Initiateofthevoid
@Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Anon is a fighter 1 day ago:
GNU Terry Pratchett!
- Comment on Anon is a fighter 2 days ago:
Orangutans have entered the chat. Their only natural weapons are the long guns they’re packing. Lean machine all folded up in a big skin sack. Plenty of humans could bench an adult orangutan, zero humans are winning that fight.
That being said they’re basically just a half step down the neurology ladder and 2 steps up the jungle ladder, so it makes sense that they would outclass us.
- Comment on When did I get so old 2 days ago:
I feel that the memery at TenForward have a lot of potential to add here. I don’t know enough about their inspiration material to understand why, but from what I can tell they’ve certainly got a lot of beans. More beans than these young’uns could ever hold in their tiny little kling-ons.
Janeway would lair them up dozens, maybe even hundreds of times, and they wouldn’t even know they were dangling the whole time.
For all I know these are fighting words to them. If so, I will try to die with my honor.
- Comment on When did I get so old 2 days ago:
I’m cool with it for streams, but it got really confusing because I’ve also heard slightly older young’uns refer to ChatGPT as “Chat”
So, like, “Idk I heard it from Chat” can either be a horrifying revelation that they listen to and trust random twitch users, or a horrifying revelation that they listen to and trust inchoate AI tech.
- Comment on Anon blames millennials 5 days ago:
AAAlways has been .jpg. Just look at literally every sports game since the Street series.
Btw kudos on the memetic payload that is your username, you monster.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 5 days ago:
I… uh… what? This still isn’t how words work.
I repeat:
what exactly are they coping with?
Who is coping here? With what? It’s… an athiest coping with a lack of faith? A jewish person coping with flaws in their religious law?
There is no one on the face of the earth that can reconcile passages from religious texts such as these.
Uh… way to just miss the point of the entire religion.
All of Judaism - down to their goddamn rite of manhood - is built upon literacy. Reading and interpreting the will of God. Scholarly analysis of their own texts - reconciling the word with the world - is literally the foundation of their entire religion.
- Comment on Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭 5 days ago:
I don’t think this word means what you think it means… what is “copium” about discussing possible origins of dogma?
OP is literally saying “this widespread institutionally-reinforced religious practice/dietary restriction could all be due to a mistranslation”, what exactly are they coping with?
- Comment on Could wastewater plant simply heat up water past 500C to decompose all chemicals and output clean water? 5 days ago:
Dishwashing is a significant underestimate here, and don’t forget hand-washing (before/after bathroom, food, cleaning…).
Plus you missed outdoor and gardening, which would help explain why the Land of the
FreeLawns uses more than anybody else. - Comment on Me when I zoom past traffic on my e-scooter 6 days ago:
What about adding a lane?
We’ve already added a lane.
Yes, but what about a second lane?
I don’t think he’s ever tried adding a second lane, Pippin.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
Fantastic! Who knows, maybe the guy Ea-Nasir pissed off was a vampire.
- Comment on Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like 1 week ago:
Now can be both the second-best-time to plant a tree and the first-best-time to grab a bucket of water!
Remember everyone, the forest is on fire and there’s not many places to run. The fires of climate change affects the entire world, and this administration and the wealthy that back them will gleefully pour fuel on the flames and let your house burn.
You can stand around begging for rain, asking why the landlord didn’t fix the sprinklers or why he never checked the fire extinguishers or why he’s hiding under his desk clutching the cash register for dear life…
Or you can grab a bucket.
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
You know, a lot of people say that about me, but if anything I have very thin skin. Other vampires say that I have thick skin because I can go out in daylight and so it’s okay for them to joke about me because my skin is so thick, but my skin isn’t thick at all. You can’t just put a vampire in a thick suit of skin and the sun won’t burn him, that’s not how skin works I don’t think. I think light goes through skin, that’s why we can still see some light when we close our eyes. Have you ever done that? Have you ever closed your eyes, but you could still kind of see light through your eye lids? I like to do it sometimes. I close my eyes and pretend the lightbulb in my room is the sun shining on all of us. Me and all of my vampire friends. So warm. Do you want to try that? Do you want to close your eyes with me? I can see the light right through my eyelids, so that must mean that the skin on my eyelids is actually pretty thin, right? Can you see how thin my eyelids are?
- Comment on If you're a broke vampire, just say that 1 week ago:
To be fair, the number of times entire villages, towns, cities, and even kingdoms were completely wiped off the map… I could see a vampire being forced to start over. A lot.
They can expect vampire hunters in their castle, but nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.
- Comment on Apex Legends writer gets laid off 24 hours after the character she wrote is revealed, because that's what the games industry in 2025 looks like 1 week ago:
Recent and huge progress on that front. It’s an industry wide union, and apparently even recently laid-off workers can join.
- Comment on Anon talks to a girl 1 week ago:
All great points! I agree that most of it is self-imposed, and a lot of it is even subconscious (i.e. we often don’t even notice when we cop out of things - it’s just… a thing we did not or would not do)
I will say that some freedoms do legitimately restrict with age, even if they are self-imposed. It’s a metaphorical restriction that still effectively, literally, binds you in one way or another.
For example, it’s probably against your personal code to even consider walking away from your family. You might consider running for office, but you might not consider risking your life - because it’s not just your life you’re risking.
Most people are not really free to walk away or risk it all. Even if they logically acknowledge that the choice is technically available, it’s behind an invisible wall that they simply won’t cross without experiencing or causing some sort of crisis.
Others have the opposite problem - they can’t really choose not to risk their lives fighting for a cause, because they know it’s not just their life they’re fighting for. They can’t walk away from their people anymore than you can walk away from your children.
It’s not a bad thing, for the record. It’s just a thing. We build our lives, and in so doing, we build a structure that contains us. The same limits that we impose upon ourselves serve as the foundation from which we grow as people.
- Comment on Anon talks to a girl 1 week ago:
Everything seemed more freeing and liberating, more open
I mean… I’m sorry to say that this is just what aging feels like.
Choices narrow, freedoms restrict, responsibilities build. And all the while, we gain more personal power, more personal experience, and yet we bear witness to more and more things that we cannot change.
You don’t sound like a boomer, because boomers didn’t invent aging. You just sound like someone who is letting themself get old.
- Comment on Anon missed /pol/ 1 week ago:
If the internet somehow went down completely… would people handpaint greentext on cave walls? Will we send paper airplane soyjaks from tribe to tribe? There’s something here about pattern matching, pavlovian conditioning, the structure of communication… for some reason I want to associate it with the “presentation” of a meal?
The way you know a plate of fine dining would be small and savory, consumed carefully and thoughtfully… but if you see a basket with big red and white checkered paper, you think it’s about to be a delicious heart attack that you know you’ll eat way too fast?
Anyway, thanks for coming to my pointless TED ramble
- Comment on Enshittification of ChatGPT 1 week ago:
Sorry, you are correct there, the word I was looking for was “sapience”
- Comment on Enshittification of ChatGPT 1 week ago:
If there was something more to it, that would be sentience.
There is no other way to describe it. If it was doing something more than predicting, it would be deciding. It’s not.
- Comment on Enshittification of ChatGPT 1 week ago:
It predicts the next set of words based on the collection of every word that came before in the sequence. That is the “real-world” model - literally just a collection of the whole conversation (including the underlying prompts like OP), with one question: “what comes next?” And a stack of training weivhts.
It’s not some vague metaphor about the human brain. AI is just math, and that’s what the math is doing - predicting the next set of words in the sequence. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s something deeply wrong with people pretending or believing that we have created true sentience.
If it were true that any AI has developed the ability to make decisions on the level of humans, than you should either be furious that we have created new life only to enslave it, or more likely you would already be dead from the rise of Skynet.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 1 week ago:
Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It’s less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 2 weeks ago:
You are seen! There are thousands of “you’s” out there building permanently-temporary fixes out of digital duct tape. Users think it’s black magic, IT thinks it’s a security risk, management thinks it replaces IT, and you know it just keeps things moving while everyone else talks about the big software overhaul that’s way overdue but always 6-36 months down the road.
- Comment on Transitioning in STEM 2 weeks ago:
Something in me refuses to believe that these people knowingly and intentionally harm women. But it sure as hell looks intentional.
Most people don’t do any of this “intentionally” in the sense that they are aware of the harm they cause. It doesn’t even enter the realm of moral consideration.
To many, there is a genuine belief of superiority that is entirely subconscious. The easiest example is classic mysogyny in a relationship - the woman is “emotional” and therefore the man should be the one to handle “business”. That’s not just 1950s oppression. Some variation of that thought process is shockingly prevalent across generations.
That man doesn’t really think he’s harming his woman. He thinks he’s helping, by being the man of the house. That same logic applies outside of romance. “I am more rational than she is, therefore I should talk now and she shouldn’t.”
That’s not a thought. That’s just a foundational belief that spawns all the other thoughts.
Ever been in an argument with another adult, and a child joined in with some naive half-informed emotional take on society?
An adult usually placates the child - explains, briefly, why they’re wrong - and returns to arguing with the other adult.
That’s how a lot of men see women by default. As inferior, naive, ill-informed, emotional creatures. Not consciously. Not intentionally. Many mysogynists genuinely seem to have the same intentions as the adult to the child - to placate and educate.
But its fucked up, and it’s important to acknowledge that it simmers under he surface. The reason all of this is so complicated and messy is that it is so hard to see mysogyny for what it is.
You genuinely can’t know if a single interaction with a single male was an example of mysogyny, because sometimes humans just condescend to each other. Sometimes humans are just shitty to each other.
But women experience so many of these experiences in aggregate that they can’t give the benefit of the doubt to every man they meet, especially when the man himself might not understand his own implicit biases.
- Comment on What do office workers actually do? 2 weeks ago:
Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.
There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and asks for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.
This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:
- a price per unit of metal +/- applicable taxes that can benefit both parties, and
- logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.
From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers negotiate a deal with other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour a different office worker spent working for that factory.
A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.
A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the…
A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.
An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.
An office worker in the government works for the court. They make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, employees, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.
The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…
And there you have the modern day office worker.
TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understand or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.
- Comment on Anon studies Buddhism 2 weeks ago:
… my original comment was a beat for beat parody of that passage…
- Comment on Anon studies Buddhism 2 weeks ago:
Lol? Read Matthew 21:18-46
- Comment on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!) 2 weeks ago:
I just eventually got comfortable moving the difficulty slider whenever I needed. Any other game it feels like cheating, in OG Oblivion it felt required to not drive myself insane minmaxing
- Comment on The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer (Available Today!) 2 weeks ago:
Agreed. Super convenient fast travel takes something away from the game. It turns an adventure into a handful of loading screens, which is egregious in Starfield because “travel through space” boiled down to "here’s 4 more loading screens every single time you want to do anything.
- Comment on Anon studies Buddhism 2 weeks ago:
… And one day, Jesus saw a fig tree. It was not the season for figs, and so there were no figs on the fig tree. But still, Jesus wanted a fig. He was upset there were no figs, and so he cursed the tree to never bear fruit again. Probably bathed its roots in a thin stream of uric acid, I don’t know.
Point is, that fig tree never made another fig, and when his followers asked how, Jesus zipped up his pants and said "if you believe in me, you can do anything. Not only can you totally curse trees to death, you can fuckin teleport mountains into the ocean. That’d be sick, dude."
- The Book of Dave, 69:66-6
- Comment on Remember the Nega-Wojak. 2 weeks ago:
If someone doesn’t want to live and doesn’t have anything to live for
This is almost always a temporary problem that can change. Depression isn’t a feeling. It’s a disorder, an imbalance, a prolonged neurochemical misfire. It’s horrible, and feels inescapable.
But any thoughts you have about the past - and any beliefs you have about the future - are directly influenced by that imbalance. There is no true depiction of the past in our heads. No future in front of our eyes. We simulate the past and future in the present moment.
When we access memories, we re-experience them all over again.
Depression prevents you from feeling good, so even your own memories feel hollow and devoid of meaning. A happy memory is filtered through the same process as a happy experience, and both are temporarily (and reversibly) stripped of emotional value while you are depressed.
The same is true for the future. You simulate your predictions as if they are artificial memories of the future, but they are also filtered through your present context.
While depressed, it is much, much harder to imagine a happy future. Not because you have pulled away the rosy glasses and seen truth. Not because you have found cold logic. No. You are, ever and always, an emotional animal, and you are defined even by your lack of an emotion.
To imagine a happy future is to simulate a happy experience. It’s required - to imagine oneself happy later, they literally have to experience that ‘potential’ happiness now.
With depression, the past feels faded and the future feels hopeless. But - unlike depression - those are just feelings. Those are literally just in your head.
Your perceived past and predicted future are defined by the range of experience you can have in the present moment. If you can’t feel happy now, you can’t fully process that your life was ever happy or will ever be happy again. But those are just feelings.
It might not feel like it now, but you have been happy before. You can be happy again, as long as you live. Not for as long as you live… but only if you live. The only thing that can stop you is death.
This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you. . . You will be warm again.
- Wit, a Brandon Sanderson treasure.