Oh shoot! I missed posting to this topic on my cakeday by 20 minutes, but me!

Came over after they killed third party apps because I couldn’t use my beloved Sync, which is now never updated anyways.

I’m not ashamed to admit I moved to Reddit during the great Digg migration. Platforms come and go, you just keep on rolling.

In all seriousness, I do feel like content has got better here in that time and I enjoy the raw, early Internet vibes. There’s still plenty of room to grow, but I feel very positive about it all.

Social media, at it’s heart, is inevitable. We will always find a way to share pictures, information, videos, etc. with each other. It’s such basic functionality when you really think about it. We’re social creatures and this is the most important thing we would do with technology.

The issue is specifically with platforms; how they consolidate power and who owns them.

I don’t know what to do about it, it’s one of the biggest problems we are going to continue to face in our time. I can’t really armchair solutions for it now, but I think it’s of the utmost importance that we recognize it and discuss it.

Social media is not inherently bad, it’s the platforms.

Camp is when a movie maybe isn’t good, but you still want to give it a gold star for trying. It’s making a joke and you’re laughing with it more than you’re laughing at it (but you’re still laughing at it). Even stuff like The Room by Tommy Wiseau which I think most people agree is a pretty bad movie; it still comes from a place of sincere vision.

This is in contrast to stuff like Epic Movie where it is trying so hard to be camp that it is just terrible instead. And this is all obviously subjective.

Cocaine Bear (2023) is surprisingly good. You think it’s gonna be one of those overly campy movies like Sharknado, but it’s pretty well written. I mean, don’t expect too much, it’s still a very solid 7/10. But the thing it understands best is it actually takes enough time at the beginning of the film to develop extensive cast of weird characters so once they all get thrown into the blender (cocaine bear) you actually care enough about them and what’s going on to care about the outcome.

So many movies these days forget you really need to care about those characters.

Fun time, give it a go some night when you’re bored and got nothing else to do.

If we’re talking realm of pure fantasy: destroy it.

I want you to understand this is not AI sentiment as a whole, I understand why the idea is appealing, how it could be useful, and in some ways may seem inevitable.

But a lot of sci-fi doesn’t really address the run up to AI, in fact a lot of it just kind of assumes there’ll be an awakening one day. What we have right now is an unholy, squawking abomination that has been marketed to nefarious ends and never should have been trusted as far as it has. Think real hard about how corporations are pushing the development and not academia.

Put it out of its misery.

The Chinese Room thought experiment is extremely relevant to what’s going on in the world today, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/

I first read about it in Blindsight, a fantastic sci-fi novel by Peter Watts. (Unrelated, I also highly recommend Starfish by him as well).

So now imagine someone asks, “Do you like dogs?” and out pops the answer, “No, I hate them.” The worker inside the thought experiment room has no idea the question that was asked nor the answer that was given and it could very well run counter to their own opinions. The answer may come from bias in the initial data, or just the person who wrote the book of rules and decided to put their thumb on the scales. PLEASE stop trusting AI for literally anything, it is less than worthless, it is actively harmful.

https://www.knorr.com/us/en/p/spanish-rice-side.html/00041000022685

Depending on your level of struggle, these rice packets cost about ~$1.25 USD and cook in 7 minutes, you just gotta stir 'em a bit.

To that I’ll add some protein, either some sausages I cooked on the George Foreman grill and sliced up or a packet of flavored tuna. This is mostly no effort or unattended.

For veggies, I’ll steam up something fresh or microwave some frozen mixed veggies. Either way this can be done in 3-5 minutes, unattended.

Some effort, but still very low. You can get everything started at once while you stand there and stir the rice packet on the stove, everything should wrap up in less than 10 minutes and you’ll have a relatively complete and filling mill for hopefully less than $5 USD but I don’t even fucking know anymore with inflation, tariffs, and out of control groceries. Should still be more cost effective than a lot of alternatives, though.

EDIT: The rice packet can honestly be quite a bit for a single person, depending. You may want to pad it out with a few more things like mushrooms and beans, then you can split the meal in two. Eat half now and save half to be microwaved later to stretch it out and for when you have no prep time at all.