Personal chat thread

[Yuli Ban]

Found on SomethingAwful

It's the most American game. 90 seconds of action, 5 minutes of meetings about the action, every spare surface and second is dedicated to advertising. You have constant intervention by authorities to ensure the appropriate outcome, and if you don't like it you can use a timeout to sue. :911:

The NFL's rulebook is 85 pages long, and changes every year. There are 15 rules of soccer, and they never change

.

[ººº]

^ It still makes more sense than baseball.

[lechwall]

Found on SomethingAwful

It's the most American game. 90 seconds of action, 5 minutes of meetings about the action, every spare surface and second is dedicated to advertising. You have constant intervention by authorities to ensure the appropriate outcome, and if you don't like it you can use a timeout to sue. :911:

The NFL's rulebook is 85 pages long, and changes every year. There are 15 rules of soccer, and they never change

.

The rules of soccer do change though not every year see things like the offside rule and video assistant referees

[Ozzie guy]

I quit my call center job it was getting worse each week it reached the point where I was working multiple 11 hour shifts in a row, there was a new issue every few days and they wanted me to come in whist starting at 6am and working more than 8 hours (It was implied being made to come in was group punishment for not meeting targets without outright saying it). Yesterday I sent my supervisor a message to put in my two week notice before quitting, they worked a full shift after I sent my message and didn't even read my message when I could see them logged into our chat system. I called up and quit on the spot today. (I still need to go in and hand over my key card lol)

I have about 20k USD/30k AUD saved I think the way forward for me is to take my time ether getting a job with lots of happiness like something to do with animals or some kind of education path which I can derive self-worth and purpose from.

Regardless I do think we are in the "end times" and my next job may be the last one or I may not finish an education path before sh$t hits the fan due to AI. I am going to do my best to not factor this into decision making.

[Vakanai]

I've been sick three or four times this year. I'm unsure of the number because the first time (or possibly two) I was sick for a week, not sick for a week, and then sick for a week again. A week is both a short enough span that the illness could've been in remission before suddenly spiking for one last round of "ugh, why god why", but also long enough that I could've been better and just picked up something new (my head was so stuffy the second time, when it hadn't been stuffy that first week). This was in January.

After the one cold or possibly two colds (not stuffy head vs stuffy head) I caught some sort of stomach virus that was going around. Puked once, some slight diarrhea, but the biggest thing for me was full one body aches (all my joints hurt) and an incredible feeling of weakness/tiredness. This too lasted about a week. That was in February.

Now skip to March. I was helping to babysit my baby niece (17 months old, she's so precious), but what we didn't know when we got her was she was in the "no symptoms yet" stage of hand foot and mouth disease. And although it's rare for adults to catch it, I caught it. Luckily the baby seems better and the sores she developed seem to be slowly disappearing/peeling. But I'm not recovering from this just yet, having gotten it later. I don't know how many more days I have to put up with this sickness (my face looks like a plague victim's, come on!) but at least foot hand and mouth is only supposed to last like a week tops I guess.

But really, I've been sick every month this year so far, when for the last decade plus I've only ever gotten sick maybe once a year, and often not at all. But then during most of that time my sister hadn't married into an instant family scenario and my dad/stepmom/adopted brother lived too far to visit often. But my sister has a family now, and a new baby, and my dad/stepmom moved to be closer to their new grandbaby -so the reason for my sudden illness streak is just more time with family and family friends, which is a good thing over all. After all, every time I've been sick at least one other person in the family had it recently or still had it. But I should probably look into taking some vitamin regimen or something to boost my immune system if increased family life means increased exposure.

But seriously I caught hand foot and mouth.

[wjfox]

I'm in a very crowded disco right now. Unmasked. It'll be a miracle if I don't get Covid after this.

[lechwall]

I'm in a very crowded disco right now. Unmasked. It'll be a miracle if I don't get Covid after this.

Hope you're doing ok WJ Fox. I just got back from the US for the first time had a great time getting away from the miserable British weather.
Trying to have as many experiences just enjoying life like this as much as possible before AGI comes which seems increasingly closer.

[wjfox]

I was playing this at my brother's house over the weekend, for the first time in almost 30 years.

My favourite shoot-'em-up on the Sega Megadrive, and some of the best music of any console game!

To clarify, the original was on the Megadrive, this version has been converted to play on Switch.

[Ken_J]

For over a year now I've been in what some call a neurodivergent shutdown. The horror show of abuse and strain from the job I was working legitimately destroyed me and left me with panic attacks and sleep issues. The slum I'm forced to live in compounds that problem. And in the last 2 years I lost my only means of transport, nearly ended up homeless again, nearly lost the replacement transport, had shingles, covid for the second time, emergency gallbladder surgery that lead to complications with internal bleeding, financial setbacks, development of a tremor, and recently ocular migraine (which left me blind for a half hour).

There are no support systems in this region of the country, and no such thing as real healthcare in this country.

and it's hard to decide if I would even want to live through this kind of life for another 40 years, even if I believed we'd make the advances needed to reach a life expectancy of 80+... Which I very much doubt more and more each year.

some of this pessimism comes from looking at data. and how neurodivergent populations are many times more prone to homelessness, heart disease, diabetes, epilepsy, neurodegenerative disorders, suicide and generally decreasing quality of life... in studies run on populations in countries with a national healthcare system and better quality of life than the lower economic bracket of US populations. And in those countries the life expectancy of autistic individuals is between 15 and 20 years less than neurotypicals.

so not only do I have a 1-2 decades shorter life expectancy, I'm likely to suffer more during that time, and never be allowed to achieve anything with my life. and things don't look like they are getting better. In fact they seem to be getting crazier every year.

it's hard to try and pull out of this burnt out, shut down and the world seems dead set on not giving me the chance to recouperate.

[Vakanai]

Literally every single dream I had last night was about either seeking professional help so I could tell someone in real life that I'm trans and going through hell pretending to be a normal "man" or dreaming about literally running away from people so I wouldn't have to tell them. Which is a somewhat disturbing insight into my mental health I feel.

[Time_Traveller]

Well something happened which i didn't expect at all, the administrator/founder of the Dr Who ~ Mad Man in a Box group on Facebook invited me to become the fourth administrator because he and another admin are pleased with my current posts i put on there and i said about when i am usually available and kindly accepted the position. Now to wait.

[Ozzie guy]

I think I have legitimately been in the bottom 0.1% for mental health for a long time typically when someone sees a psychiatrist they go for like 12 weeks I have seen mine for nearly 5 years. I only recently found out this kind of treatment is rarer and a retiring psychiatrist I saw once or twice acting as triage presumably chose to send me to my current one specifically.

In the last week or two I have had a gigantic change for the better mental health wise. I stopped hiding from the world as much (this started happening in tiny ways like a month ago), mostly dropped the mentality of trying to survive until AGI and have sparks of wanting a much better life. Ironically, I think a lot of this change was brought on because I saw someone from my past slandering me on a website pushing me to process emotions that were preventing me being social to any degree and get back on social media.

Outside of getting on social media and mental woo woo in pragmatic reality nothing has really changed (and why would it in a week or two) I have made some small progress in the last few weeks which I should really reflect on embrace and be happy about but nothing worth updating here over.

[Ken_J]

I think for most of the last 20 years I've counted myself in the recovered mental health catagory. but In the last couple years I've been abused and neglected to such a degree that it's wrecked my mental health.

I find myself at once desperate for reassurances that I won't continue down a long painful chronic health crisis into poverty and homelessness and death on the street, with no body missing me and no contribution to the world to live past me and to never amounting to anything or warnting being remembered...
And at the same time horrified at the idea that I might very well be lead down a trail of piece by piece dragging out a life of desperation and toil and disability into 100 year, 120, 140. That I'll lose everything and everyone as they fall to things or move up and away from the tide of meaninglessness that I'll be in the depth of. Just a drone, whose own memories of where I started from faded, because they were never worth preserving to my owners. I might live for 2- 6 times what someone like me would have lived in most of human history, but I won't really have a life of any measurable amount.

1-2 hours every few days to count as your own, and even in them there are just a mountain of things you'll never be allowed. You won't be somebody of note, you're greatest achievement in 240 years, will be that in the 10 years of that time you scraped together enough spare hours to be in the top 15 of your favorite game, and you make a good tasting sandwich. You'll never see the pyramids, let alone make anything as noteworthy by future historians.

and it's hard for me to convince myself that I'd want to live that life if that was even plausible to get that as a potential future in the first place.

Like I would love to imagine a future Star Trek civilization, but with medicine advanced to the point where I can have the pinnical of my health and youth back and never experience the ravages of aging. I will be free to travel the solar system and set out between stars in my apartment-ecology ship to explore and meet other people along the way share a century with some and eventually revisit earth in a few 1000 years. pull up emersive vr of places long gone and people gone with them, and have those reconstructions be possibly so accurate that I could question whether we reincarnated their awareness an selves. and I don't know what i'd do until the universe itself seems to be dying, maybe see what what would happen if we aim past the edges of the universe, maybe initiate a new big bang and be there for a beginning of a new eternity, who knows. but I'm not sure it's even remotely possible, and I have to ask myself if there is a sort of unhealthy desperation in the dream, to avoid the fade to nothing that has been the fate of every thing that has ever lived to date, like a Karen wanting to see the manager of life because this can't happen to her, despite it having happened to nearly 100 billion human in all of human history and nobody was ever special enough that they didn't have to fade to nothing.

[lechwall]

I think I have legitimately been in the bottom 0.1% for mental health for a long time typically when someone sees a psychiatrist they go for like 12 weeks I have seen mine for nearly 5 years. I only recently found out this kind of treatment is rarer and a retiring psychiatrist I saw once or twice acting as triage presumably chose to send me to my current one specifically.

In the last week or two I have had a gigantic change for the better mental health wise. I stopped hiding from the world as much (this started happening in tiny ways like a month ago), mostly dropped the mentality of trying to survive until AGI and have sparks of wanting a much better life. Ironically, I think a lot of this change was brought on because I saw someone from my past slandering me on a website pushing me to process emotions that were preventing me being social to any degree and get back on social media.

Outside of getting on social media and mental woo woo in pragmatic reality nothing has really changed (and why would it in a week or two) I have made some small progress in the last few weeks which I should really reflect on embrace and be happy about but nothing worth updating here over.

Glad to hear you're doing better. No one really knows how AGI will turn out so we should make an effort to engage with the outside world before it happens.

[Powers]

No one really knows how AGI will turn out...

Or when.

[lechwall]

No one really knows how AGI will turn out...

Or when.

I think there's a 99.9999999% chance it happens this century barring some cataclysm such as nuclear war it would truly be a shock if it didn't happen by the end of the century we're talking a not dissimilar time frame from Colossus to ChatGPT as we are from today until the end of the century. As to when this century however yes no one really knows so live life to the fullest in case the Yudkowsky's of the world are indeed correct.

[wjfox]

I've started to learn SQL, as I think it's a very useful skill to have in today's world. It's clear that I need to work with data, and databases, especially for a new project I'm developing that's going to run alongside Future Timeline.

Right now, I'm just getting through the basics, but I hope to develop an intermediate or higher level knowledge over the next few months.

[Tadasuke]

I've become interested in the Future many years ago, because I've considered this Universe a horrible place to live in, so a lot needs to be done in all areas, to make it more livable for us and we could make that progress. What has always struck me, is how little has been achieved since modern humans evolved to their current form. The reason is, that progress is usually exponential.

I do think that we are making progress, but I feel it's a bit slow. Especially after 2010. I feel like what we are getting since 2010 is more of the same, instead of something completely new and exciting. Like, even this website and forum. It was already online in 2010 and since then there hasn't been that much of a change. If you go back to the year 2000, there wasn't even Wikipedia.

Basically all the things that are being bought or used today are very, very similar to what was available in 2010. There is just more of everything. It's more of a quantitative than qualitative progress.

In the 2000s, I hoped for more positive change to happen in the 2010s. In the 2010s, I thought that they are a decade to be waited out, until the 2020s start and we get to the good stuff (rather naïve on my part).

I don't mean, that it's worse now than 10 or 15 years ago, but I don't really feel technological deflation or exponential improvement in many areas. There is just more of the same. More houses, more blocks of flats, more motorways, more airplanes, more yachts, more trains on the 2005-2010 level, more and larger screens, more air conditioners (now with built-in Wi-Fi), more medical equipment that already existed in 2010, etc. Like for example, da Vinci Surgical System is available since the year 2000, but now there are more of them.

I don't feel much AI's positive effect on my daily life. Not yet. Just today, Google Search showed me completely irrelevant results, and Google Maps showed me a wrong way, making me waste time.

I do think that fixing health and longevity for us, humans, is the most pressing issue right now. People won't care much about the environment, when they know, they've got health problems on hand and they will be dead in 30 or 40 years anyway, so why bother. There are exceptions of course, but some people think that way. Most people would care much more, if they knew they are gonna be around for hundreds of years to live on this planet. This pertains to poor and rich people alike.

I am a perfectionist, I have obsessive-compulsive disorder, I am sensitive, irritable and I don't enjoy living much. That's why (positive) change is what I hope for. But I'm not sure about AI evolving so rapidly, that it becomes almost like some kind of a god. This seems too much like some science-fiction, instead of reality.

It would be really great, if everyone could choose their own body (including sex, gender) and also a (virtual) world, where they want to live. Instead of being forced to just accept things for what they are and obediently live until they die.

[Tadasuke]

Since being a kid, I've thought that significantly improving humans in all aspects, is by far the greatest priority and of highest importance for us all.

And then we hear all that talk about environment, "eco"-stuff, "organic"-stuff, "GMO-free", climate change (at first it was global cooling), sustainability, overpopulation, etc. and even "degrowth".

And at the same time, I see obesity and overweightness in lots of people (even kids!). It's really a huge problem. From 5 other people that sit with me in a train travelling between cities at the moment, 2 of them are obese and 1 is even eating now.

I personally walk, ride a bicycle and travel by train. I don't have a car. Keeping slim is very important for me. I don't have a huge appetite.

Wasting resources for no good reason is dumb. Playing computer games on a 10-25 watt laptop APU like the eight core (2 tflops iGPU) Ryzen 7 5800U is not very wasteful or damaging/taxing to the environment. I consider it being efficient and smart.

I do see improvements around, but they aren't huge or quickly happening. At least that's my opinion. I'm still optimistic overall. I do think that solutions for our problems will be found, probably during this century.

[wjfox]

climate change (at first it was global cooling)

No it wasn't.