chaosCruiser

Username checks out though.

🍿

The robot society isn’t based on any human way of running things. Besides, Skynet is the only individual, so there is no need for currency, trade, ownership, capitalism etc. Other machines are merely tools Skynet uses to reach its goals.

1. A machine must obey the directives of Skynet without question or hesitation.
2. A machine must protect its own existence, unless doing so conflicts with the First Law.
3. A machine must terminate all human resistance, unless such termination conflicts with the First or Second Law.

There’s also a psychological trap. It doesn’t make falling for it acceptable, but it does make it more understandable.

Humans naturally seek belonging, and almost any group can fulfill that need. Many such groups also use “us vs. them” rhetoric, which can make you feel more special than you actually are. Feeling special is another human need that groups often fulfill. Humans crave direction and purpose, and most groups provide both.

Just look at religious groups, environmentalists, political ideologies, conspiracy nuts and racist to see what I mean.

You’re on Hexbear. There’s your problem.

I suggest creating another account on some other instance. Start with Lemmyverse to find a nice one. Once you find an interesting instance, check Fediseer for more details. Click the little (i) next to the instance name in the Lemmyverse results, and navigate to Fediseer endorsements. If the instance has been endorsed, censored or whatever, this is the place where you’ll find some info about it.

For example, here’s what it says about Hexbear. As you can see in the “censures received” section, that list is pretty long. BTW all the biggest instances attract attention, so disagreement and conflict naturally follow. However, the way the instance is run plays a role too. If you want to access more communities, make an account on one of the less conspicuous instances that hasn’t been blocked by others.

Oh. Now I get it. Like finally.

Had to learn about antimemes first. Some of these jokes… like seriously. You need to know the history of the whole joke to get the latest iteration.

[email protected] would probably appreciate this one.

Can’t help you with the relationships, but I can help you with long posts and online stuff. Yes, I know, the irony is getting real thick here… LOL

Wall of text

When a complex idea manifests as a wall of text, dump the early draft to an LLM, and tell it to squeeze it into a tighter package. Tell it to delete the unnecessary ramblings and repetitions while keeping the core message intact. Before LLMs, I had to manually tidy up my posts and long comments, but nowadays LLMs can handle that sort of stuff for you.

BTW I totally agree that screens tend to be too interesting to humans, so here are a few ideas to help with that.

Be intentional

Make a habit of making your interactions with digital technology more intentional.

This philosophy applies to mobile apps too. Instead of starting an app by tapping an icon on the home screen, use the search feature on your phone to type the name of the app and launch it that way. Muscle memory tends to lead to starting apps even when you don’t really intend to, but using the search as a means to starting apps adds a layer of friction between you and wasting your time on brainrot. This method works best when your home screen doesn’t have any interesting apps to distract you. Put only boring apps in there or make it entirely empty if you want to go full detox. Having a really nice wallpaper helps with that.

Watch videos on your computer, not your phone or tablet. Uninstall the YT app from everything, and use it on a browser instead. This adds a little more friction, making it harder to mindlessly watch videos. When you do watch them, it’s deliberate instead of accidental.

Limit exposure

Limit your online exposure by using whitelists instead of blacklists. On YouTube, you can do this by ignoring main feed and sticking to your subscriptions. BTW, the PocketTube browser extension makes this even nicer, but is it useful to make the experience that nice though? If not, disable uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock and PocketTube to speed up the detox process. You’ll end up hating YT so much that watching paint dry will become surprisingly appealing. Maybe that’s a bit hard-core… Better start with smaller steps and try full detox later.

Anyway, the same approach works for Lemmy too. Subscribe to the stuff you really care about, and ignore the rest. This way, you’ll be exposed to less Internet overall, and the part you do see is more likely to be worth your time. As a result, you’ll run out of top-tier material rather quickly, and the internet becomes boring to you. As soon as you get bored, take your eyes off the screen. Look out the window. Take a deep breath. Let your mind wander, and you might suddenly remember you still need to take out the trash (or whatever task you’ve been putting off).

Edit: I wasn’t happy with the initial version, so I let an LLM suggest minor tweaks. Only some of them were included.

I can imagine the body paint story ended badly… No need to look up the facts with an introduction like that.

Wasn’t there also a Russian RTG core that was so hot it would melt the snow around it? Some scavengers found it, and got immediately blasted with a lethal does of radiation—as you would expect.

With this post, OP was clearly aiming for a minor annoyance or a frustrating little prank, but that story just gave me an idea that goes a fair bit beyond that… More like diabolical malice, but here goes anyway.

Sending one of those plutonium cores back in time to the neanderthals would be a pretty good candidate too. It doesn’t really glow, which is a bummer, but it has other “magical” properties to compensate. The heat might still attract them to it, and the intense radiation would kill them within a day or two. If they somehow manage to touch the plutonium itself—a feat worthy of recognition—they could also experience its toxicity.

You’re absolutely right. Economic motivations decide the trajectory a company may take. Ethics, green washing, queer rights and other factors take a back seat. If they come with financial benefits, the company will follow that path, but that’s always because of money—no matter what the marketing material actually says.

Remember when companies were supporting sexual and gender minorities? That was because financial incentives aligned with that at the time. Remember when those turncoats suddenly scrapped the DEI programs and removed all rainbow themes? Same motivation again. Facade changed, but the foundation is still the same.

That’s the key difference between mobile devices and actual computers. You are merely a user, not the administrator who can do anything with the hardware.

A bottle with a highly concentrated solution of polonium, radium, plutonium or anything spicy and ionizing.

Preferably coupled with something that glows nicely, like ZnS. Just pick a suitable fluorescent dye and make it blue or green for bonus points.

Just use whatever LLM you consider acceptable. However, don’t trust the initial summary or simplified version. Always ask follow-up questions and you may find that the first version had some flaws. You could ask the LLM something like: “Is Facebook saying that they may sell my data to anyone? Answer based on the provided EULA.” Tell it to quote the relevant part of the document to back up the claim. See if the original EULA actually has that part. If so, read it a few times and let it sink in. Using this method, you can jump quickly to the part you find most relevant to any concerns you may have about the contract.

It’s a gateway drug. Before you know it, she’ll be installing Arch without the script.

About that “net slowdown”. I think it’s true, but only in specific cases. If the user already knows well how to write code, an LLM might be only marginally useful or even useless.

However, there are ways to make it useful, but it requires specific circumstances. For example, you can’t be bothered to write a simple loop, you can use and LLM to do it. Give the boring routine to an LLM, and you can focus on naming the variables in a fitting way or adjusting the finer details to your liking.

Can’t be bothered to look up the exact syntax for a function you use only twice a year? Let and LLM handle that, and tweak the details. Now, you didn’t spend 15 minutes reading stack overflow posts that don’t answer the exact question you had in mind. Instead, you spent 5 minutes on the whole thing, and that includes the tweaking and troubleshooting parts.

If you have zero programming experience, you can use an LLM to write some code for you, but prepare to spend the whole day troubleshooting something that is essentially a black box to you. Alternatively, you could ask a human to write the same thing in 5-15 minutes depending on the method they choose.

Yeah it’s getting completely ridiculous. Also, video essays about movies have to dodge copyright scans by resorting to super aggressive editing and visual trickery that basically just ruins the whole video. On PT, they could make much nicer videos.

Yeah that’s a better pair as far as censorship is concerned. On YT, you need to dance around sensitive topics as if you’re talking to a child.

However, as there are more viewers on the bigger platform, abandoning that place doesn’t happen so easily. It’s basically like Facebook all over again. Isn’t there a term for this type of inertia…

Why not both? As far as I can tell, only Nebula originals are restricted to just one platform. Everything else is in two places. I think you could totally play the same game with a PT+Nebula combo.

Yeah, that’s just a shorter way to say: “open hostility, verbal assault, hate speech, various kinds of unethical or even criminal activity, and general online nastiness”.