Tbh, cutting back was a big benefit for me.

I was up to 4+ coffees per day. At my worst, 8+ to self medicate with that sweet, sweet dopamine (which I now get from prescription meds). I did not realize how much it was increasing my anxiety and making me agitated.

I am back to 1 or 2 per day, not typically after noon, and it is much better. I sleep better, my baseline anxiety is lower.

Disliking AI is fine and good. But that is a really dumb argument.

“60 employees who can’t be productive without the internet? And this is progress?”

“60 employees who can’t be productive without computers? And this is progress?”

“60 scribes who can’t be productive without clay tablets? And this is progress?”

Etc.

Edit: LLMs/AI are going to change some things. They are going to make (shitty) coding and various automations much more accessible. They are probably not a revolutionary technology like computers/internet, but that they could be a core part of some people’s workflow is absolutely not unthinkable. It has been shown that there have not, so far, been major boons to productivity on the whole, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have some use cases.

Kobo is pretty good. I like mine. Is it as nice and user friendly as Kindle? Probably not. Do I own it, not rent it, am not served ads, and don’t have to deal with shitty DRM? Yes. Zero regrets. Got one for my sister and my wife, too. They also really like them.

That was the point, though, I think. It’s a commentary on how society treats violence and mental health as individual, isolated character flaws rather than as systemic problems. Having a female & feminine character be the violent/troubled one was a brilliant choice imo because it goes against our stereotypes and further highlights this. That uncomfortable feeling you have would probably be less so if it was a character you expected to have issues like that

Hard to pick one, here are a few:

• Triangle of Sadness

• Challengers

• Conclave

• The Wrestler

• The Drama

That’s just what has happened on Earth, though. Also I didn’t specify they’d be coming to us - if they landed here in something we’d recognize as a rocket, then I’d suspect we’d have a lot more in common with them.

But what if they evolved in gas clouds? Or hell what if they perceive higher dimensions? What if it’s a 4D being, capable of instantaneous long distance travel through spacetime - they don’t need math for that. Or even language. Those are far-out scenarios, but I’m just saying that it takes a very earth-centric, anthropocentric view of intelligent life to assume the sorts of things that’d make communication possible.

My trouble is that they may have a totally different theory & understanding of numbers, language, symbols, names, etc.

For instance, what if they don’t have the concept of symbolic representation of objects/concepts in visual/auditory ways? That seems incredibly fundamental from an anthropocentric perspective, but their neurology would be totally different - maybe they evolved a different way to store concepts.

Or say they do, but we get to math - and their understanding of math is similar to ours and they represent it symbolically, but beyond that their perception of time, self vs other distinction (theory of names type stuff), senses are so radically different that we can’t ever reach enough common ground to communicate.

Maybe they communicate with like, pulses of IR light that we can detect & reproduce, and they represent numbers basically like morse code and they have words for standard mathematical and logical operators. And maybe they have hearing and can see the visible light spectrum - just to make things easy.

But

• their neurology is such that they can’t comprehend the link between sounds and meaning
• same with visible light. It’d be like us seeing magnetic fields and making the leap to thinking planets were talking to us.
• they don’t have an understanding of names. Individuality for them is not a concept they understand - there are individuals, but they are not referred to. Maybe they speak in generalities & objectives. Not “you, go farm the field” but “satiate hunger” - perhaps who does and where/how this is done is not particularly important or it is marked with pheromones or context or something.
• they do not have phonetic components of speech.

So, how do we communicate?

We can broadcast numbers at them maybe. We place 2 apples in front of them and broadcast “two” on repeat in distinct, discrete sequence: Two. Two. Two.(…— …— …—) Maybe we start throwing the word for apple in there in morse code. ( …— . - .–. .–. .-… .)

To get the message, they’d need to understand that:

• sequences of IR pulses generated by things other than them can have meaning. Granted, seems simple enough.

• the length and cadence of the pulses matter. We could presumably figure that out by observation & tailor our communication to them, granted.

• intention is to name the two objects in front of them. Hmmmm that is suddenly a bit harder since they don’t typically view names the same as we do. But maybe.

• phonemes can be represented with IR flashes. Oops, they don’t have a concept of those… they’d have to make a massive leap to understand that. But maybe they’d view the word as an ideogram.

• the 2 we were broadcasting referred to the quantity of the apples and not some other feature. Not a given at all, they could take it to mean any number of things, in theory.

• the specific type of thing that an apple is can have a name. Not a given.

• that we are referring to the apples and not to something else. Maybe the act of presenting objects, the act of flashing IR light, the concept of presence vs non-presence, etc.

• that we were labelling the thing as apple and not instead talking about what you use it for, where it comes from, how old it is, it’s scent, who knows - could be anything.

It is not a given that they get past apple. The likelihood, I think, goes up when you contrast it with something else, but what if they don’t understand comparison and contrast similarly to us?

Okay. Say they understand apple. We go through thousands of things to build up their vocabulary of objects. Maybe we show them someone eating an apple next and they know the word for human and the word for apple.

They have to understand what verbs are, have some concept of grammar, the relation of things in the sentence, the conveyance of cause/effect - the specific human is causing the action of the apple being eaten.

“Human eat apple” could really mean anything in this context. Perhaps they don’t know that words like these presented in a different context have the same meaning. Or they don’t understand eating in this case - like it is an unimportant concept, the concept they understand is what is achieved by eating.

Anyway. It all gets very abstract. But, what I’m trying to say is: thinking we can communicate with creatures that evolved in a totally different context assumes their neurology is strikingly similar to ours in ways I think are honestly far-fetched. Some of the above could be solved, with difficulty, given enough time and motivation, but it takes a lot more assumptions than I think people typically realize regarding how anthropic the aliens would be. And the challenges go beyond mere logistics & extend to fundamental linguistic/psychological/philosophical/neurological barriers.

People always say that, but like… what does that actually mean? Like we could work from first principles and just build a system of communication based on math?

Gotta say I have my doubts. I have no idea what alien cognition would be like.

This is what I ended up doing, and it works great. I knew about aliases, but didn’t really use them at all - I didn’t know about bash functions though.

So now I have a few functions in .bashrc for short things and am just aliasing shell scripts for easy access to more complex tbings I don’t want cluttering the file

Oooh ty that makes a lot of sense. I was unaware of that functionality.

This should be the next step for me. When you do aliased commands, can they take arguments? Like to download a playlist with yt-dlp, could i do download-playlist [URL]?

Cooking his favorite beef swellington, perhaps

It’s really easy. Linux Mint. Bootable USB. Back up your important files on a separate harddrive. Plug in USB. Reboot. Install. Port old files over. Good as new

Bonus points for looking into how to optimize your partition structure, but it’d be fine to just let it do its thing. Also like… I guess you should probably make sure your audio and video cards are supported, but they like 98% are

Hell yeah. I was considering a C5, but saw people online saying ads are present on LG.

I use shield anyway, but I will probably just follow your advice and set default input to the shield

Anybody have un-enshittified 4k tv recommendations?

Mainly want good picture quality for movies + high refresh rate for games.

HA HA take that COMMIE you’re braver than me due to your genetic superiority! ^oh ^wait

It also isn’t as performant for the price, or so I’ve heard. They’re working on it, but it isn’t up to par with big name companies.

Nope! None of those situations should be motivated by profit imo. Basically, nothing that is necessary for life should be for profit, in my opinion, as long as the state can handle the administrative burden.

But like… if the people demand some random, superfluous thing and the state doesn’t have the will or resources to produce it, maybe that’s where markets come in.

All they have to do is effectively use the public funds alloted to do the things they’re tasked with doing. Not everything should generate profit.

For so many services, profit-seeking creates perverse incentives. Well… all services. But maybe it’s tolerable in some circumstances.

It’s a type of kei car - a kei truck