this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
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Disposable multiblade razors are objectively worse than safety razors, on all counts. They shave less smooth, while causing more burns. They're cheaper on initial investment but get more expensive very quickly, making you dependent on overpriced replacements and gimmicks that barely last a few uses. That's not counting the "externality costs", which is an euphemism for the costs pushed onto poor countries and nonhuman communities, thanks to the production, transport and disposal of all that single-use plastic (a safety razor is 100% metal, and so are the replacement blades, which come packed in paper).

About the only advantage of disposables is that they're easier to use for beginners. And even that is debatable. When you're a beginner with a safety razor you maybe nick yourself a few times until you learn the skill to follow the curves of your skin. You skin itself maybe gets sensitive at the start, unused to the exfoliation you get during a proper smooth shave. But how long do you think you stay "a beginner" when you shave every day? Like it's not like you're learning to play the violin, it's not that hard of a skill, a week or two tops and it becomes automatic.

But this small barrier to entry is enough, when paired with the bias and interests of razor manufacturers. Marketing goes heavy on the disposables, and you can't find a good quality safety razor or a good deal on replacement blades at the grocery shop, you have to be in the know and order it online. You have to wade through "manly art of the masculine man" forums that will tell you the only real safety razor is custom-made in Tibet by electric monks hand-hammering audiophile alloys and if you don't shave with artisinal castor soap recipes from 300BCE using beaver hair brushes, your skin is going to fall off and rot. Which is to say, safety razors are now a niche product, a hipster thing, a frugalist's obscure economy lifehack. A safety razor is a trivially simple and economic device, it's just a metal holder for a flat blade; but its very superiority now counts against it, it's weaponised to make it look inacessible. People have been trained to think of anything that requires even a little bit of patience or skill as not for them; perversely, even reasonableness can feel like "not for my kind".

Not by accident; since the one thing that disposables do really well is "transferring more of your monthly income to Procter & Gamble shareholders."

I could write a long text very similar to this about how scythes can cut grass cheaper, faster, neater, requiring no input but a whetstone—and some patience to learn the skill but how long does it take to learn that if you're a professional grass-cutter—when compared to the noisy motor blades that fill my morning right now, and every few months, as the landlord sends waves of poorly-paid migrant labour to permanently damage their own sense of hearing along with the dandelions and cloves that the bees need so desperately. But you get the point. More technology does not equal better, even for definitions of "better" that only care for the logic of productivity and ignore the needs (material, emotional, spiritual) of social and ecological communities.


You get where I'm going with this analogy. I keep waiting for the moment where the shoe is going to drop in "generative AI". Where the public at large wakes up like investors waking up to WeWork or the Metaverse, and everyone realises omg what were we thinking this is all bullshit! There's no point at all in using these things to ask questions or to write text or anything else really! But I'm finally accepting that that shoe is never dropping. It's like waiting for the moment when people realise that multi-blade plastic Gilettes are a scam. Not happening, the system isn't set up that way. For as long as you go to the supermarket and this is the "normal" way to shave, that's how shave is going to happen. I wrote before on how "the broken search bar is symbiotic with the bullshitting chatbot": Currently Google "AI" Summary is better than Google Search, not because Google "AI" Summary is good or reliable, but because the search has been internally sabotaged by the incentive structures of web companies. If you're a fellow "AI" refuser and you've been struggling to get any useful results out of web searches, think of how it must feel for people who go for the chatbot, how much easier and more direct. That's the razor we have on the shelves. "AI" doesn't have to work for the scam to be sustainable, it just has to feel like it more or less kinda does most of the time. (No one has ever achieved a close shave on a Gilette Mach 3 but hey, maybe you're prompting it wrong). As long as "generating" something with "AI" feels like it lets you skip even the smallest barrier to entry (like asking a question in a forum of a niche topic). As long as it feels quicker, easier, more convenient.

This is also the case for things like "AI translations" or "AI art" or "vibe coding". The real solution to "AI", like other forms of unnecessarily complex technology, would involve people feeling like they have the time and mental space to do things for pleasure. "AI" is kind of an anaerobic infection, an opportunistic disease caused by lack of oxygen. No one can breathe in this society. The real problem is capitalis—

Now don't get me wrong, the "AI" bubble is still going to pop. There's no way it can't; investors have put more money on this thing than on entire countries, contrary to OpenAI's claims the costs of training and operating keep exploding, and in a world going into recession at some point even capitalists with more money than common sense will have to think of the absence of ROI. But the damage is done. We're in ELIZA world now, and long after OpenAI is dead we'll still be reading books only to find out the gormless translation was "AI", playing games with background "art" "generated" by "AI", interacting online with political agitators spamming nonsense who turn out to be "AI", right until the day when electricity becomes too scarce to be cost-efficient to spam people in this way.

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[–] nightsky@awful.systems 4 points 3 hours ago

I'm quite happy with my electric razor though ;) But yeah, single-use plastic products, and their implicit "subscription"-like business model, is a good analogy.

I also don't expect that Gen-"AI" will go away entirely anymore, it's too useful for generating low-quality crap for e.g. spam and disinformation and similar purposes. I also dread the thought that when I buy a translated book now, I won't know much it was actually translated by a person.

However, I still have hope left that it will eventually become more of a background noise. Like how cryptocurrency still exists now, but at least we don't have to hear anymore about how "NFTs are the future of art" (just remember what a common theme that was for a while, pretty recently). Likewise I think that "AI is the future of " will eventually fade away.

And some people are already creating and spreading little "human made" seals that one can attach to projects, I hope that catches on, like labeling of food products. And not just in niches like open source software (where I've seen it so far), but widely across all kinds of creative things, like book translations and music and so on. I can hope, right?

Once the big hype is over, when the bubble has burst, the absolutely enormous costs of running all the server farms will have to be passed on to the product-making companies and they will have to further pass it on to their users. As a result I think that most of these "AI" "features" will be pulled from most products, because who's really willing to pay for it? And I don't expect that it will become cheap soon. In their desperate attempts to make their "AI" perform "better", the companies are currently cranking up the usage of compute power to ever-higher degree, because they're otherwise out of ideas how to improve anything about it. And from what I hear (out of principle I never use this stuff myself), the small models which one could run locally just aren't very good (not that the big ones are "good"...). (However, as written above, they will always be good enough for spam/disinformation and such where quality doesn't matter.)

So I don't believe that this will be like the 80s or 90s, where one could develop fancy big software with the expectation that within a few years even the cheap entry-level machines will be fast enough for it. That kind of performance progress stopped long ago. I expect that this will stay really expensive for the foreseeable future, at least for the "better" models. And then, maybe, with most of this crap pulled out of our tools for plain and simple reasons of "cost", together with the collapse of the hype around it, we can go back to this being mostly background noise.

Yeah, I've always been kind of a hopeless optimist...

[–] EtnaAtsume@lemmy.world 2 points 3 hours ago

Good post.

Ironically I do shave with a safety razor and that part did resonate. The first few weeks were uncertain but now I love it's and it's a good little conversation piece/parlor trick.

[–] jaschop@awful.systems 4 points 4 hours ago

You're certainly hitting some nails on their heads here. The normalisation of AI is absolutely happening, mostly because the buttons start showing up on Google/Microsoft/etc. products with massive market share.

Also the manlyman blogs bitching about beaver hair brushes. I was looking up safety razors in german ("Rasierhobel" btw, totally unaware of that until now), and Wikipedia was referencing one such archived blog, bitching about pig bristle brushes being "drug store" garbage. I might still get one. (The razor that is, not the brush. Spray on foam will do for me.)

Not so sure about the scythe/mower thing. My battery powered mower & motor scythe slap. (Stihl btw)

[–] NABDad@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

Good read.

Demoralizing, but what isn't today?