Perspectivist
@Perspectivist@feddit.uk
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
- George Orwell
- Comment on Can we have a healthy life only with fruits or fruits and plants combined alone, and if not why? 5 hours ago:
Going entirely vegan isn’t the easiest thing to pull off for everyone, but you absolutely could cut out the vast majority of animal products that we consume. I think there’s an argument to be made for a certain level of consumption of animal products - perhaps not from a moral standpoint but arguably from a health point of view.
- Comment on Why is ethanol so tasty? 5 hours ago:
Because you’re wired that way. It’s not universally tasty, but it is to some individuals. I personally don’t like the taste at all - I only want the effect.
- Comment on Dude read the rules of woman only community and decided to post anyway 8 hours ago:
Probably trying to say that just because incels (allegedly) use the term “female,” it doesn’t mean that a person using that word must then be an incel.
- Comment on People who think an attack on another user is approproate for this sub, and the mods that enable them 1 day ago:
Yeah, not only is the way that user is writing actually infuriating, but they’re also doing it because of the attention it gets - this is just more of that.
- Comment on Do you have a flagship phone or a car that's 2021/newer but are struggling financially? 1 week ago:
I consider a 10 year old car to be practically new. Older models are much nicer design-wise anyway than these new computers on wheels.
- Comment on Do you have a flagship phone or a car that's 2021/newer but are struggling financially? 1 week ago:
Total expenses for my almost 20 year old truck are around 300€/month. While not cheap, it’s not that expensive either. Housing and food are by far the biggest expense categories for me.
- Comment on People who don't wear earphones outside - why, and what do you do instead? 1 week ago:
otherwise I just end up endlessly distracted and completely away from the world.
Can you dig more into what you mean by that? I assume you mean distracted by your thoughts, rather than the world itself.
- Comment on People who don't wear earphones outside - why, and what do you do instead? 1 week ago:
This reads like satire but I assume you’re being serious.
I’m not really doing anything instead. I’m listening in both cases - only the what I’m listening to changes. Listening to music - or podcasts in my case - is a bit of an distraction. I don’t want to be distracted all the time. I’m more present when I’m listening to the world instead, and it gives more space for my thoughts. I never even have the radio on in my car because to me, driving is almost a meditative experience and I like to just sit there in relative silence and focus on the driving itself. I’m stimulated one way or another for the vast majority of the day anyway. I think it’s good to have these intentional moments built into your daily routine where you let yourself be bored. It’s good for you.
- Comment on How hard would it be to trap gated communities by crashing dozens of cars into the front of their gates blocking them from leaving ? 1 week ago:
Probably not much harder than to trap them inside a gay bar yet we feel differently about these two cases and that should make one pause and think for a moment about the quality of their thoughts.
- Comment on Are platforms like reddit just "internet noise" and bots or just genuinely the darkest parts of humanity? 1 week ago:
The bigger the group of people, the more bad apples there are among them. It’s just statistics - plain and simple. Reddit is a huge platform, so there’s naturally going to be a great number of bad people there. Something to also keep in mind is the gap between how bad someone truly is and how bad you imagine them to be. We’re pretty quick to judge and label people, especially online, based on just a few lines of text. It’s highly unlikely that one’s assessment of someone’s personality as a whole, based on a handful of social media comments, is anywhere near an accurate representation of their actual views.
Also, these same extremists are just as present here on Lemmy - they just mostly fly under the radar because it’s a rather homogenous group of people from a political standpoint, and those extremist views therefore tend to align with your own.
- Comment on why is radical acceptance not being a spineless conformist? 1 week ago:
What’s spineless about not trying to change things you truly can’t change? Wouldn’t it be delusional to keep trying despite knowing it’ll make no difference? I think the important thing here is to distinguish between things you truly have no power over and things you can’t fix yourself but can still play a role in alleviating - or at the very least, behaving in a way that you’re not contributing to making them worse.
I think my personal worldview has some similarities to what you’re describing as radical acceptance. I don’t believe in free will, so no matter how much of a prick someone is being, I don’t blame them personally for it. I don’t act as if they’re choosing to be that way and could just as well choose to act differently. In my view, they can’t help themselves. They couldn’t have done otherwise. Of course, they’re not immune to outside influences, and I’m not saying they lack the capability to act differently in the future - it’s never people’s future behavior we get frustrated about, it’s their current and past behavior.
That, I simply accept as them being the malfunctioning biological robots that they are, and if anything, I’m deeply interested in how they behave. Like a car running without engine oil, I want to see how far it’ll get and what eventually happens. I do, however, move out of its path. While I might not blame someone for being insufferable, I also, for no free will of my own, don’t want to be anywhere near such a person.
- Comment on Why aren't people harassing marketers? 1 week ago:
My unwillingness to mistreat a stranger doesn’t mean I respect them.
- Comment on Why aren't people harassing marketers? 1 week ago:
Because I try my best to treat other people the way I wish to be treated myself. I have no desire to harass anyone, and if I did, I’d feel awful about it. There are enough jerks in the world already, and I don’t want to add to that. Nobody has ever stopped acting shitty because people responded by acting shitty toward them. What you’re advocating isn’t virtuous, no matter what story you tell yourself about it. You’re just trying to justify your own bad behavior so you don’t have to feel guilty when you go to bed at night.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
People break up. Just because someone is 40 and single doesn’t mean they’ve always been.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
The only common denominator in all your bad experiences with women is you. It’s not their fault that you’re single, and as long as you keep thinking that, you’ll probably stay that way.
Put yourself in their shoes - would you date yourself? Would you date a guy who goes around thinking “women suck”?
If you want a relationship with a woman, then work on becoming the kind of person a woman would actually want to be with.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
34M here - just got dumped after a 9-year relationship about two months ago.
Why? Well, multiple reasons. In short: the love just died. Everything was “fine,” but neither of us was particularly happy. We didn’t have that much in common to begin with. Communication was good, and there wasn’t really any one specific event that caused the breakup. I’d say the two biggest factors were excessive weed use - for both of us - which made things feel “fine” despite the spark being gone, along my lifelong porn addiction, which eventually killed my interest in sex entirely and distorted my sense in what kind of women I find attractive. That also made her feel undesirable herself which didn’t help.
I didn’t put enough effort into the relationship and started taking her for granted. I think there was a bit of self-sabotage involved too - deep down I knew that if I didn’t change, this would be the outcome, yet I kept doing it anyway. Maybe I was subconsciously hoping she’d end it because I didn’t have the guts to.
Right now, I just feel numb. I don’t like being alone, but at least I don’t have to worry about being abandoned. I’m trying to take this time to reflect on my life and figure out what’s next. Honestly, in a perfect world, I’d love to find a caring, asexual woman - someone with whom I’d never have to worry about sex again.
- Comment on Research shows 4K or 8K screens offer no distinguishable benefit over similarly sized 2K screen in average living room 3 weeks ago:
My 15 year old FullHD 48" LED TV is about 4 meters away from my couch and when watching a 1080p movie I can’t possibly imagine how a sharper image would add anything to the experience.
- Comment on What is the self? 3 weeks ago:
It’s an illusion that there is a centre to consciousness. It’s a subjective feeling that you are located somewhere up there behind your face looking out into the world, authoring your thoughts and making decisions.
- Comment on What are some good things to purchase to add a new distraction to my life? 4 weeks ago:
Flashlights really do seem like an endless rabbit hole to sink into. They’re surprisingly affordable too - there are tons of Chinese models in the 30–60 euro range that outperform name brands costing over 100 euros.
You could even turn it into a challenge: try to research the absolute best everyday carry flashlight for yourself and see if it arrives in the mail before you’ve already found a better alternative.
- Comment on Why don't police use rubber bullets instead of live rounds? I get if someone is holding a loaded weapon. But wouldn't a rubber bullet have the same effect with out putting holes in another person? 4 weeks ago:
Putting holes in people is what guns are for. If you don’t intend to do that, don’t use a gun - that’s what hand-to-hand combat training, batons, tasers and pepper spray are for.
There’s also a moral-hazard problem: rubber bullets can still be lethal, but the threshold for using them is lower, which could actually lead to more deaths, not fewer.
- Comment on Is there any way the average American can insulate themselves from the AI bubble bursting? 4 weeks ago:
If you’re certain an “AI crash” is coming, then shorting AI companies is how you’d not only avoid the fallout but actually profit from it. That’s speculative investing though - basically gambling.
For everyone else without the ability to predict the future, the general advice stays the same: invest in low-cost, highly diversified index funds spread across sectors and regions. The markets are deeply interconnected, so it doesn’t really matter where you’re invested - when the market crashes, you’re getting hit. If you’re all in on tech, you’ll get hit hard; if you’re spread out, you’ll get hit less. But either way, you’ll feel it.
For someone in it for the long run, it doesn’t matter what the market’s doing. I just keep doing what I’ve always done - managing my finances carefully and investing my savings.
- Comment on Is there any way the average American can insulate themselves from the AI bubble bursting? 4 weeks ago:
The main issue in Japan during the 90s was that the government refused to acknowledge the reality of the situation and let the market crash. Instead of allowing bankruptcies and bad loans to clear, they propped up banks and corporations for years - freezing growth and causing decades of deflation and stagnation. The real lesson from Japan isn’t about the crash itself, but about the response: avoiding short-term pain led to long-term paralysis.
If an AI bubble bursts, it would probably resemble the dot-com crash more than Japan’s experience. Central banks act much faster now, bad debt gets cleared out instead of buried, and the global economy isn’t built entirely on AI speculation. So even if valuations take a hard hit, a decades-long depression like Japan’s is very unlikely.
- Comment on Is there any way the average American can insulate themselves from the AI bubble bursting? 4 weeks ago:
If you’re not invested in the stock market, you don’t lose anything when it crashes - and if you are invested, you only lose if you sell at a loss. I understand the anxiety around economic uncertainty after a crash, but I get the sense that many people don’t really understand how “losing one’s investments” actually works.
- Comment on Is there any way the average American can insulate themselves from the AI bubble bursting? 4 weeks ago:
How did you handle previous stock market crashes, and why do you expect this time to be different? I’m heavily invested in the market, yet I’m not losing any sleep over the possibility of a crash - meanwhile, people who don’t even seem to invest are the ones worrying about it. I can’t help but wonder why that is.
- Comment on NVIDIA’s New AI’s Movements Are So Real It’s Uncanny 4 weeks ago:
Isn’t that bit of an oxymoron? Uncanny implies something doesn’t look natural.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
If it bothers you that much, you can always just make a new account to lose the tail - because that’s exactly what they’ll do once you finally get them banned or whatever your endgame is.
Just block and move on. It’s an anonymous message board. Someone following you around and “vandalizing” your posts is completely meaningless. They’re wasting their time - you’ve already won.
- Comment on When Everything Is Fake, What’s the Point of Social Media? 4 weeks ago:
I think the user bears some responsibility here too. Consuming an unfiltered social media feed isn’t ideal, in my opinion. Mindlessly scrolling through whatever TikTok’s algorithm serves you is exactly how people get sucked into rabbit holes where they can no longer even tell what’s real and what’s fake.
The same goes for platforms like Lemmy - the difference is that instead of algorithms, your feed is handpicked by people with agendas, sprinkled with a few bots. We’re all gullible. We like to think we’re not, but we are. We believe what we want to be true and seek out what confirms what we already think. Unless you actively go out of your way to improve the signal-to-noise ratio, and expose yourself to alternative views then noise and confirmation bias is what you’ll mostly get.
- Comment on How would you quickly describe Lemmy to a non-fediverse person? 4 weeks ago:
Like reddit but mostly politics and no videos.
- Comment on Study proves being rude to AI chatbots gets better results than being nice 4 weeks ago:
You’re right that an LLM doesn’t care how it’s treated - it’s not conscious. But that’s not really the point. The way people treat things that seem human still says something about them, not the thing. If someone goes out of their way to be cruel to a chatbot that’s just trying to be helpful, it’s not the bot that’s being tested - it’s the person’s capacity for empathy and restraint.
It’s the same instinct behind how we treat animals, or even how kids treat toys - being kind to something that can’t fight back is part of what keeps us human. And historically, the “it’s not really human, so it doesn’t matter” argument has been used to justify a lot of awful behavior.
So no, the AI doesn’t care. But maybe it still matters that we do.
- Comment on Study proves being rude to AI chatbots gets better results than being nice 4 weeks ago:
Being ethical in real life doesn’t always give you the best outcome either - doesn’t mean you still shouldn’t be so.