psion

I work in a copy-print center where we take orders for business card, posters, flyers, invitations, and all sorts like that. Lately, I have been getting more and more AI generated artwork for these flyers and business cards, and they are not sized correctly. I can tell it's AI generated not from style, layout, or even hallucinations, but just the size. The background are a full color, the customer insists that it's the right size, but I have to tell them that if I print what they gave me, there is going to be large white borders on the sides, tops, or all around. I have had to explain to too many customers that AI doesn't know what an inch really is, as the reference images it has are different sizes. AI flyers could be the best design ever, but it will never be sized properly and will still piss off the print employee.

And I have found that if you are paying for an AI service to get these generic, wrong sized designs, you could have spent just as much going on Fiverr and gotten something that doesn't need to get a full style revision.

There are some serious attempts at removing the car addiction. The qLine rail goes down Woodward avenue providing a rather nice alternative to the bus systems, and the I have heard recently there are talks to expand the People Mover as it was intended when it was designed. I'm hoping that the bus systems make efforts to bounce back and start serving the suburbs better.

I used to roam that city in my youth some twenty years ago. And if you told me then it would eventually be what it is today, I would have laughed in your face. I'm impressed with how much Detroit has reinvented itself and continues to grow again.

My thought is that this will be taken on by the same people who create low-effort WordPress plugins and charge high dollar amounts for them. Create something super-low-effort, doesn't need to do much except look like it does, and expose an advertisement layer. Publish it as an important mobile app we all need, they make money, we install insecure apps that do nothing for us down the road. Call me a cynic, but I've had to wade through paid plugins and extensions for WordPress and Magento and that is exactly what happens.

I was hired to design and build a loan platform from scratch. The company that hired me was a marketing agency that build WordPress and Magento sites, not scratch built platforms. but they took the bid from a large company and hired me to build it. I came in and started developing various microservices, and asked for more developers to assist. I got freelancers in other countries who usually build WordPress themes. I worked hard to keep these people building the right projects for months. then I was asked to help out with a couple of WordPress tasks for other clients. More and more of these, and finally I was called into the office and told my project was cancled by the client. They got bought out and was told that they were spending too much money on this platform before it even went anywhere. All my work got scrapped. I believe most of my code has been deleted.

I wrote an amazing feature for a client's website. Saw how awesome it was going to be, wrote it so we could use it on other websites. Even pitched it to my boss on how to pitch it to another client. That code shipped and was never used again.

Putting aside the HP bad discussions, they've had a tank laser printer on the market for a few years now. A few of them, actually. I know because I had to sell this crap. It used a special "plunger" toner refill kit where you set it in the hole and push down. It wasn't that great of a printer, expensive, and a potential mess.

> I believe ageism is real.

I agree, but I would also like to point out a different form of the ageism that I see all the time in my line of work. I'm in tech retail sales. My stores customer base is a bit older, trending more over retired. There is a certain mindset among this age group that goes back a number of years that computers and technology was the playground of the young, so they think because they are older they can get away with not knowing what's going on in technology. I remember the jokes where some older person (in this case around 30-40) would have serious trouble understanding some technology, be it a computer or VCR, and having to call some teenager to their rescue. Too many older people decided that these newfangled toys are just for the kids, and that stuck. So now I have older seniors looking to buy a computer or printer and not understanding how it works because "I'm an older person, I don't know these things like you younger people."

It feels like the old jokes have pervaded our minds and now the younger see the greybeards as some senior citizen who's out of touch on technology. This shouldn't be the case.