ameancow

Can we also talk about how much everyone, everywhere relies on service industry workers and how much everyone would absolutely lose their goddamn minds if they had to make their own burgers and fries twice a week, AND how these staple institutions, jobs we deemed so important that we made people work at them during a pandemic, how much the prices of these sandwiches and snacks has gone up in the last few years, how even bringing up the possibility of increasing minimum wage for these difficult and demanding jobs leads to an entire social "discourse" and fierce debates about if people should be able to afford things.

And if you think your little 401k makes you a meaningful shareholder

"In this company we're all like family, you don't have to worry about anything."

If you can't understand that there is a very, very wide difference between choosing to live in and appreciate the life you have, and self-centered apathy, then maybe you should revisit your own thoughts on wisdom.

In fact I would argue it's the people without nuance who will doom our species, the idea that if you're not one thing, you must be the other, black-and-white thinking rapidly becomes reactionary thinking which rapidly becomes superstition, fear and hate and an embrace of authoritarian reactionary leadership.

Hope us a useless feeling. So is despair. Neither will do anything.

You only get one life, you happen to be fucking born in a time when everything is about to go to shit. Well too bad, you still get to live and make the best of it. I don't understand people who are so hung up on things they can't control. If earth was going to get cooked by a supernova in 40 years, I would still live a normal, healthy life and the only thing that would be different is when I die, everyone else does too. Changes nothing.

The act of rumination on a depressive episode involves your brain trying to find something about you, something immutable and deeply connected with who you are as a person, and it takes that thing and amplifies it through a wickedly destructive lens.

See, a lot of people don't know how their own brain works. They think they can think about something and their thoughts will reason out a solution, or that all their ideas are based on the brain's ability to connect logical elements.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Your brain is designed to write a story to explain how you feel. That's it. If you already feel bad, especially if you're not entirely sure why, your brain will scramble for a story, it will tie together every weird loose-end it can find, and assemble a batshit nonsense story for you, which you will believe wholeheartedly. You think your brain is you. You think your thoughts have to be true if they come from inside. Many people never consider that their own thinking is fundamentally wrong, and most of us are wrong about a number of things we feel wholly confident about.

Curbing depressive episodes and getting your life back involves learning to identify when you start ruminating and nipping it in the bud. For many insecure, lonely guys, memes/stories like this will be MAJOR trigger-points for rumination episodes, an act that becomes strangely addictive when you're suffering depression.

The difference between some sullen incel who hates life and hates you and hates women and hates themselves, but happens to be 5' 9", versus a really short dude who has a nice girlfriend and smiles a lot about their life and appreciates what he has, absolutely comes down to how their brains have learned to assemble stories for their world and how emotionally intelligent they are. Some dude is reading this post right now gnashing their teeth and formulating pushback and opposition because their brain is resisting this message because brains hate to be wrong. Even though they're very good at being wrong.

On the other hand, the act of sharing this response without also sharing a method of resolution and/or a framing or context that makes it a passing feeling and not a "harsh reality about current society" or whatever your brain will try to attach to, just provides miserable people yet another rumination topic to get lost down.

For healthy adults, you learn how to manage or avoid rumination. For people without social experience, without a healthy level of emotional intelligence, and especially without good, involved parenting, a young mind can take a post like this and just get absolutely lost down the rabbit-hole of negative validation. Seeing someone in the community you connect with sharing a feeling that your already depressed brain can latch onto is a recipe for depressive contagions.

Get your teenagers off the internet people.

This is literally the only field in which anyone says it's helpful, and I have made effort to reach out to users to see if it's really helping. And even then, about half the programmers I've talked to about it (out of maybe a dozen) say that it's either useless for their particular field of coding, or extremely hit-or-miss, it's more like a quick dice-roll to see if the thing gives them something useful.

"In this company we're like family."

I also notice the ONLY people who can offer firsthand reports how it's actually useful in any way are in a very, very narrow niche.

Basically, if you're not a programmer, and even then a very select set of programmers, then your life is completely unimpacted by generative AI broadly. (Not counting the millions of students who used it to write papers for them.)

AI is currently one of those solutions in search of a problem. In its current state, it can't really do anything useful broadly. It can make your written work sound more professional and at the same time, more mediocre. It can generate very convincing pictures if you invest enough time into trying to decode the best sequence of prompts and literally just get lucky, but it's far too inacurate and inconsistent to generate say, a fully illustrated comic book or cartoon, unless you already have a lot of talent in that field. I have tried many times to use AI in my current job to analyze PDF documents and spreadsheets and it's still completely unable to do work that requires mathematics as well as contextual understanding of what that math represents.

You can have really fun or cool conversations with it, but it's not exactly captivating. It is also wildly inaccurate for daily use. I ask it for help finding songs by describing the lyrics and other clues, and it confidentially points me to non-existing albums by hallucinated artists.

I have no doubt in time it's going to radically change our world, but that time frame is going to require a LOT more time and baking before it's done. Despite how excited a few select people are, nothing is changing overnight. We're going to have a century-long "singularity" and won't realize we've been through it until it's done. As history tends to go.

I would also add "hopeful delusionals" and "unhinged cultist" to that list of labels.

Seriously, we have people right now making their plans for what they're going to do with their lives once Artificial Super Intelligence emerges and changes the entire world to some kind of post-scarcity, Star-Trek world where literally everyone is wealthy and nobody has to work. They think this is only several years away. Not a tiny number either, and they exist on a broad spectrum.

Our species is so desperate for help from beyond, a savior that will change the current status-quo. We've been making fantasies and stories to indulge this desire for millenia and this is just the latest incarnation.

No company on Earth is going to develop any kind of machine or tool that will destabilize the economic markets of our capitalist world. A LOT has to change before anyone will even dream of upending centuries of wealth-building.

Yeah this is some privileged American problems I wish I had.

Yeah this is a couple who haven't really talked through their issues and may have some kind of executive dysfunction. A little time being very honest and crying through their own insecurities together would turn their lives around for the better. (executive dysfunction is a big word but common problem with anyone who has depression and/or anxiety. It just means you don't have a solid distinction in your mind between what you want for yourself and your life, and how your feelings just run away with you and make small things huge obstacles.)