Libra00

Car: road trip with breaks, you want to sleep a couple hours at a rest stop but it takes forever to fall asleep because as soon as you stop the car you feel wide awake again.

You got me on office tho, maybe it’s for those people who power nap at lunch?

To be clear you don’t have to get that technical to read non-Amazon books on your kindle… I’ve owned 2 different kindles over the course of about 15 years and literally never bought an ebook from Amazon. Just gotta know where to get them (libgen) and how to use them (calibre.)

A cheap ereader would be nice, but I’ve kinda had to go the opposite direction; my eyes weren’t great to begin with and have only gotten worse with age, so I need a larger screen. I do very little reading (in general, not of books specifically) on my phone because it’s too small and I have to zoom in and pan around all the time, etc.

I’m not saying it’s not relevant, I’m saying it’s not worth generating 50 headlines every time the guy who literally only says crazy shit says something that’s a little crazy. Iono, put that shit into a daily/weekly digest or something.

I’ve been using duck.ai recently myself and quite like it. My only complaint with it is that the chats have a length limit, so if you’re working on complex projects you can run into those limits pretty quick. I use it for worldbuilding for a novel I’m working on and I have to use chatgpt for thematic stuff because it has a better memory, but otherwise it’s great for quick/small things.

Why is ‘notorious firehose of bullshit spews even more more bullshit’ still a headline anymore? Oh wait, it’s the daily beast, and firehose of bullshit is kinda their whole shtick. Carry on.

Yeah that’s exactly what’s going on here, I’ve seen it happen so much these past few months, and all this kowtowing is disgusting. Not that I ever thought particularly highly of giant corporations in the first place.

‘Rich guy thinks thing designed to make rich guys even richer is great, to the surprise of literally no one ever.’

Or, alternatively

‘Rich guy kowtows to fascist regime in the hopes of being allowed to continue getting richer.’

Take your pick.

That, I’m afraid, is the nature of technology: it makes everything easier, even the stuff you really wish it didn’t.

Bill Wurtz’s excellent history of the entire world, I guess. Also check out his history of Japan.

Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so…

Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.

I quite liked Walkaway, but I’ve got kind of an anarchist bent myself, so.

Replace ‘stop remembering things’ with ‘remember fewer things’ at your own leisure if it makes you happy, I’m exaggerating slightly to make a point.

My argument is not that we will stop practising critical thinking altogether, but that we will not need to practise it as often.

And mine is that as far as I know we have no evidence (or at least nothing more than anecdotal evidence at best) for that because society has only gotten more complex, not less, and requires more thought, memory, etc to navigate it. Now instead of remembering which cow was sick last week and which field I’m going to plant tomorrow I have to remember shit like how to navigate a city that’s larger than the range in which most people traveled their entire lives, I have to figure out what this weird error my PC just threw means, I have to calculate the risk-vs-reward of trying to buy a house now or renting for a year to save up for a better down payment and improve my credit, etc. These are just examples, pick your own if you don’t like them.

Less practise always makes you worse at something. I do not need evidence for that as it is obvious.

Now who’s being reductive? I’m not asking for evidence that less practice makes you worse at something, I’m asking for evidence that labor-saving devices result in people doing less labor (mental or otherwise), because I think that’s a lot less obvious.

I have seen how today’s students are using it instead of using their brains

This is a bad example because learning is a different matter. People using it instead of learning will not learn the subject matter as well as those who don’t, obviously. But it’s a lot less obvious in other fields/adult life. Will I be less good at code because I use an LLM to generate some now and then? Probably not, both because I’ve been coding off and on for 30 years, but also because my time instead is spent on tackling the thornier problems that AI can’t do or has difficulty with, managing large projects because AI has a limited memory window, etc.

We teach critical thinking in schools for a reason, because it’s something that does not always come naturally, and these students are getting AI to do the work for them instead of learning how to think.

That’s debatable, though I guess it depends on where you’re from and what the schools are like there. They certainly didn’t teach critical thinking when I was in (US public) school, I had to figure that shit out largely on my own. But that’s beside the point. Shortcutting learning is bad, I agree. Shortcutting work is a lot more nebulous and uncertain in the absence of that evidence I keep asking for.

Yeah I don’t need anywhere near that much. I’m syncing maybe 50-100mb worth of stuff. More might be nice cause I could back up other things too, but… meh.

Came here to say this, I’m glad I’m not the only one.

And I want Windows and all its bullshit to heck off!

Fortunately I’m winning that one so far.

PRETTY_NAME="Nobara Linux 42 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition)"

Next thing you know the ‘orbs’ will be NFTs and we’ll all be expected to grind away at their ‘quests’ (probably training AI) to earn ‘real money’.

increasingly belligerent chasing of profits.

The word you’re looking for is enshittification.

Damn, I’ve been thinking about checking it out, but if it doesn’t do voice at all (and I would also really like streaming) it’s just not worth it to me. Text chat is nice, but I spend 2-3 hours evenings hanging out in voice with friends and I don’t want to lose that. Messing with two separate apps is just not worth it atm, so I’ma keep steadfastly ignoring Discord’s bullshit until Matrix is where I need it to be to switch. Although then the problem will be getting everyone else to switch, of course.

I listen attentively to pretty much anything Cory Doctorow says about the internet and technology, he’s been consistently insightful as hell on the subject. His books are also pretty good.