Good documentation makes me happy, bad documentation makes me run away. I suspect I’m not the only person who not only reads the fucking manual but thinks writing good technical documentation is an art of its own. Good luck with trying to replace proper documentation with profuse gibberish.

Who’s in this pic and doesn’t like it? Not me, of course, because I don’t work for an evil company directly, I just help their operations through a middle man. So I work for several evil companies, but only a tiny little bit for each, which in the grand scheme of evil is nearly nothing!

A not very epic poem about smart appliance FOMO, to be sung to a tune played on the world’s smallest violin

I’m devastated my fridge is old and does nothing
but keep my food cold.
I feel so poor and left out,
having no access to these value-strengthening promotions and curated advertisements.
My dumb fridge just
stands in a corner of the kitchen, not talking to me!
I feel so alone among my silent appliances.
Please speak to me washing machine
say something sweet space heater
profess your undying love to me dish washer

I was out of work for over a year and jobs have been coming in again since two months. The many indications that this unholy shit bubble is finally bursting has me smiling, dancing and singing “The robot is dead, the robot is dead!”. I hate the AI hype with a passion, not just because of my work, but because of the ghastly slop we’re being exposed to everywhere online. I hope it disappears quickly into the same hole NFTs when to fuck off into.

Now before the billionaires come up with the next stupid hype can we at least eat a few of them?

I’m a translator, and we’ve been plagued by MT (machine translation) for years. A year ago translation jobs stopped completely and all I was offered was “Rating AI results”. I refused all of that garbage and turned temporally very poor. I went to shovel manure like a proper peasant to not have to engage with this shit. A year later translation seems to bounce back a bit, and I suspect art will do so as well. Most people can’t stand this slightly-off uncanny slop everywhere. It’s not just us artists and writers who react with almost visceral hate to this life-less soul-less crap. The hype will die down (don’t forget to diss it wherever you can in your free time!)

Lots of good advice here already, especially regarding IFS, which is a therapy approach that works with splitting one’s inner monologue into a conversation between different voices.

Since a lot of commenters seem to equate inner voices with schizophrenia or psychosis I’d like to let you (and them) know it’s not that unusual to have inner voices with different personalities! I found my inner voices very helpful to deal with my mental challenges and this never turned into anything uncontrollable. I had a similar very critical inner voice which I then recognized as mainly being my mother’s way of criticizing me - even after I went no contact with mom, she was still occupying space in my head telling me everything I did wrong.

The way out was really simple, CBT-based: a therapist reminded me to be kind to myself and I just practised - like giving myself an inner hug every time I used the unkind voice and remembering that kindness to myself is important (not beating myself up for being unkind!), and to avoid self-deprecating humour. It just took some time, maybe a year, and now I see clear improvements. The voice is pretty much gone. At the moment I have no need to separate into different voices and feel quite at home within myself. Hope you get there soon, you seem a be on a good path towards it!

Ah beautiful, that’s the way!

Not if you could express it in a more accessible way without loss of meaning, and especially not if you claim to want a broader public to opt into your cause. Mostly it’s smartassery. I understand that there’s situations where you want to speak about scientific topics and need specific terminology for precision, but this is definitely not it.

Okay thanks, though I wish you hadn’t used AI. I’m fiercely against AI, which is why I voiced my disappointment that a cause I stand behind is obfuscated by pseudo-radical word salad.

Anyway I don’t believe OP wrote the manifesto themselves, so my criticism is most likely not arriving at the right address anyways.

This particular OP rather than suffering from mania is suspiciously bot-like. It’s the second account I encounter in a few days whose posts and comments seem ever so slightly off - in this case it’s just the completely random stuff they post and an uncanny and distanced way of commenting.

I’m a bit dismayed that I now have to make an effort to distinguish real people from bots and that if I block those I find suspicious it includes the risk of blocking some real people who are just having a weird way of expressing themselves.

More of an integral protestation of the inherently unknown in the paradigm of embedded meta-complexities, but you do you ;-)

Or is it the text of the manifesto itself that makes the AI shitrobot explode? Maybe I misunderstood.

The problem with most manifestos is that every second word is more than 10 characters long. Why? Can you not write what you want to say in as few words as possible, and in a way it even can be understood by people whose native language is not English? Come on, give me an ELI5 please, I want to fight AI but I don’t want to have to wade through word salad to do so.

How is leisure time terrible? And it wasn’t the only thing I was looking at. Clean air, clean water, sustainable production, green spaces, quality over quantity of products, sustainable production… But then I feel like you don’t want to actually engage. Go on and continue “industrial revolution good, low tech past bad” - I can’t help you here.

If you read history in more detail you’ll find that that’s not quite true. The industrial revolution only improved the quality of life for people after the rich and powerful made sure to enclose the commons and invade countries all over the world making living conditions for people worse in the process. Hunters and gatherers had more leisure time than the industrial worker, even medieval peasants had more leisure time than the industrial worker, living conditions got worse when people were forced into cities (once again, by stealing communal land that made it possible that villages were pretty much self sufficient).

Better living conditions nowadays are only possible because the environment is being destroyed at a record rate, and are declining again as we speak, with pollution making life in those glorious industrial cities worse every day.

History is written by the winners so you have to read between the lines to figure out how much of this supposed better life for all is actually propaganda.

This hints at a problem of academia being in favour of ‘lots of expensive words good’. They start training us for this at school - more often than not churning out a longer and more complex text is rewarded over writing succinctly and in language that is easily understandable to all.

Yes, I understand using accurate terminology is a thing, and that this terminology can get extensive and complex. But it doesn’t account for all of the word salad produced because we expect academic texts to sound a certain way. And that’s how we get desperate people using robots to keep up with the silly demand for overcomplicated word salad and then other desperate people using robots to work their way through the aforementioned word salad.

Not good arguments imo. Art can be this ‘blood, sweat and tears’ thing if you are into it, but art also can be an activity you do because you enjoy doing it, without a single fuck given that the result looks like the wet fart of a 3yo. I mostly don’t care how people make art. Scratch your art into rock with a baguette if you feel that’s the level of pain needed, or paint with your period blood if that floats your boat.

But use AI? It is incredibly bad for the environment, uses other people’s work without their consent, and it’s being owned by fascist fucking tech bros who want to drown the world in doom. You wouldn’t kick a puppy and call it art, same goes for AI.

Our current treatment for such types of depression are essentially still in the stone ages. Throw something at it, see what happens, adjust as needed.

I know, and I guess watching a loved one being slowly destroyed by the trial and error that is ‘modern’ medication made me want to never consider it no matter how bad i felt - so this AI thing seems to be an even more dangerous trial and error method, because it seems even more invasive and less tested than the medication that’s available now. On the other hand I’ve found self medication with plant medicine (yes, it’s weed, weed, and more weed, but also quite a few other herbs I collect myself) quite efficient and safe. I’ve managed to keep myself going for a few bad years and have now reached the point where I went off it cold turkey - something my loved one never managed to do once he was hooked onto the meds. All done on my own terms, no doctor pretending they know better than me, giving myself the time I needed. So that’s for a true stone age method, and given the fact our bodies are still working the same way as they did in the stone age I feel it might be safer than any novelty they have come up with in the last decades. Probably that’s a controversial take on this, and I don’t expect this to work for everybody (you need to have lots of time to be able to afford to rest and relax and have access to unlimited amounts of plant medicine).

Horror might be more entertaining than depression, but the sheer idea of letting some techbro implant shit in my brain is so ridiculous, I’d probably try DIY lobotomy before I consider the AI option.

As someone who is literally living where others go on holidays while depressed let me tell you my depression is very much a response to the world being a rotting shithole. I am not sad because my life sucks but because so many others are suffering and I feel powerless to change it. The narrative of ‘chemical imbalance’ is a very reductive and misleading one.

The feeling of powerlessness and disconnect also points to the cure I find for myself. Instead of implanting experimental BS inventions into my brain I try to be a force of connection, community and hope for others. There is very few things I can do as a single tiny person, but in these very small things lies the power of change for the better.