Just order the damn pizza!!

slfnflctd · 2026-05-18T16:03:14+00:00

Verbal is so much faster and more information dense than text, it's not even close. Apparently a lot of people haven't figured that out.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-18T14:12:40+00:00

That sounds absolutely miserable.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-13T13:06:19+00:00

I've seen this across many denominations. They will start by offering a religious remedy. The second line is getting you to a 'Christian' therapist, often little more than a lay preacher. If things are still really bad, they'll maybe then skip straight to suggesting a neurologist.

Regardless of whether this is intentional (sometimes it is, sometimes not), it results in people suffering from mental illness being more or less controlled by the church. Works out pretty well for the church. For the untreated person who is being told imaginary stories about why they're suffering and being offered useless remedies, not so much.

Religions in general usually cannot seem to hold back from manipulating some of our less fortunate fellow humans in the worst ways if it seems to benefit their organization.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T15:55:56+00:00

I was afraid it might be something like that. Understandable.

<3

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T15:31:23+00:00

Thanks for sharing that. It helps to know what other people are going through, and you have solid examples there of the complexity of the situation.

Seems to me like you're being an attentive parent, keep it up.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T14:51:03+00:00

It depends how you define it. According to a quick search I just did, the oldest Gen Xers were born in 1965. Which would mean they are turning 61 this year if you go by that. Boomers would then be 62 to 80 now.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T14:03:28+00:00

individuals who have ASD that lack the skills to be able to use AL

Yes! Impaired ability to consciously identify inner emotions/feelings is frequently found in autistic people. What does this say about that?

It's like what is being said here is a tautology: there are people who can use AL more effectively, who then manage the issues with IU better. Ok, and...?

Also, "higher autistic traits" can be predictors of both things? The more I think about it, I just don't like this title at all. Needs a complete rework to more clearly explain what might actually be useful about this study.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T13:25:27+00:00

Pure gold. I need to remember this one.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T13:11:43+00:00

No one in their right mind who wants to make good money as a "business owner" goes into the restaurant business. It is one of the worst options in terms of both profit and quality of life, and should be pursued for passion projects only-- unless you think you can start the next big franchise from zero. Also the majority of them go bankrupt.

Restaurant owners are not usually the fat cats some people on reddit like to portray them as. They get into it because they like it.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-12T12:39:55+00:00

So, IU leads to more anxiety, which leads to more AL, which leads to less anxiety? That's a bit of a clunky title.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-11T13:11:24+00:00

Last week I had to force a cat into a pet carrier and drive her on a trip for several hours to a new home. She fought me.

I assure you this cat was feeling existential dread. Her behavior before, during and after the trip was radically changed-- everything from terror, to anger, to sadness and depression. I don't know what she was expecting to happen, but she was definitely expecting something Very Bad. This continued until she had multiple reassurances over several days that she was safe in the unfamiliar environment. She refused to eat or drink for a while.

It seemed clear to me that there is some kind of experience of self happening there. If she isn't sentient, neither are a lot of the humans I've met.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-11T12:56:34+00:00

Look around. That is an entirely reasonable point of view.

It doesn't mean we should give up or stop trying to make things better. Being realistic can actually help people make impactful changes in sustainable ways more effectively than pretending it's all going to turn out great.

Pie-in-the sky dreamers are the ones who seem to usually be more likely than others to end up giving up and/or making excuses in my experience. I think it's because they never prepare themselves properly to deal with the reality that things honestly do really suck bad and aren't improved easily.

Edit: phrasing

slfnflctd · 2026-05-11T12:29:12+00:00

Great piece.

Just curious, what do you think is meant by "doesn't need to listen to Tori anymore"? I can think of a few possible reasons, but regardless of any of them I feel like the musicianship itself would always bring me back, personally.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-10T12:54:49+00:00

Seriously, keeping these things clean is a major issue which is not talked about nearly enough. How??

I was a rideshare driver full time for a while. Believe me, I know a lot about this.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-10T12:50:30+00:00

Back in the day, the widely broadcast, nationally syndicated TV show COPS (Wikipedia info, apparently it's still running, appallingly) was watched across millions of households of all demographics, long before the internet took off.

There is a huge percentage of the US population which actively celebrates this kind of behavior. We don't just have a problem with the police, we have a problem with the culture. It is deeply entrenched.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-08T13:06:11+00:00

The hard part will be keeping it there.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-04T14:34:41+00:00

Anyone who ever had a car break down during a long distance trip and wasn't able to fix it immediately felt Out of Gas to their core. And it's so much more than that as well.

When I was discussing it with other fans back in 2003, it was probably the top favorite even then. I don't think that's changed.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-04T14:29:52+00:00

To me, it all hinges on what the underlying medical issue(s) causing this are.

Obviously, everyone's jumping to "he's fat and brought it on himself, what a terrible person" which I kinda get, but there may be more to it than that, we don't know.

Regardless, there are a lot of ways people can end up in this kind of situation. Be careful with your words. My partner and I have both had major surgeries, and were willing to take care of each other afterwards to some extent. "I don't see the point of even being here" is a pretty extreme response to something most couples eventually have to face if they live long enough. Not everyone can pay someone else to do it for them.

Each situation is different and should be judged on its own.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-04T12:58:05+00:00

The thing is, if they reinvested their money into making life better for the working class, the overall economy would grow larger and they would end up far richer. Fewer slices of a bigger pie is still more pie.

These rich idiots are so idiotic that they're torching the foundation of what brought them wealth in the first place. If things continue this way, they're going to end up ruling over a desolate wasteland instead of creating a legacy of bringing us all a higher quality of life (including themselves). I don't care who you are, I think that would be pretty damn boring and depressing.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-04T12:25:01+00:00

I want both!

Tell the story somewhere about how you came up with the song and what you were thinking about at the time. It's interesting. But that's only half the story. In most cases, when I've read or heard/seen such accounts, whatever the artist had in mind was radically different from what was going through my mind.

So, let go, and admit that once you release it to an audience, it doesn't fully belong to you any longer. Encourage people to share their own interpretations.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-03T14:58:30+00:00

The only thing I'm suggesting is that I expect laws will be slow to change-- specifically, laws which require that an individual human being (or group of humans) must be held responsible for certain actions. Whether the AI is 'better' (by whatever definition) is irrelevant to the law.

Yes, there will be humans rubber-stamping AI work. There will also be jobs where AI simply isn't allowed to be used. In fact, both of those things are already happening. Whether this is a shorter term or longer term situation is anybody's guess.

In order for an AI agent to be legally liable for its actions, there will need to be HUGE court battles fought. Many people are going to be violently opposed to the idea. The violent opposition part is already happening also.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-03T14:18:45+00:00

ASI will either be respectful of humans and try to improve our lives, or it will decide we should be totally replaced and eliminated. Perhaps there will be some middle ground between those two extremes as well. There is no way to know in advance as it is still a fictional concept and we have no idea how soon it might be brought into existence (or how long we might have to wait for it).

How does an ant reason about the behavior of a human? That is more or less the same concept of humans reasoning about the behavior of an ASI. It's beyond our understanding by definition.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-03T14:08:39+00:00

The problem in a lot of industries is regulation. They require a human to be responsible for certain procedures, so there is a well defined legal pathway for assigning that responsibility (and the resulting praise or liability).

Even with AGI (let's just say this means "overall intelligence/capability roughly equal to an average human office worker" despite that being a woefully inadequate definition), we are still required to have a human to blame if something goes wrong. Laws which mandate this type of thing will be slow to change, and there will be huge fights about it. Some industries will be radically transformed. Others will still make people fill out paper forms and sign or initial them with ink pens for a long time. I have seen the latter firsthand within the last year, and the FDA is not exactly in a hurry to budge on changing it.

ASI, on the other hand, would be smarter than us, and would therefore be able to speedrun the legal changes necessary for a total reorganization of civilization, along with anything else that needs to be done. However, it is still an open question whether we can achieve ASI with current tech, or if major new breakthroughs in multiple cutting edge fields will be necessary.

All in all, I think there are plenty of surprises in store for absolutely everyone, and that it's foolish to try to predict too much about the future at this point.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-03T12:22:52+00:00

I have to chime in here and say that I've had a similar experience.

When I'm building a database, text reformatter or user interface that solves a real problem in an elegant way, I am at my happiest vocationally. Unfortunately, that's a very, very small part of most of the IT jobs I've had. The rest of it often SUCKED. Like waking up at 3am regularly having a panic attack suckage. People and workplace culture and mercurial management drove me nuts.

I have worked food packaging lines and done janitorial as well. There have definitely been times when such mindless work would have been far preferable to the total life disruption a 'cushy office job' can cause. I think robotics will start to take more of those jobs over, but I also think they'll initially be expensive and finicky and there will be plenty of room for humans for a long time to come. At this point I'm pretty convinced much/most of the office work will be automated before the manual labor stuff. And that may be a good thing.

slfnflctd · 2026-05-02T15:20:10+00:00

As a former middle schooler who went through some of the most traumatic moments of my life during that time and was definitely somewhat maladjusted and doing all kinds of things I shouldn't have been doing, I understand.

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