My social anxiety is about to turn against me, isn’t it?

Many ancient practitioners of stoicism were wealthy statesmen, including emperors. And, the literate elite were certainly enamored with it. I’m not a historian, but stoicism was shaped by wealthy and powerful people, as was every popular philosophy.

I’m not opposed to it. I like aspects of Stoicism. But, When it comes to wealth, it always rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed so often to me that wealthy stoics make a virtue out of possessing, but not coveting wealth, and in doing so make a vice of dissatisfaction with one’s wealth. For a rich man, this is reasonable. However, a poor man is correct to be dissatisfied. Poor men need to be angry, and to rise up and demand wealth (in my opinion), their pain and anguish is meant to be felt and to stoke action.

Stoicism is not often presented as compatible with this mindset of mine. I’m sure there are types of stoicism which address this, but most influencers seem to present Stoicism though a relatively uncritical lense.

My caveat to this is that many of the foundational individuals to stoicism, as well as present influencers, are members of the upper class, and while there are a lot of great ideas in there, stoicism can often be distilled into a philosophy of rugged individualism which is more easily achieved with wealth, power, and privilege.

I am of the opinion that stoicism is good, but a disproportional number of those who practice it are often out of touch.

I frequently forget that chrome is installed on my phone. The only time I’m forced to use it is about once a year when I order Papa John’s Pizza takeout. Their checkout page doesn’t seem to work in any other browser.

Something which clarified Zuck’s behavior in my mind was an interview where he said something along the lines of, “I could sell meta for x amount of dollars, but then I’d just start another company anyways, so I might as well not.”

The guy isn’t doing what financially makes sense. He’s Uber rich and working on whatever projects he thinks are cool. I wish Zuck would stop sucking in all his other ways, but he just doesn’t care about whether his ideas are going to succeed or not.

I actually don’t think this is shocking or something that needs to be “investigated.” Other than the sketchy website that doesn’t secure user’s data, that is.

Actual child abuse / grooming happens on social media, chat services, and local churches. Not in a one on one between a user and a llm.

I mean, if the ex president of the United States sent out the scam email, perhaps!

Tons of people already are. The following site is useful for searching papers using ai https://consensus.app/

I wonder if you could just use your PC to hotspot when you need to use VR.

Yeah, right? I mean, imagine if YouTube when down and just deleted all the videos. People would be up and arms demanding legislative action. There would be endless lawsuits.

As a creative, you rely on platforms to not obliterate your stuff. At least not immediately. This guy has a horse in the race of this site.

That’s not really what the article is about. The author even concedes that such a law would never, and perhaps never should, happen; rather, he feels that corporations will not adopt best practices of preservation unless compelled, and it pisses him off.

The title is deliberate hyperbolic. He’s clearly pissed.

Why is everyone so mad about this? I mean, it’s a salty article, but yeah, it kinda sucks when publications don’t give notice before closing down. I think providing the public, including previous contributors, time to archive content is a good practice.

I have to say after watching the videos, boo to the corpo for the weird exploitative lies, but kudos to the two women for staying in character! They legit put effort into moving like the real robots around them, and all while in what were probably uncomfortable costumes. I hope they get positive social media attention!

He is not

If you don’t mind me asking, why don’t you like this other girl? Was she mean to you?

I’ll be honest, this is confusing as hell, so I might be misunderstanding.

I think it’s a little hypocritical that you want it to be a chill, no drama space with the bros, but you also want to exclude a girl because you see her as competition for the guy you like who is in this group.

I understand you had a bad experience with her, but you said that the guys don’t know that. From their perspective, you’re just excluding other girls for no other reasons than seemingly to be the only girl in the group and perhaps to have exclusive access to your crush.

I’ve made a lot of IRL friends online and at work.

If you’re between jobs, consider doing something like Americorps. People of all ages do it, not just young folks, and its temporary. I think of it as summer camp for adults, but you get paid and in some cases housing.

Back in 2017 I was super into VR. IDK what the communities are like now, back then the demographics were older, but I got a big social fix from it. An oculus quest 2 or 3 is affordable. Almost all the best games are social, “face to face” talking. It’s like having a public arcade in your closet.

I made the most friends back in 2011 by posting art online and commenting on other artists’ things. People love chatting about their hard work. I ended up meeting loads of them in person. If you can find a space of creatives, whether it’s a bluegrass club, DND, discord book club, whatever, you’ll have a good time.

And, don’t beat yourself up about being lonely. Life moves in cycles. Remember, it just takes meeting one extrovert to suddenly gain a crap ton of friends. Or, maybe you’ll collect them one by one. Regardless, I feel you. Be well.

Grok 2 uses the image model, “Flux.” Flux is made by black forest labs. You two can download the model and run it locally on a moderately expensive gaming PC or use it for free at https://huggingface.co/spaces/black-forest-labs/FLUX.1-dev among other places.

I find it funny that the most newsworthy component of this product is made and distributed for free by a completely unrelated company. This is manufactured outrage by musk as a ploy to seem relivant in the ai space. All he did was put a free thing behind a Paywall.

“Warning: you will get texted so use your disposal number.”

Umm… What?

I’m so happy that new pipe is working again.