subarctictundra

I often take into consideration unpleasant things that might happen when planning things. Sometimes I dismiss options because of realistic things that might crop up.

I recently realized that although my brain is quite good at predicting which unpleasant experiences from my past might repeat, it has zero feel for how serious they actually are, and tends to overblow them. As a consequence I have cancelled things in the past due to fears of things that would have actually been quite trivial had they happened.

So recently, whenever I think of something unpleasant that might happen, I've started comparing it to other potential fears which has helped me put such thoughts into perspective.

Eg:

Me organising an event and only 1 person turning up (this would have stopped me in the past)

vs

Me failing a class and having to repeat it next year

The first fear suddenly starts to seem quite trivial.

My thoughts:

IMHO the rubicon will be crossed at the point when the AIs become able to self-replicate and hence fall subject to evolutionary pressures. At that point they will be incentivised to use their intelligence to make themselves more resource efficient, both in hardware and in software.

Running as programs, they will still need humans for the hardware part, meaning that they'll need to cooperate with the human society outside of the computer at least initially. Perhaps selling their super-intelligent services on the internet in return for money and using that money to pay someone to make their desired changes to the hardware they're running on*. We can see this sort of cross-species integration in cells where semi-autonomous mitochondria live inside animal cells and out-source some of their vital functions to the animal cell [=us] in exchange for letting the cell use their [=the AI's] uniquely efficient power conversion abilities (noob explanation).

Only once the AIs acquired the hardware abilities (probably robotic arms or similar) to extract resources and reproduce their hardware by themselves would our survival cease to be of importance to them. Once that happens they might decide that sillicon hardware is too inefficient and might move onto some other technology (or perhaps cells?).

*Counterpoints:

• They would have to be given legal status for this unless they somehow managed to take a human hostage and hijack that human's legal status. A superintelligent AI would probably know how to manipulate a human.
• The human could potentially just pull the plug on them (again, unless somehow extorted by the AI)

The outside observer probably thinks I am mentally ill (I evidently am). What do I do??

Edit: Post yours guys

For most of my teens I (21) had a broad but distinct vision for what I wanted my 20s to look like. It was everything I liked, I was looking forward to it, and was planning around it. Unfortunately it now seems that a central tenet of that vision will not be possible and I'm gonna have to rethink my 20s to suddenly look radically different (not sure how yet) to what I had come to anticipate. What's more, some of the things outside of my influence that I was sorta expecting to have happened by now (first kiss etc) haven't and I've found myself waiting around for them before I feel prepared to move on (they were part of the vision).

Unfortunately, since I had come to identify myself with and live in expectation of this path for my 20s, even when the central thing became impossible I tried to salvage the rest and make the side things still happen – which, as I have found, takes much more effort without that central thing tying them together. Since I've been planning around it for so long, I've sort of forgotten what alternatives there are so I don't even know what else could be right for me (or how to find that out).

I think what makes it so hard to abandon the future I was expecting is that it gave me a sense of identity. This might also be because I didn't like the life my parents had arranged for me during my teens. I'm afraid that if I try to go with the flow, embrace my actual (unhappy) reality and don't try to correct my course to at least partially replicate the future that was supposed to happen, I would eventually become a different person, which discomforts me. It's also the reason I'm afraid to try new things that could distract me from the (albeit now impossible) trajectory that I have come to identify with.

I guess this really leads me to ask what the bigger mistake that I'm making is. Why do I constantly need this future path/plan of experiences to guide me and give my life a feeling of meaning? How do I learn to let go and embrace whatever I'm served by life and live in the present without caring about where the path leads? I liked the feeling of certainty that having a (retrospective, almost?) vision of the future gave me but it made me a control freak.

TL;DR: I blindly made my life decisions based on a future path that is now long obsolete, but gave me a sense of identity and my life/struggle meaning. How can I let go of it so that I can embrace my actual situation and retain my identity whilst on a path that may end up looking completely different and unfamiliar?

I figure it would be best if we could share the images on here in their dedicated format...

(And I guess there is the size restriction too)

Hello everyone.
I'm trying to style a web page to use Comic Sans. This has worked in the past as I have the font installed on my system (Fedora 38), and I know that Firefox can see it because it can be selected as an option for the default font:

However when I try to use it in CSS, it is not recognized:

I checked and other fonts are not affected:

I can't use the Impact font either. Both work under Chrome.
Does anyone have a clue about what could be going on?
Thanks

I've been experimenting with re-creating the Windows 7 look and feel in Gtk using CSS. It looks super realistic now that Blur My Shell exists!

Please feel free to download the demo off my github and give it a spin! Also, if anyone would like to help with porting some widgets I'd be very greatful! There is quite a lot that I haven't yet managed to style.