intensely_human @ intensely_human @lemm.ee

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2 yr. ago

Straw men have only ever existed on planets. There are no straw men on Pluto. Therefore, Pluto is not a planet.

Thank God for Finland.

what do you see as the difference between a person seeing your work, Ingesting it into their brain to reprogram their brain, allowing them to make parallel works, and an AI ingesting your work as part of its training data?

Our current IP laws prohibit making money on exact copies of your work. That is not what AI does.

The pickup point my least favorite uber passenger chooses.

Diomedes au Raa

I would definitely eat cultured meat as long as it’s not too expensive.

And if my grandma had wheels she’d have been a bicycle

Cómo cara blanca, digo que chinga tu racismo. Es la ruina y la derrota del gente. Juntos, se puede. Divididos, caímos.

That’s terrible! What’s your livelihood?

I’m getting better. The other men in the group are helping. They’ve helped me heal a lot of trauma, and they hold me accountable for promises I make.

wow

One time I had a contract gig which had me showing up to the same office building M-F for about six months.

There was a coffee shop where I got my morning coffee on the way in to work.

I made myself a rule that after I was handed my coffee, I would stay for 60 seconds making small talk with others in the shop before I left.

Within a couple of weeks I knew everybody who hung out in that shop and everybody who worked behind the counter. It was a very warm, fulfilling part of my day to stop and chat with the people there. Ended up spending 5-10 minutes daily.

And all it took was a commitment to delay my departure by 60 seconds. It was so easy to just say “thanks” and zip out the door with my coffee.

I haven’t figured this out entirely, but I’ve found a partial solution in being part of a men’s group.

We meet weekly to discuss our feelings.

After a couple years in that group, one of the other guys requested that someone call him a few times per week because he needed an impetus to keep moving. He was battling depression and laziness, and wanted someone to check in on him.

I volunteered to call him three times a week. It was only going to be a few weeks at first, but we kept it up.

Now it’s been about six months of me calling him on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday morning. I told him I’d be happy to call him like this for the next fifty years if that’s what it takes.

I live alone, and don’t really see anyone on a regular basis except for this group. I don’t know my neighbors, nor anyone in my neighborhood. I’ve considered joining a church to have some community, but I don’t want to distort my relationship with God.

But this morning I spoke with that guy. He’s not physically present, but our ongoing commitment to this phone call schedule creates an abstract “meeting place” where we encounter each other regularly.

It really works. It’s like sharing a kitchen with someone, and bumping into them there on a recurring basis.

I think it would be great if more people made arrangements like that. I think it would be great if there were a community here on Lemmy just for the purpose of setting such arrangements up.

Regular, recurring connection is magic.

In college I had a classmate that I enjoyed speaking with. Somehow we decided that we were going to have breakfast every Saturday morning at Le Peep, just the two of us.

We did that for an entire year of college, and it formed a deep bond. We became best friends, as a result of seeing each other regularly.

I myself don’t have the bandwidth to take on a lot of such connections, but if anyone is interested in trying such an arrangement please respond to this comment and y’all can pair off.

The arrangement I would propose is this:

• Set up a recurring schedule. Same time on the same day every week
• One of you calls the other
• Have some specific questions planned, in order to kick start the conversation. With this guy from my men’s group, I started off by asking him three questions: “How are you feeling right now? How did yesterday go in terms of your plans and objectives? What are your plans/objectives for today?” This was to help him keep moving in the depression/laziness he was experiencing. Now after months we’ve abandoned the formulaic structure and we just talk
• Treat it as important. Stick to the commitment and make the calls. Lots of people don’t stick to their commitments, and that sucks. Commitment creates consistency, and consistency is the heart of community.

If anyone would like to experiment with this, I can call you regularly for a short period of time to teach you how it’s done. I can’t afford a lot of long-term commitments right now, but I’d be happy to put in some effort to help people understand the technique.

It’s described in the bible: man’s need to work.

“Work” meaning “Do things you don’t feel like doing, because they need to be done”.

Our emotional configuration evolved in an environment that is gone. In that environment, what one feels like doing, and what one needs to do, are the same. That’s why that motivational configuration evolved: it optimized our survival and reproduction in that environment.

But our civilization has wrapped us in a new environment, that has different cause and effect relationships than our EEA (environment of evolutionary adaptedness).

This means it will always be necessary to do things we don’t feel like doing, or to suffer the consequences.

Generally speaking, this is the problem of “work”. The bible refers to this as a sort of eternal curse humanity must suffer as a result of being expelled from Eden, which itself resulted from our eating of the tree of knowledge.

When we parted from our basic animal ways, we took on this curse of having to force ourselves. It’s what Marx refers to as the “alienation of labor”.

And as society progresses, it’s only going to get worse.

For example right now, one must shower and dress and go out in the cold to go to a job in order to get money to survive.

That’s pretty far from “eat whatever fruit looks pretty”. But it’s also not as bad as it’s going to be.

Our brains are capable of finding some meaning in that daily work struggle.

Soon we will have more automation and some kind of UBI. It will be an option to not work.

And in some ways that will be better. Just like working at Amazon moving boxes is safer and more predictable than living in the wild, having UBI will be safer and more predictable than working at Amazon.

But also, just like that dangerous jungle existence creates an inherent meaning in the survival, feels rich and alive, and how that effect is diminished when working a job surrounded by civilization, in that same way having basic income is going to give us even less inherent meaning to our days.

We’ll have more options, and as a result we’ll have more existential anxiety. There will be more freedom, less of a default path for the day, and this will make us feel even more alienated.

This is a problem that will always exist in our society: the less danger and difficulty our external environment provides us, the more difficult it will be to get ourselves moving. The more susceptible we will be to depression and anxiety.

This is why people fantasize about a zombie apocalypse. Yes it’s horrible. Yes it’s full of terror. But it more closely resembles the environment of natural hostility we evolved in, so it’s easy to know what to do. Gather supplies, secure your shelter, kill zombies. It’s simple and straightforward, and so it would feel very alive. Depression disappears when one is running for their life. Anxiety is eliminated by fear. Confusion is eliminated by hunger.

We may get “lucky” and see civilization collapse. Or there may be a war into which we are all drawn as front line fighters. We may have an alien invasion.

But then we’re just back to the other kind of suffering. The kind we emerged from to find this world.

These two types of fuckedness complement one another, and we’ll always have some nonzero combination of the two.

Believe me someone will try.

Eventually biology itself will be banned because of how un-controllable it is. All that will be allowed will be silicon components manufactured by a central authority or assembled under centrally-approved code.

Everyone has the option to stop their lifes if wish be.

I don’t know if that’s true. I shot myself in the head once and just woke up like nothing had happened. I suspect life might not be as fragile as it appears from the outside.

If humans have a nature, then humans will always have that nature by definition. “We” might get beyond that nature, but it won’t be “us” after that. It will be our descendants.

And not like “sons and daughters” but rather “our evolutionary descendants”.

As for humanity, we exist in a particular set of inescapable challenges, which define what it is to be human.

I guess one option could be don’t make a commitment you don’t have time to fulfill.

Let the voting system do its job of crowdsourcing the suppression of unhelpful content.

When I was on reddit it was just a fact that there’d be a pile of trash accumulated at the bottom of each thread, made of comments that were stupid or toxic and collapsed because their score was negative. That layer of shit at the bottom was well-hidden and didn’t interfere with the productive discussion happening above.

Wood on slab feels weird because of the lack of flex

Wow it’s actually 1860. I didn’t know they had plastic that far back. I would have guessed 1950.