If at all reasonably possible, try to find a place where drugs can be tested to see what they really are (sadly a rare thing still, but it exists).
The next best thing to do is talk with people in the scene and find out what they consider a trustworthy source. Any single person trying to offer you pills is a potential scammer or worse, you need to verify from other sources whether they're legit.
There's probably a better than 50% chance you'll get something close enough to what you want regardless, because incentives are aligned with everyone having a good time. But just like everywhere else, bad actors will always exist.
Bitcoin doesn't have long conversations with you, including deeply technical ones, in a way that you thought only a human being could just 5 years ago.
They are not the same.
I agree fully with you on the potential for energy waste. We always do that, though, with nearly everything. How many of today's jet plane flights really needed to happen? The question is how much value people feel they're getting. People are having a whole lot more feelings about AI than they ever could about cryptocurrencies, and that train aint stoppin'.
I mean, I agree, but good luck with that. Especially in the current environment.
We need to plan for the world we're most likely to be living in in addition to the one we want to live in but probably won't. The latter energy isn't entirely wasted, but it's also not as essential to our immediate survival.
This is a satisfying way to deal with frustration. Unfortunately, it also gets spit all over whatever device you're speaking toward. Sometimes worth it for sure, though.
Oh you can direct the stream a bit to the side or just raspberry softly. The important thing is to make sure the prrffftt sounds are Gaussian-distributed.
As a longtime student of the human condition, it is so obvious to me that this is real, has been happening, and will continue to happen as long as homo sapiens (in our current state) exists.
False beliefs are not a neutral thing to ignore. The way people react to them has strikingly tangible consequences for the rest of us.
A frightening number of people already believe all kinds of wildly irrational things about AI, and I don't see any way this doesn't become an increasingly complex issue we will all continue to have to deal with for the rest of our lives. In addition to everyone who comes after us.
AI will certainly cause job loss. It already has (regardless of to what degree it was an excuse for something else in many cases). I agree with what you say, though.
The big question to me is whether the people who lost those jobs will have better opportunities in the future. That's kind of up to all of us.
My childhood was free range. Some of the greatest memories of my life (admittedly, also some not-so-great ones, but still) are from that time period.
Maybe I was lucky to not get severely injured or abducted, but I do feel it helped me become a more resilient and independent person. I moved out of my parents' house at 18 and never had to go back for more than a few weeks. I have persevered through a widely varied array of very difficult situations.
In some ways, I'm not sure I would've made it as far as I have without those experiences as a kid. Of course, maybe I could've done even better if I had stayed home and studied more, and maybe avoided some of those difficult situations? But I am glad to say I am okay with how things turned out.
I definitely believe overly sheltered kids are missing something important. There is a better balance we can strike, I think.
I started trying doing for my kids what was done to me and quickly ran into a brick wall. Had school refuse to release child when I wasn't physically present at bus stop, had cops called at the park, and have had Karens roll up and interrogate my kid for walking "alone" on our property.
Only solution I found was to move in the middle of nowhere and buy acreage. No other kids but at least the Karens can be trespassed and the child snatchers are too underfunded / too far of a drive away for them to bother us over a sad faced Karen calling.
The other option that's really going to piss some people off when I say, but matches my reality, is living in a few ghetto neighborhoods when I was broke there were literally so many single moms that the child snatchers could not possibly punish all of them and the kids roamed because momma was at work and they were protected from the Karens/CPS by having critical mass.
When my first-born was six I walked around with her to all of the neighbor's houses and we introduced ourselves. We informed them that my daughter would likely be moving around the neighborhood independently, perhaps on occasion with her younger brother. I gave them my phone number and told them to call any time.
In addition to having no problems with Karens or the CPS we were able to identify the other houses that had kids in them and a band of independent neighborhood kids playing with and looking out for eachother quickly became the norm in our community.
Poor people often get a pass for various reasons. Many/most of those reasons may be bad or stupid ones, but I see it as a silver lining. There is often much more of a sense of community than in other places as well.
Giving kids access to a bunch of rural land to explore is a great middle ground for those who can do it.
Mine was also free range in an older neighborhood/suburb with a highway on two sides and river on the other two. The only rule I had was not to cross the highway, but even that rule was eventually relaxed as there were better fishing ponds on the other side of the highway and I just had to tell parents/be careful. I was also a latchkey kid (along with all my friends) so I'd get home from school, drop my books and turn right around and head to my friend's houses.
Like you, it wasn't always easy, but I think made me a stronger person overall.
I keep telling my wife our son is literally more likely to be hit by lightning than to be snatched by some rando, but somehow that is hard to understand.
It is funny because we now know that in the 1970s there were far more randos kidnapping people than today. The FBI actually got pretty good at these crimes.
Perhaps those are your greatest memories because that is what you were doing as a child. Would your greatest memories of you grow up now be playing Minecraft online?
I don’t really know the answer. I grew up in the early 2000s with a mix of video games and ‘outside with friends on the woods’ time. I have many great memories of playing games, but by far my best are always the ones, in person, out in the woods. Even my best gaming memories were at lan parties. Being in-person with friends is just better.
I think part of it depends on what kinds of friendships you have.
Some kids have major problems finding healthy, positive relationships with other kids in real life, often for very arbitrary reasons. For a subset of those, interacting through screens eliminates a ton (if not the entirety) of the friction of IRL interaction.
What it really all boils down to for me is that relationships are deeply important. Once upon a time, I thought I could be an island. I was wrong. Maybe there are a few who can do it, but not me, and probably not most of us.
Pure speculation, but simply the presence of em-dashes may be a statement in itself.
One of the big problems I see currently is all the wild accusations being thrown around by seemingly half the internet that every little thing has been AI manipulated upon the tiniest suspicion. We will go mad tearing each other apart if we keep escalating this behavior.
Yes, some of it is blatantly obvious, but not to everyone-- so I think those casting aspersions need to really back up their claims with more than one or two bits of 'evidence'. I have been accused of using AI to write comments (which I have thus far never done), and I know I'm not the only one by a long shot. Such a waste of time and energy. Ignore it and move on if something smells off to you.
Also I am just so, so tired of the em-dash argument. Humans have been using it for a looong time. Let it go.
My point was less about em-dashes and more stopping to consider how the vatican's workflow and editorial process has changed in wake of AI, and what, if any, impact that could have on the outputs.
AI is a tool, I have no problems with others using it to assist with writing as long as the original intent/argument remains.
Far too many of us (particularly younger people, but not only them) undervalue or are dismissive of philosophy. I once was like this, partly because at the time I'd been brought up - like most humans - to believe my parents' religion held all the answers philosophy might address.
I quickly learned as an adult that whether you're a person of faith or not, it's not pointless at all. It's the foundation of everything. Philosophy is how you explain the deeper reasons behind why you follow whatever religion you do, or adhere more meaningfully to whatever kind of agnosticism, atheism and/or 'spirituality' (with or without woo) you espouse.
Same thing happened to me. My reading comprehension isn't always great first thing in the morning, but I still feel like the title was/is somewhat confusingly worded.
Yeah, I'm kinda sad about that one. Most of my friends and family are aware many of these are fake now, but argue that it still invokes the same response in us so it's okay. For me, though, however intangible or irrational it may be, I do feel a sense of loss.
Funny enough, this is actually one of the few things which has bothered me with the AI boom, and I'm mostly pro-acceleration. A lot of what's happening seems inevitable. But surprisingly, knowing that cat or dog or bird or lizard or butterfly or whatever has a strong chance of being generated really does take something out of it to my mind. And I say that also knowing the extreme amount of staging which has long gone on with traditional nature videography. Somehow, knowing the animal is real means something... I'm still trying to figure out how to better understand and express this.
The next best thing to do is talk with people in the scene and find out what they consider a trustworthy source. Any single person trying to offer you pills is a potential scammer or worse, you need to verify from other sources whether they're legit.
There's probably a better than 50% chance you'll get something close enough to what you want regardless, because incentives are aligned with everyone having a good time. But just like everywhere else, bad actors will always exist.