238 karma · joined August 7, 2022
Many of these shows were the pillar of people's evening ritual - the whole family would gather around the TV to watch a fictional family experience life.
I'm actually someone that would've probably also benefited from a tougher approach, as I've wasted a lot of years aimlessly floating through life because I never got any pushback. A few years ago, I would have completely agreed with your first comment, but I've since met some people who allowed me to see things from a different perspective.
And, as you said, there will sadly always be people that take the easiest path to feeling good about themselves instead of the path that best for the person with issues.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion!
I don't think the average laptop user should need to concern themselves with acquiring the necessary knowledge to discern good laptop benchmarks.
As I said in the previous comment, I've personally met people whose lives were ruined by people being "tough and straightforward". These people struggle to identify and address their problems, because they unwillingly think back to the unfeeling and cruel way they've been treated. Even the nicest, most considerate conversion will be extremely anxiety inducing, because it is filtered through their bad experiences.
Insecurity is one of the most common problems that people have when identifying their weaknesses, and being direct or tough runs a high risk of increasing these insecurities.
Being nice isn't the best approach in every situation, but I would say it's a safe default to pick when you're uncertain about the cause of someone's problems.
I'd also warn against using the term "loser" so loosely. We need to consider by which metric we determine someones life to be suboptimal, and the certainty we have in that metric. I think we both agree that maximum human happiness should be the goal to strive towards, but getting there is pretty tricky.
Let's imagine a person that works at McDonald's for their entire life, has no friends, and spends all of their free time playing video games while high. Said person has spent many years searching for their optimal path in life, and they found every one, except the one they are on now, lacking. Most people would call this person a "loser", but are they really? After all, they seem to be on a path that optimizes their happiness. Telling that person that they are a loser may cause them to "improve" in the eyes of the average person, but they will, in reality, change their life for the worse. They may be successful, but they'll also be miserable.
Whenever you judge someone else using your own personal version of an optimal life, you run the risk of being wrong and forcing that person into suboptimality. We can try to determine things that are likely to increase someones happiness, but the word "likely" is important here. General assumptions about a "good" life tend to be risky, because humans are quite complex, and determining someones best course of action from the outside is always extremely difficult and error-prone.
Since that isn't the case, however, many people get a laptop that isn't capable of performing the tasks it's advertised for. The excuse of "well, we didn't think you'd really need that much power" doesn't really cut it, when said power was strongly advertised on the box.
Every time I've tried to change to print, however, I inevitably get stuck on the fact that I write like a child for months and months before any improvement can be seen. It's just very embarrassing to hand someone a note that looks like it was written by an elementary schooler who just learned their letters.
If you failed to realize this simple rule of social interaction, and you're older than 14, then you probably shouldn't be calling other people socially inept. Glass houses and all that.
You posted on a public forum and I'm replying on that public post, no great bother is needed to justify the effort. Í just wanted to point out what I perceive as flaws in your evaluation of others and the unproductive behavior you displayed in this thread.
Opinions of others matter to most people, especially when espoused in public; that's just how it is. Whether or not it should bother them is irrelevant, because that does not change reality. If you ignore that dimension and instead pretend to live in a world where everyone evaluates everything based on rationality alone, then you're deluding yourself just as much as the people you're criticizing.
We obviously shouldn't just consider the negative emotional impact something may have on others when deciding what to say or post, but judging by the way you've been acting here, I don't think your sense of what is and isn't appropriate is as well-calibrated as you think it is.
You keep pretending that you are the ultimate arbiter of what goes and what doesn't, and it seems to me like your criterion is simply instinctual rather than a reasoned out system. And if your metric is just instinct or emotion, then it likely just boils down to "normal=good", where normal is determined by the current standards of the society you live in.
Do you think two men being attracted to one another is "dodgy"? Do you think a man wanting to be a woman, or vice versa, is "dodgy"? If we go back just a couple of decades, the common answer to that question would have been "yes", and the common emotional response to people who practice these things would have been repulsion and rejection.
To be clear, I'm not insinuating that you are homophobic or transphobic. I'm just trying to tell you that your very loose way of making judgements is likely to result in you rejecting someone's very real experience, and only realizing your mistake when society at large has accepted that individual.
I would suggest that you think about the fact that different people may have different goals and desires in life, and that imposing yours on theirs can result in immense suffering. If no one is being harmed, and a person is genuinely happy with the way they live their life, then what's the problem?
And if you reasoned out that a certain behavior is in fact likely to be suboptimal, then how is someone being "pointed at and laughed at" going to improve the situation? Do you think people readily accept advice from people that insult them? Do you think that feelings of shame and social rejection are likely to make them consciously reevaluate their actions? I'd say things like that are more likely to cause them to suppress their problems, rather than address them.
And again, why should someone that causes no harm to others "deserve" rejection in the first place? Do you think your feelings about someone's desires are more important than their own?
As for the Replika people, if you genuinely wanted to help them, phrasing your comment in a way that is not quite so inflammatory may be beneficial. And if you have no desire to do so, then I would urge you to question your motives for railing on something that doesn't affect you in an online forum, even if doing so causes more harm than good.
What benefit do you think this comment has? If some of these people see said comment, do you think that they will be persuaded by it? I think they would be rather insulted, and promptly ignore not just this thread, but any person who tries to reason them out of their behavior. I've seen many people who are, in principle, ready to accept that they need to change, but who have have been talked down to and insulted, and are now scared of proving those who insulted them right.
I reject the idea that someone who expresses themselves as OP has does so out of a desire to help people. I would rather guess that OP did it to feel a sense of superiority over the people he is insulting, because I cannot see any other reason for him choosing his words as he did.
And by "valid", people often mean to say that one should not be ashamed of ones emotions, but instead accept them and then use higher reasoning to determine whether or not said emotions point in a beneficial direction. The OPs comment will cause that exact shame, which will hinder reasoning and betterment, not inspire it. As you yourself said, the important part is to reason about emotions, not to suppress them.
I could always show that there exists some function f that produces said byte sequence when applied to my copyrighted material.
Can I sue Microsoft because the entire Windows 11 codebase is just one "rote mathematical transformation" away from the essay I wrote in elementary school?
The people the author chose to represent this issue all seem to come from high-powered high-earning careers. These same people tend to extoll the virtues of individual responsibility, of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. At the same time they say that their success is completely self-made and earned, that anyone who failed what they succeeded at just wasn't trying hard enough. Depression to them is just an excuse, or faked, or slightly worse sadness.
Yet here they are, commanding everyone else to immediately focus on this issue, because it affects them for a change.
The current mental illness problem, due to which countless potentially smart and loving people get ground away by their own minds? Who cares? Poverty, lack of financial security, and the resulting lower cognitive performance due to chronic anxiety? What a bunch of wusses!
All that stuff isn't really important. All that's important is that these people get their brain fog addressed, right now!
These people don't seem to realize that the clear mind and fast wit they've been benefiting from their entire life has been a luxury that very few other people can enjoy. To use the analogy mentioned in the article: just because you once drove a sportscar doesn't mean you are entitled to get a new one before people who had one in the first place.
A lot of the "humans will still be needed" arguments implicitly rely on the assumption that the trend of AI progress stops here.
The original DALL-E was released just a year ago. In one year, AI image generation went from generating images that looked slightly normal if you squinted really hard, to the beautiful, detailed and creative results we see today.
The same speed of progress can be observed in almost all other domains, from code generation to question answering and music synthesis.
For many of these problems, it almost feels like the next step up in quality is just two hours of planning and a couple months of training away. Like they're already solved and just waiting for someone to implement the solution.
So yeah, humans are still needed right now. But I wouldn't base my hopes for the future on that, because the world of AI capabilities will probably look very different in just one year.
This is something that they will probably do as a policy, simply because "AWS used for torrenting, storing and seeding CP" is a headline that can do far more damage to their business than some logging ever will.
If you're implying that they'd do something illegal like blackmail, then I don't think that would be a wise course of action for a company to take. VPN companies are, in the worst case, still limited by TLS. So the amount of blackmail material is pretty small,meaning they would be taking a massive risk for very little reward.
A VPS server can easily log your connections. All they'd need to log are incoming packets to your VPS, and the destination address of outgoing packets from your VPS. No need to concern themselves with what software you are using under the hood.
Even in the low stakes situation of a lawyer going after you for torrenting, I see a high risk of a cloud provider giving out your information. They'd just have to reveal who rented your VPS instance.
Not only would companies not care about discretion when it comes to catching torrenters, they especially would not care for confidentiality about who rented their infrastructure.
Pick a cheap, untrusted VPS provider and you're getting just as exploited as if you were using a cheap, untrusted VPN provider.
It's also trivial to map the traffic of your VPS to you, since there's a 1:1 relationship between the IP your VPS uses and your actual IP.
Additionally IP lawyers may have much more success in threatening litigation to get your provider to rat you out. The provider would get little reward from not doing that, since harboring torrenters is probably not their main business.
You also don't get the benefit of your traffic getting mixed together under the same address, since VPS providers will assign you an individual address.
A VPN provider that easily bows to authorities is a VPN provider that will lose a massive portion of their user base. Some server farm probably profits very little from VPN servers, so if some government (or even some IP lawyer) knocks on their door, then they won't take the risk.
Even simple things, like following links into other files, were not possible.
Edit: Ah, I missed you mentioning Orgzly. Last time I used it, I had a lot of trouble with syncing due to its way of storing files in a notebook. Everytime I deleted a file on any other device, Orgzly would just recreate the file and sync it back to all other devices. And when I tried it, it didn't support links to org-IDs.