Comment by altairprime
4 days ago
Please don’t be sweepingly dismissive of people by framing like this. Printers lack mobility and firearms would only activate their defensive ink cloud reflexes, as every expert office IT worker knows (including you!). So the group B you’re describing is being portrayed as both excessively paranoid and blatantly incompetent in order to dismiss the views of tech experts that reject A.I. and support your own claim that they’re, to paraphrase your intent in last century’s terms, ‘dinosaurs’. That’s not a respectable form of rhetoric and your use of it paints both you and group A, the one whose beliefs you’re trying to promote, with a broad brush of skeptical disbelief.
Office Space: Laser Printer murder scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjsSr3z5nVk
Perhaps you couldn’t tell from ‘defensive ink cloud’ that I understand the joke being used to demean and dismiss group B. It was a great movie for its time and was a small but real contributing factor in my recent retirement. Doesn’t excuse the rhetorical behavior I’m objecting to, of course, but I’m sure its characters would have appreciated my pun slash half-joke* about squid ink-jet printers.
* Seriously, do not shoot a toner cartridge or any object containing one with a projectile weapon; silicosis is no one’s friend and while you’d probably be fine with a 100 respirator, your lungs would still really prefer you didn’t even just once do that. (doi:10.1002/ajim.23147)
I'm actually sympathetic to group B. The last para was a note that the economics of software dev means that the value of human-created code is low and dropping. It's ushering in a new hellscape if you desire quality software or just like programming, but here we are.
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