mccFantasy world where they have been breeding dragons to be smaller and smaller until they have little toy dragons that can sit in your lap and are popular among noble ladies and if you leave them unattended in a home they will gather up all the low denomination change under dressers and such and push them into a corner to make a tiny $4.78 hoard to sit on
Imagine opening up your closet door and there in the back of your closet is your lap dragon, sitting on a rudimentary hoard of six nickels and 17 pennies. "Graaaak!", it says, as it spreads its wings wide (span 2ft 3in). The threat display is made somewhat less terrifying by its head getting caught in the underside of a coat, causing it to flap around briefly
bob
серафими многоꙮчитїи@bob @mcc Every so often I think of the crime of what ~ humanity did to pigeons - making their entire species into what is essentially a familiar and then extensively altering them for ~ fashion over centuries, and then discarding them once technology advanced and fashion changed; they haunt our cities because we made them love us and be bound to us. And I think of a fantasy setting with dragons, and us binding them the same way, until we get petroleum, and fashion changes, and we discard them.
SwiftOnSecurity@flaviusb dawg wtf
@bob @mcc Sad pug dragons haunting fantasy cities, people treating them like 'sky rats', kids throwing copper bits (fractions of a copper penny) 'for their hoard' to them the way kids feed the birds with bits of bread today, no one talking about how the legendary forges that made the early parts of the fantasy industrial revolution possible (before magic natural gas/magic coal infrastructure was built) were all powered by pug dragons who were the valued familiars of the machinists guild members.
@bob @mcc And if I were looking at it literarily, I'd have the thing set in the equivalent of the modern day, with the machinists union having been basically smashed, and the plot would ~ exactly map on to what happened in real life in the US (David F. Noble - 'Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation' is a good source), with minor changes to link it thematically to the machinists casting out and erasing from history their dragon familiars (+ MC/CMC rather than NC/CNC &c).
@bob @mcc Yeah. A lot of what was at issue was similar to the earlier case of weavers and the current case of programmers; a potentially powerful labour bloc that could control an important part of production, which was dangerous because of the skill premium plus the internal lines of education, which were defanged by capital at first through propaganda/ideology, and then when that started to lose effectiveness, through destroying the skill premium and the internal lines of education.
@bob @mcc Many similarities between the power looms, NC (and then CNC), and LLMs, both in terms of their political economy (eg they are a centralisation + rentierism play backed by on the face irrational financing plus quiet military investment and weirdly lax military contracts) but also in the way they are lock step propagandised as increasing quality and decreasing costs while all actual testing shows that they decrease quality while increasing costs, they just decrease the return to labour.
@bob @mcc Yeah, the book I referenced upthread a bit does go in to that. NC and CNC were particular 'solutions' to the problem of labour power, as we can see by the fact that there were existing other 'computerfy machining' technologies at that time that instead raised productivity and lowered costs by raising the skill ceiling and reducing offcuts/scrap/the need for rework/etc. But NC at the time meant lots of bespoke tapes, produced by un-unionised white collar workers, and ticket clipped.
@bob @mcc But there was a concerted (And documented) effort to move to NC instead. Much like how there are a lot of forms of computer-aided productivity increase in programming, both already deployed (but underused) and in development, which raise the skill ceiling / reduce defeces / increase programmer speed and comfort, but CoPilot is being pushed instead.
acb
Jamie McCarthy