The Luddites should have been dismantling capitalists if they wanted to solve their problem.

Whenever I hear this I always feel it takes a lot more guts to understand why not to but continue to choose to live anyway. Death is a comforting certainty while living is the way we know it to be. Hope you and I will be able to feel differently and be more comfotable with the idea of continuing through this world.

I’m intending to build a more frequently enjoyable life. I may have to do some surgery before I’ll be able to forget things in the moment though.

This is actually my primary motivation. I have some morbid curiosity about what we’re going to do to ourselves next.

I’m here too and in my case I’m damn sure it’s something other than cowardice. I know I’d sacrifice myself in less than a second given the opportunity and I even know how I would, but I haven’t. There’s a reason we’re still around even if we don’t know it consciously.

Thanks for the reminder. I’ll make sure they know my body belongs in the trash can (in a few decades).

I’ll be getting a dog soon. Thanks for this, it’s too easy to forget how cool dogs are when you don’t have one.

I’ve always felt that my note would make anyone who read it glad that they no longer have to deal with someone as indignant and sanctimonious as I am. The fact that most would react to need this way is part of my reasoning against continuing in this world, but in spite of the failings of my species I like other people regardless whether they’re safe or not. I’d like to see what happens for my personal interest, but I completely understand anyone who wouldn’t be able to tolerate this life at all.

I’m not sure whether I’m too stupid one way or the other, but at least I know I’m stupid.

Cheers, mate.

Choosing the default is still a choice. Why is the default better than the alternative in your opinion? Please don’t answer that question or even consider it unless you already have an answer. I would rather not have to ask this myself to be honest.

Satirical, fake AI-generated clips show Rishi Sunak declaring, “Please don’t vote us out, we would be proper gutted!” and making unevidenced claims about how the Conservative leader is spending public money - including how he will send his “mates loads of dosh”.

I thought this article would be making a case against TikTok.

Veritasium endorsed a known racketeer and as a consequence some portion of their audience is now going to be defrauded in an economy where there’s not a lot of room for that especially among those in need of therapy. Watching Veritasium videos causes the channel to have greater exposure, increasing the risk to the general population if engaged with by anyone. Therefore, engaging with this channel in any way is harmful to others.

Your comment made me re-think this a bit, because I happen to know that the origin of “dad-bod” wasn’t patronizing but a word used by some straight women who find this body type attractive in men. I wonder if “short king” may have initially been used by people who were attracted to the attribute in men and wanted a nice sounding way to describe it. I’m totally with you when these phrases are used like you described, but I wonder how many people using these terms are genuinely attracted to the attributes they’re pointing out.

So many times I wanted to know the name of an actor who played a character after the first episode and the top result was something like “[Character Name] (deceased)” or " Villain: [Character Name]."

Some of my common uses are:

1. Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don’t depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.

2. Re-phrasing things: At work when I’m drained and out of patience I can tell that what I’m writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT’s version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.

3. Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say “no idiot, instead:” and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.

Fun uses which are less common:

1. Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.

2. Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.

This could actually happen soon. Outside of office use most casual users in younger generations are using laptops. Desktops are getting to be more niche and associated with computer builders and power users. As Windows gets shittier, Linux gets easier to use and customize, and desktop use shrinks to just enthusiasts, we could very well see Linux on the majority of desktops.

There’s respect for someone as a person who deserves all their human rights as I believe everyone does regardless of their behavior. Then there’s respect for someone’s ability to do or understand something, and that depends entirely on whether they can demonstrate their knowledge or ability in my subjective opinion. I can respect someone as a person even if I don’t respect their ability to, for example, argue the finer points of literary analysis.

There’s tiers.

I have no respect for an opinion that the holder doesn’t understand well enough to argue since they are parroting a “common sense” belief based on premises which are easily disprovable.

I can respect an opinion I disagree with which the holder understands, but up until the point where they are willing to argue in good faith. If they are deliberately spreading info which they know to be false because it’s to their advantage that others hold those beliefs, I thinknit’s a major problem. If they refuse to entertain any challenge to their opinion however obvious, that is also a problem.

The opinion I disagree with which I respect the most is one that is in total good faith which causes me to question my opinion. This is how I learn.

The thing about that is that there isn’t a definable human nature, just tendencies and systems. Using technology like CRISPR to force a definable human nature for all humans would likely doom us. It would be nice until the the environment we adapted our species to changes and then no one in the entire population would be capable of adapting to the new environment since we bottlenecked ourselves for short-term peace and prosperity.