The Enthropy in Travel

Oh the pretty cabins! Pretty, pretty cabins! I'm gonna travel to a national forest and stay in a pretty cabin with all the fun things a cabin should have. Hot tub! Fireplace! Back deck! Right on the lake, too!

See the picture? Yahoo! (No photo because I don't want to get sued for defamation.)

Here we go! Whip out the credit card and book that pretty cabin!

Problem is, that cabin isn't in the same place we are going, it's 250 miles away. But the SUPER EASY VACATION APP doesn't tell you where this pretty, pretty cabin is located until AFTER your money has been paid.

Where is it? 250 miles from the lakeside photo! Hot tub doesn't matter, you can't find the cabin from your original destination, because it's 5 hours away!

With one blissfully deceptive swipe of the credit card, our vacation has turned into a disaster, from which there is no recourse.

Kiss that $500 goodbye! Thanks SUPER EASY VACATION APP!

No, I'm not kidding. This is the second time this has happened. Traveling has never been simple, always got to be careful that the logistics are right. Right maps, right supplies, correct directions, proper clothing.

Yet increasingly, the very applications that are supposed to make things simple are becoming financial traps. I'm tech savvy, and I find that trusting the SUPER EASY VACATION APP to book accomodations is a sure fire way to get ripped off. It's a black hole into which my money goes, and the chance of getting a refund for a moment of in-attention is nil.

If I want to book a cabin inside a national forest, I have to call the Lodge to make sure I'm booking a real cabin. That's not easy, because the Lodge Staff just referred me to SUPER EASY VACATION APP!

Apps, applications, booking software, all that crap has made getting screwed out of your hard-earned money easier than ever.

The en-shitification of life, courtecy of Silcon Valley Tech Bros and Artificial Intelligence.

AI -- Making Reading Less Interesting

The more content I read these days, the more of this odd syntax shows up. A word or two, just odd or out of place will tell you that the content was AI generated. I've used Chat GPT for small bits of text that I don't want to write myself. It will churn out bland text that is grammatically correct. Things like book blurbs for 200 words or less. Hand it 500 words, and it cuts 300 out. But it doesn't produce interesting text. Servicable text. Useful text. Yes, but do we haunt the internet for that kind of text? Now, ask ChatGPT to produce text for gaming, and it will turn out a monster stat block with lightening speed. This is a great help, but it isn't fiction. Yet I keep hearing that authors are using AI to write their fiction books. I can't imagine what kind of vague, oatmeal-textured fiction it might be. But I can't imagine it being great, engaging fiction. Oatmeal is great stuff. I eat it for breakfast, when I need fast food and a lot of it. Something that will stick around until lunch on a busy day. Oatmeal flavored fiction might fill an e-book, but it won't engage a reader. This last month, I've clicked away from a number of articles on various websites, because the text was bland and uninteresting. I think it's possible that AI produced text is going to slowly make general internet surfing uninteresting. Which might be a good thing in the long term. The less time I spend online the better.