The Dream: My mother gifted me an old, beat up RV to live in. It was filthy inside, rusted outside. I saw my aunt who wanted to see it and give me a house warming present but I told her No because it was so gross.

The Explanation: It’s because I have a very strained relationship with my family right now. They failed to step up to protect me when I was young, and then failed to show up again when I needed support as an adult (along with numerous times in between). They left me with trauma and fear and self-hatred without ever an apology or a modicum of empathy. It’s left me with the intense desire to be seen and to be loved, but at the same time an intense fear of being treated again like I was for so long. It’s left me opting out of most of life, because who would want to see such a disgusting, shoddy RV like me? And even if I do convince myself that someone might, what if they burn my RV down? Or come in and are repulsed because they don’t like what they see?

Actually…

study - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1718793115

CNN article talking about the study - https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/13/health/falling-iq-scores-study-intl/index.html

The article you didn’t read?

fatal police shootings in more-Democratic states have declined 15 percent on a population-adjusted basis, with the rate holding relatively steady since Mr. Floyd’s death.

But in Republican-leaning states, they have risen 23 percent. And within those redder states, exurbs and rural areas, which tend to be more conservative than cities, have the highest rates of police killings.

You’re telling me that in republican bastion states of lower education, less unions, less social spending, and more racism, is tied to more violence and a greater amount of extra-judicial killings by the state-sanctioned corporation-protectors? But they have almost 4 weeks of training! How could this possibly be??

But don’t worry! They’re trying to make it worse! Far worse!

This week, the Justice Department said it would no longer investigate or oversee nearly two dozen police departments that were accused of civil rights violations, including in Minneapolis and Louisville, Ky. And in April, President Trump signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing” law enforcement, including by directing the U.S. attorney general to “provide legal resources” to defend police officers accused of wrongdoing.

I was thinking about their horrifying conclusion as well, and your comment made me pine for the days when you wouldn’t know something. Think about it, back before the internet, if you had a random question, you either had to interact with some trusted person, or you went to the library and looked it up. It’s like the ever-present access to all information has quelled or killed any notion of curiosity or boredom, and it’s within those frames of mind that learning and inspiration come. I remember as a kid when I wouldn’t know the answer to something, I’d think on it for days, weeks. I’d get stuck on a video game level, and hit my head against the wall for hours trying to overcome it, only to pick up a random gamer magazine off the rack at the mall, and read the solution. Treating that magazine like it was the lost treasure map of some ancient expedition, passing it around my group of friends… Interactions and experiences that are gone forever.

The idea that we’ve gradually went from relying on trusted professionals, learned educators, and scientific rigor, replacing them with a corporations data-harvesting LLM, on-line influencers, and click-bait “journals” cosplaying as academic centers with integrity. This article is basically celebrating the fact that we’ve off-shored all of our thinking, curiosity, and inquisitiveness to machines, all the while we struggle for scraps in a corporation dominated life devoid of genuine human interaction. We’re all to busy sipping dopamine hits from a screen instead of actually living our lives.

I grew up while the internet was being slowly rolled out, and being from the last generation to remember what it was like before the internet, I can say that the things I miss most are privacy, the ability to be bored, and not knowing.

It’s worse now, and it’s harder everyday to imagine that life on this planet will improve.

The existence of this kind of instinct within an LLM is extremely concerning. Acting out towards self-preservation via unethical means is something that can be hand-waved away in an LLM, but once we reach true AGI, this same thing will pop-up, and there’s no reason to believe that 1. we would notice, and 2. we would be able to stop it. This is the kind of thing that should, ideally, give us pause enough to set some world-wide ground rules for the development of this new tech. Creating a thinking organism that can potentially access vital cyber architecture whilst acting unethically towards self-preservation is how you get Skynet.

cooks make more than salads. You’re being an asshole.

Literally not a fantasy, but my and a lot of cooks reality.

When I was a cook, even if I was just making something simple, I could still find creative satisfaction in a variety of ways. How you sprinkle on the garnish, plating, using a little more of this, a little less of that. Food to a chef is like art designed to be destroyed, so with the temporary nature of the medium, it really allows you to be creative. You’re not hung up on making it perfect, because it’s just about to be eaten, so it let’s you be more free with your design choices. It can be fun creating art while you’re supposed to be working.

but if my job was suddenly just washing up after a machine… well. That will get old real quick.

Thought I was going to see a crack appear on the driveway, that’s what I was watching originally. Then it happened and I was like “What? The driveway stood still and the rest of the Earth just lurched forward?” Holy shitballs

Collin Farrel and Kristin Stewart.

They’re just not good actors. They’ve been in a couple good movies, but those movies succeed despite, not because of them.

As the founders intended, we have a right to bear a single-bore muzzle-loaded flint-lock. Anything more than that should really be a separate right.

The American dream is now an outright lie, one perpetuated by boomers who lived the most charmed existence before pulling up the ladder behind them. Billionaires stole our future.

disgusting. Funds should be taken and given to the family of the boy she traumatized.

Millerey González, 32, was raped, had her hands, arms, and legs broken, then was thrown into a stream in a deep ravine to drown in Colombia on April 4

Rather than helping, some witnesses recorded her on video trying in vain to escape the ravine and stream, which they later posted to social media.

What in the actual fuck. You see someone struggling to not drown and you just fucking film it??

Create art. Writing screenplays and books. Painting, gardening, working out, traveling, seeing live music, volunteer with whatever great organization I happen to be into at the time. Spend more time in my community. Have children.

The way I console myself is by saying that likely, the only way the US elects a true socialist democrat (AKA Bernie Sanders / AOC) that can bring about a Brand New Deal, is by having the pendulum of American politics first swing so far to the right, that everyone with a conscience is forced to get out and vote in retaliation.

But the idea that we could simply vote our way out of a rising fascist dictatorship seems a fleeting fantasy.

we’ve been given too much bread and too many circuses

For a while I celebrated the idea that we were in the “Golden Age of Television.” So many amazing shows, stories being told so exquisitely. But the more I think about it, the more that the ancient roman proverb of Bread and Circus seems more apt. I sit in front of a computer screen all day for work. On my breaks, I browse Lemmy on my phone. When I get off, I work out while staring at another screen in the gym. While making dinner I put on whatever NBA game is currently playing. While eating dinner I watch a show. After dinner I watch a comedy series while I eat dessert, occasionally browsing the internet simultaneously. My whole day, from when I wake up, to right before I go to bed, consuming content from a screen.

I wonder how many are like me, and how many of us are successfully using this constant stream of info- and entertainment to dull the pain of living like this. And what would it take for us to truly resist.

I think you’re right in that it would take hardship. We’re all mostly two missed paychecks away from our living standard collapsing, that could do it. But then that begs the question, how does one resist the rise of fascism? Because I’m beginning to think that voting may not save us when those in power are completely divorced from public outcry or consequences. When peaceful opposition is made impossible (or illegal on certain college campuses), when they round up and deport those that would publicly question their authority, when our elected leaders wring their hands in mocking frustration over all the nothing they’ve tried… well, perhaps violence is the answer after all. What other means have they left us?

The everything is already awful enough without us having to carry around a device that connects us to all the awful everywhere we go.

nobody would care

Information Overload. The march doesn’t matter. The people who did the upsetting thing have already gone on to do several more upsetting things by the time we’ve started marching against the first one. The people reporting about the upsetting thing miss the point but it doesn’t matter because nobodies actually paying attention, it’s just fluff on in the background. The white noise we need to go about our day maintaining some false sense of “staying up to date” when it’s impossible to do. The torrent of information comes from all over the globe and never stops growing. Even if everything is suddenly perfect in your neighborhood, city, state, or country, it doesn’t matter because there’s a genocide somewhere else, and the pope died, and there’s a famine and a new study that says the sweet treats you like are going to kill you and the stock market is down but it’s back up by the time you check and you should’ve bought the dip so you could actually retire but you were too busy ignoring a TV while looking at bad news on your phone and eating a sweet treat because nothing feels real anymore and you just need a hit of dopamine before you start panicking and reach for the gun in the nightstand to put a bullet in your brain because at least the bullet will be real and the silence afterwards won’t be temporary.