instead, new layers of code are slathered atop of it, and wherever the layers of code meet, there are fissures in which these systems behave in ways that don't exactly match up. Worse still: when two companies are merged, their seamed, fissured IT systems are smashed together, so that now there are adjacent sources of tech debt, as well as upstream and downstream cracks:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/28/dealer-management-software/#antonin-scalia-stole-your-car

That's why giant companies are so susceptible to ransomware attacks – they're full of incompatible systems that have been coaxed into a facsimile of compatibility with various forms of digital silly putty, string and baling wire. They are not watertight and they cannot be made watertight. Even if they're not taken down by hackers, they sometimes just fall over and can't be stood back up again – like when Southwest Airlines' computers crashed for all of Christmas week 2022, stranding millions of travelers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/16/for-petes-sake/#unfair-and-deceptive

Airlines are especially bad, because they computerized early, and can't ever shut down the old computers to replace them with new ones. This is why their apps are such dogshit – and why it's so awful that they've fired their customer service personnel and require fliers to use the apps for everything, even though the apps do. not. work. These apps won't ever work.

The reason that British Airways' app displays "An unknown error has occurred" 40-80% of the time isn't (just) that they fired all their IT staff and outsourced to low bidders overseas. It's that, sure – but also that BA's first computers ran on electromechanical valves, and everything since has to be backwards-compatible with a system that one of Alan Turing's proteges gnawed out of a whole log with his very own front teeth. Code is a liability, not an asset (BA's new app is years behind schedule).

Code is a liability. The servers for the Bloomberg terminals that turned Michael Bloomberg into a billionaire run on RISC chips, meaning that the company is locked into using a dwindling number of specialist hardware and data-center vendors, paying specialized programmers, and building brittle chains of code to connect these RISC systems to their less exotic equivalents in the world. Code isn't an asset.

AI can write code, but AI can't do software engineering. Software engineering is all about thinking through context – what will come before this system? What will come after it? What will sit alongside of it? How will the world change? Software engineering requires a very wide "context window," the thing that AI does not, and cannot have. AI has a very narrow and shallow context window, and linear expansions to AI's context window requires geometric expansions in the amount of computational resources the AI consumes:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/29/worker-frightening-machines/#robots-stole-your-jerb-kinda

Writing code that works, without consideration of how it will fail, is a recipe for catastrophe. It is a way to create tech debt at scale. It is shoveling asbestos into the walls of our technological society.

Bosses do not know that code is a liability, not an asset. That's why they won't shut the fuck up about the chatbots that shit out 10,000 times more code than any human programmer. They think they've found a machine that produces assets at 10,000 times the rate of a human programmer. They haven't. They've found a machine that produces liability at 10,000 times the rate of any human programmer.

Maintainability isn't just a matter of hard-won experience teaching you where the pitfalls are. It also requires the cultivation of "Fingerspitzengefühl" – the "fingertip feeling" that lets you make reasonable guesses about where never before seen pitfalls might emerge. It's a form of process knowledge. It is ineluctable. It is not latent in even the largest corpus of code that you could use as training data:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Boy do tech bosses not get this. Take Microsoft. Their big bet right now is on "agentic AI." They think that if they install spyware on your computer that captures every keystroke, every communication, every screen you see and sends it to Microsoft's cloud and give a menagerie of chatbots access to it, that you'll be able to tell your computer, "Book me a train to Cardiff and find that hotel Cory mentioned last year and book me a room there" and it will do it.

This is an incredibly unworkable idea. No chatbot is remotely capable of doing all these things, something that Microsoft freely stipulates. Rather than doing this with one chatbot, Microsoft proposes to break this down among dozens of chatbots, each of which Microsoft hopes to bring up to 95% reliability.

That's an utterly implausible chatbot standard in and of itself, but consider this: probabilities are multiplicative. A system containing two processes that operate at 95% reliability has a net reliability of 90.25% (0.95 * 0.95). Break a task down among a couple dozen 95% accurate bots and the chance that this task will be accomplished correctly rounds to zero.

Worse, Microsoft is on record as saying that they will grant the Trump administration secret access to all the data in its cloud:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2025/07/22/microsoft-cant-keep-eu-data-safe-from-us-authorities/

So – as Signal's Meredith Whittaker and Udbhav Tiwari put it in their incredible 39C3 talk last week in Hamburg – Microsoft is about to abolish the very idea of privacy for any data on personal and corporate computers, in order to ship AI agents that cannot ever work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ANECpNdt-4

Meanwhile, a Microsoft exec got into trouble last December when he posted to Linkedin announcing his intention to have AI rewrite all of Microsoft's code. Refactoring Microsoft's codebase makes lots of sense. Microsoft – like British Airways and other legacy firms – has lots of very old code that represents unsustainable tech debt. But using AI to rewrite that code is a way to start with tech debt that will only accumulate as time goes by:

https://www.windowslatest.com/2025/12/24/microsoft-denies-rewriting-windows-11-using-ai-after-an-employees-one-engineer-one-month-one-million-code-post-on-linkedin-causes-outrage/

Now, some of you reading this have heard software engineers extolling the incredible value of using a chatbot to write code for them. Some of you are software engineers who have found chatbots incredibly useful in writing code for you. This is a common AI paradox: why do some people who use AI find it really helpful, while others loathe it? Is it that the people who don't like AI are "bad at AI?" Is it that the AI fans are lazy and don't care about the quality of their work?

There's doubtless some of both going on, but even if you teach everyone to be an AI expert, and cull everyone who doesn't take pride in their work out of the sample, the paradox will still remain. The true solution to the AI paradox lies in automation theory, and the concept of "centaurs" and "reverse centaurs":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

In automation theory, a "centaur" is a person who is assisted by a machine. A "reverse centaur" is someone who has been conscripted into assisting a machine. If you're a software engineer who uses AI to write routine code that you have the time and experience to validate, deploying your Fingerspitzengefühl and process knowledge to ensure that it's fit for purpose, it's easy to see why you might find using AI (when you choose to, in ways you choose to, at a pace you choose to go at) to be useful.

But if you're a software engineer who's been ordered to produce code at 10x, or 100x, or 10,000x your previous rate, and the only way to do that is via AI, and there is no human way that you could possibly review that code and ensure that it will not break on first contact with the world, you'll hate it (you'll hate it even more if you've been turned into the AI's accountability sink, personally on the hook for the AI's mistakes):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

There's another way in which software engineers find AI-generated code to be incredibly helpful: when that code is isolated. If you're doing a single project – say, converting one batch of files to another format, just once – you don't have to worry about downstream, upstream or adjacent processes. There aren't any. You're writing code to do something once, without interacting with any other systems. A lot of coding is this kind of utility project. It's tedious, thankless, and ripe for automation. Lots of personal projects fall into this bucket, and of course, by definition, a personal project is a centaur project. No one forces you to use AI in a personal project – it's always your choice how and when you make personal use of any tool.

But the fact that software engineers can sometimes make their work better with AI doesn't invalidate the fact that code is a liability, not an asset, and that AI code represents liability production at scale.

In the story of technological unemployment, there's the idea that new technology creates new jobs even as it makes old ones obsolete: for every blacksmith put out of work by the automobile, there's a job waiting as a mechanic. In the years since the AI bubble began inflating, we've heard lots of versions of this: AI would create jobs for "prompt engineers" – or even create jobs that we can't imagine, because they won't exist until AI has changed the world beyond recognition.

I wouldn't bank on getting work in a fanciful trade that literally can't be imagined because our consciousnesses haven't so altered by AI that they've acquired the capacity to conceptualize of these new modes of work.

But if you are looking for a job that AI will definitely create, by the millions, I have a suggestion: digital asbestos removal.

For if AI code – written at 10,000 times the speed of any human coder, designed to work well, but not to fail gracefully – is the digital asbestos we're filling our walls with, then our descendants will spend generations digging that asbestos out of the walls. There will be plenty of work fixing the things that we broke thanks to the most dangerous AI psychosis of all – the hallucinatory belief that "writing code" is the same thing as "software engineering." At the rate we're going, we'll have full employment for generations of asbestos removers.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[traycakes]

A big reason why some people think chatbots are great at writing code is because it's like gambling. Entering a prompt and having a chatbot return in seconds workable code that would have taken you hours to write is like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine, it's an incredible rush. Gamblers remember the times they hit a jackpot but ignore the fact that they lost money overall.

This is how you can end up with coders insisting that AI tools benefited them in a study proving that AI tools made them less productive.

Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower

Coders spent more time prompting and reviewing AI generations than they saved on coding.

[bug-swarm]

Even worse, Im in a lot of open source code related spaces and if you don't ask a chatbot for help before asking people, no one helps you nowadays like 60% of the time.

Its like going to a doctor and being like "Im coughing up blood" and they respond with "well have you tried the slot machine yet? You should try the slot machine before you ever speak to a doctor".

[mostlysignssomeportents]

[tgirl-thucydides]

[oysters-aint-for-me]

[sillem0]

¡ Mic, mic !

Por fin lo veo en vivo.

[last-fast-naturalist]

[sirfrogsworth]

Looking at some of your work, it is stunning but it is very similar in style to AI artwork, do you have any recommendations for how to tell apart photography like yours from AI.

I've been thinking about this. And this may sound controversial at first, but I'm hoping people will hear me out.

We should stop trying so hard to detect AI art.

I think we should all lift that burden from our brains.

I have often talked about "woke goggles." Where conservatives have lost the ability to enjoy anything because they are hypervigilant about detecting anything woke. They've cursed themselves into just hating everything. All they have left is the "God's Not Dead" Cinematic Universe.

And I worry people are getting AI goggles now. They are so concerned about accidentally enjoying robot art and hurting artists that they have overcorrected to the point where they are hurting artists.

One cannot say "AI is all soulless slop that always looks bad" and then accuse a real artist of making something that looks like AI and not hurt them. By doing so, it includes the baggage of all of the "slop" comments along with it. This crusade is having collateral damage to the very artists we are trying to protect.

Yes, we need to be cautious about malicious AI images. Misinformation and deepfakes are going to be a big problem. People using AI imagery for profit is already a mess. But if you are cruising your feed and like a cool sci-fi robot gal or a photo of a waterfall and it turns out to be AI... that's fine.

It was trained by real artists and AI is going to create some cool shit because of that.

Honestly, I think a lot of the worst slop is because the dipshits creating the prompts have no artistic taste. People keep blaming the AI for how bad it looks and often don't consider it is a product of the loser who published it.

There is plenty of non-slop out there that has fooled me. And, like it or not, it is going to get harder and harder to tell what is AI. Until there are better tools or better regulations, I don't think there is much we can do to avoid enjoying AI art every once in a while. If only by accident.

Current "AI detectors" are mostly a scam. Even the best forensic-level AI image detectors struggle to stay above 70–80% accuracy across a wide range of models and image types. And that's in controlled lab conditions.

Free online tools often drop to near coin-flip accuracy (50–60%), especially with newer image generators and post-processing applied.

The best way to avoid AI imagery is to look at an artist's body of work. It's much harder to create consistent, non-obvious fake images in a large sample size. That is usually enough to have confidence in authenticity. Plus, if they have posted similar art before 2022, you can pretty much rule out any shenanigans.

Otis literally died before genAI was available.

But images you see in the wild, just let yourself enjoy them if that is what your brain wants to do. It'll be okay.

I just think we are attacking this backwards. If we want to protect artists, we need to support them.

Calling out random AI art does not support them.

It does not put money in their pockets.

It does not grow their audience.

Over a decade ago I tried to lead a fight to create better systems of attribution on websites like Reddit and Imgur. I even spoke to the Imgur team after an article was written about me.

I asked them to allow sources on their posts and to develop tech that would help people find where an image came from. They said they were "working on it" and it never manifested.

IMAGE SHARING SITES STEAL MORE FROM ARTISTS THAN AI.

But we just kind of accepted it. No one really joined me in my fight. The prevailing defeatist attitude was, "That's just the way it is."

I think now is the time to demand better attribution systems. We need to be vigilant about making sure as many posts as possible have good sourcing. If an image on Reddit goes viral, the top comment should be the source. And if it isn't, you should try to find it and add it.

Just to be clear, "credit to the original artist" is NOT proper attribution.

And perhaps we can lobby these image sharing sites to create better sourcing systems and tools. They could even use fucking AI to find the earliest posted version of an image.

And it would be nice if it didn't require people to go into the comments to find the source. It could just be in the headline. They could even create little badges "made by a human" for verified artists.

Good attribution helps artists grow their audience. It is one of the single most effective things you can do to help them.

I literally just got this message...

There are maybe 10 popular artists who I helped grow their audience early on. Just because I reblogged their work and added links to all of their social media. I even hired my best friend to add sourcing information to every post because I believed so much in good attribution.

Calling out AI art may feel good in the moment. You caught someone trying to trick people and it feels like justice. But, in most cases, the tangible benefits to real artists seem small. It impedes your ability to enjoy art without always being suspicious. And the risk of telling someone you think they make soulless slop doesn't seem worth it.

But putting that time and effort into attribution *would* be worth it. I have proven it time and time again.

I also think people should consider having a monthly art budget. I don't care if it is $5. But if we all commit to seeking out cool artists and being their collective patrons, we could really make a difference and keep real art alive. Just commit to finding a cool new artist every month and financially contributing to them in some way.

On a bigger scale I think advocating for universal basic income, art grants for education and creation, and government regulation of AI would all be helpful long term goals. Though I think our friends in Europe may have to take the lead on regulation at the moment.

So...

Stop worrying about enjoying or calling out AI art.

Demand better attribution from image sharing sites.

Make sure all art has a source listed.

Start an art budget.

Advocate for better regulations.

[nestedneons]

by pascal blanchè

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

it would explain so much about Gotham economics if it turned out the only employers who pay a livable minimum wage are 1) Wayne Enterprises duh, but mainly 2) all of Gotham's assorted villains.

sure henching comes with shitty working conditions, but the benefits package is crazy competitive. they have dental

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

Gotham's villains are so engrained because supervillainy is the only thing propping up the local economy. henching requires no work experience, provides on-the-job training, and has a diversity hiring program (you're willing to commit crimes in tacky matching uniforms? great you're in, here's your gun and clownsuit)

Batman is constantly throwing money trying to compete but the fact remains that henchpeople are Gotham's largest workforce and will be until minimum wage laws catch up to reality

[fall-out-girlboy]

even educated jobs in environmental science are probably getting laundered money from poison Ivy. and a lab equipment tech might notice three different jobs are tied to pamela Isley and also happened to receive grants from "unrelated" shady shell orgs and the next one is setting up a temperature controled penguin habitat for some eccentric obvious mobster.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

half of Gotham's supervillains have doctorates of course they're also funding the sciences (for crime purposes but still)

[firesidoni]

(tags via @biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist )

[chill]

The basically Poison Ivy though

[consecuences]

[seat-safety-switch]

Do you love sports? I love a sport. That sport is called Zamboni. It consists of several minutes of big dudes wearing skates kicking the shit out of each other, until a piece of ice-surfacing equipment powered by a 1979 Volkswagen four-banger comes out and cleans up all the blood. You have to see it: these guys are like artisans; working the blade, the turning brake, and the throttle deftly to put on a show and leave the ice in perfect condition for the flawed monkeys to continue to eviscerate each other upon as soon as the beer ads finish.

Now, of course I’ve owned a Zamboni. And in fact, “Zamboni” is just one of many brands of ice resurfacing machine out there today. You can save a lot of money if you know this fact: everyone and their dog is looking for the name brand, so ads with a B- or C-grade rink stripper are gonna sink to the bottom, where they’ll find a pitifully small amount of your money. There are just two problems with owning one of these fine beasts. First, the top speed is annoyingly low, and second, Big Government keeps plowing away all the snow around my house before it can be turned into shiny, flawless rink-grade ice.

The first problem, as with so many others, can be fixed with sufficient addition of gearing. Since these things are made out of busted-ass old Volkswagen Fox parts, all it takes is understanding where the Fox ends and the Chevy S-10 begins, and then swapping out the cogs in the gearbox with the appropriately-chosen ones. Yes, it means that the 0-60 suffers, but you can fix that with a turbocharger. You don’t even need to intercool it: need I remind you of the giant pile of slowly-melting water that you’re sitting on?

Gearing up your Zamboni to highway speed does invite further problems: I was barely able to finish my break-in tune before the local law enforcement became aware of my actions. Nothing is more antagonizing to them than the existence of liberated, free thinkers such as myself. They may also have been angry that the aforementioned “pitifully small amount of [my] money” was in fact zero dollars, because I stole the fucker right out of a Timbits League game when I was supposed to be working. Hey, it’s my first day, what do you want from me?

Where was I? Oh yes, the ice quality. Here’s the thing: once you lead your pursuers out of the city, where there’s no road clearing, and drop the shaver, it’s difficult for the authorities to continue their pursuit. Maybe it’s because they’re in awe of the gloriously clear ice and have stopped to play a patriotic game of shinny, or it could be because the Lethal-Force-Spec™ Military Terrain® all-seasons that the patrol cruisers are equipped with are better at being bulletproof than they are at being snow tires.

[istheremorethanburrito]

This post is about train accident prevention.

Do not derail.

[chill]

Please stay on track.

[setulose]

One of life's great ironies is that almost everyone who makes the active decision to not have kids would probably be way better at raising a child than all the people who just kind of have children because it's what they think everyone is supposed to do

[setulose]

Like genuinely if you're like "I don't want kids because of the financial strain/the commitment/the irritation I would feel/the possibility of traumatizing them/whatever reason" you instantly demonstrate to me that you 1) understand the realities of parenthood and 2) believe that children should be treated with at least a base level of respect and compassion. Meanwhile everyone who's like "I want kids because I don't want to be alone" "I can't wait to dress up my babies" "I won't raise my children to be soft" may as well be talking about Neopets for all the fucks they seem to give about kids

[chill]

They usually make great aunts and uncles

[fuck-customers]

Our store got self checkout recently so now every entitled customer who refuses to use them has to go "oh wow! a person!" whenever they get to the front of my line. You're not funny. You're just fucking repetitive. Very tempted to start responding "oh wow! another robot!"

keep a bit of paper at your till with "WOW A REAL PERSON" at the top and everyone that make that joke add a tick. I do it with the "if it doesn't scan it must be free" people. It makes the dad joke guys embarrassed.

-Rodney

[chill]

They must be new to dad jokes. A proper response is "oh wow a lot of funny guys must shop here"

[fightthesun]

its saturday post colquhoun chillin

[spinningblueball]

Andromeda Galaxy Various Views

[theofficiallorddgc]