LastThursday

You've got to love that tasty non-dual cheese. I slept, I breathed heavily into a brown paper bag. And, I've still got my wonky humour at least, I didn't lose that. What will happen, will happen organically and without too much forcing (keep breathing). Whether I chose to stay on this forum or not is irrelevant to the great scheme of things. It will stop when it stops. All of life is ephemeral and grabbing on to things too tightly is a recipe for suffering. Constantly having to letting go of potential and people is also a recipe for suffering. Being alive is both - suck it up Guillermo. Carry on...

Ever since Saturday I've been feeling kind of tired. I went out Saturday with friends about an hour and half away to meet at a country pub, we ate, drank, went for walk - all very pleasant. How many of those of you outside the UK get to stroll by someone's house in a little village that was built in 1637 and talk to the owner about its history? We're spoilt so many ways in this country. But come Sunday I felt sleepy the whole day. And that tiredness hasn't left me, I want to return to my sprightly self. That phrase has been niggling away at me. I have a love hate relationship with this forum. Yes, part of it is to do with the idiocy of the way the forum is, the people in it, but also that the forum is insignificant in the same way that a cafe down the road is insignificant - and yet I seem to keep returning to it. It gets under my skin that I choose to get embroiled in its stupidity, I AM above it, both in maturity and common sense. It is not the place for me and I get no substance from it any more. I suspect I'm probably one of the oldest guys here too - I really do have a different perspective from everyone here. The main thrust of why I do so is that I know that I need to keep introspecting, something within me compels me to do it. It is a way of forcing my hand. But when I do so it sucks the little life I do have out of me. It's like holding up a mirror and seeing my reality for what it is and I don't like it. I don't like it because I have no answer for how to change the bad bits. At 53 years I've run out of steam, I've done so many things in my life that the excitement and freshness got drained out me. I remember that optimistic, excitable, energetic and flirtatious youth I was. I was immature yes, but I was also more vibrant and full of life. Earlier this week, I was minding my own business, but found myself idly curious about a police-woman walking on the other side of the street. She was older, tanned and chiselled in her features, very serious. But we made eye contact and for an instant I could see her soften, nearly smile, before she realised what was happening, and carried on looking away seriously again. THAT. That is the real me. That I miss. I used to flirt with anyone who'd care to pay attention to me. I wasn't trying to pull - although sometimes I was - more like I was saying "this is me, let's play". A friend of mine calls me "The Wolf" and for good reason, he remembers who I was before. Maybe I was a wolf, I like to roam the outdoors, I like the chase! I read the signs of things that go on around me, my tiredness is just that, both a literal and figurative one. It would be nice to sleep and start dreaming a different dream from this one. Don't worry I'm not suicidal, I've been through all that and out of the other side. No, there is no easy escape, instead I must go through it. Other people depend on my presence, my dad, my sister, my nephews and nieces, my friends; and I decided a long time ago that I couldn't do it to them. In fact I couldn't bear it going wrong either, I don't need that hell. I find it useful to get out my thoughts in this journal. I could just as well make a private one for my eyes only. But I always was a bit of an exhibitionist by nature, it all fits together with those other things I mentioned above. I really don't care if no one responds to what I write, it's enough that others see it. My energy, the good, the bad, and the ugly is held up for scrutiny, and disseminated for others to make what they will of it. It's not all bad. The large tract of introspection and self-scrutiny I've gone through has sharpened my wits, made me see far more clearly, and made me a lot wiser than I once was, even in the short time I've pissed around on this forum. I'm less of a try-hard than I used to be, I do actually flow in life and my interactions with people day-to-day, something that I've always sought after, mostly overcoming the autistic hurdles I was born with. In fact I just don't care if I'm awkward, absent-minded, or that my "mask" drops at times. Social interaction for me - as much as I've always loved it - has always been hard work. Only now at 53 can I say that I've nearly cracked it FFS. I need more. Yet another phase in my life. I want it to start now. But I'm a bumbling idiot who doesn't know what the fuck they're doing. I feel like I've hibernated for long enough now, and I'm desperate to stretch and wake up. I don't know what that looks like, and perhaps it isn't going to be handed to me on a platter either. But I know one thing, I need to have a word with that younger me, mug him, and steal back that flirtatious, playful energy I once had. Cheers to that!

Thanks @Yimpa I will repeat the mantra regularly.

In no particular order the highlights are: Sweet, innocent, gut wrenching, Protracted loveless friendship, Potential wife, asymmetric, shrug, Slow motion car crash, Self absorbed, brief, immature. I have to laugh. I always wondered why I stayed single...

Thanks. You're most welcome.

Nuance man. Sigh. Women are not machines that are to be dissected and inspected like a clockwork. This is the wrong framing for what you want to achieve, you just don't realise yet. It's more of an improvisation, a dance, a ritual, a live exchange, a seduction. You're presented with a living breathing human being and you have to somehow enmesh yourself with that person. How do you do that? By paying attention to everything that's being presented to you in the moment and deciding in the moment what to do with all that. Sure, it helps to have a few rules of thumb, but that barely accounts for anything. Every single person gives you something different, you can't generalise it's not that easy.

There are no generalisations to be had, each woman is different. You're better off understanding what men are, since masculinity in all it's ways is what the majority of women find attractive. Since you're a man you're already at an advantage in that department, gotta flow with that more.

Noooo dont' break my fourth wall. Oh ok. I'm saying that women may have one or all or none of those attractive attributes, and that's it's ok. Obviously, my list is gross simplification for effect.

Each to their own lol.

Women's sometime beauty, women's sometime inscrutableness, women's sometime nuturingness, women's sometime defiance, women's softness, women's hardness. Call me an old romantic. Ha!

Damn you Zan Perrion. You may wear a costume, but I can sip coffee.

For sure, but it's not universal yet.

He even has it in bold. I don't drink caffeine, because I suspect my body doesn't break it down well, it has a huge half life in my case, and my health is probably better off without it. Pedant mode on - he misunderstands "half life" slightly, which is the constant of the rate of decay of an exponential curve, i.e. the time it takes for half the substance to be catalysed, and in theory it never quite reaches zero - pedant mode off.

Capitalism will take the cheapest path. AI is not cheap to run and maintain and those costs will eventually trickle down to the users of AI, at the moment it is probably underpriced to get people hooked on it. If AI ends up costing more than a human to employ for the same level of productivity then humans will win over AI. Will the AI cost problem be solved? Only by ditching LLMs, which are the core of coding AIs at the moment. But I don't think anyone really has new ideas about what would be cheaper and as powerful as LLMs to run. The other side of the coin is that if you're going to rely on AI for all commercial coding practices, then it really has to be rock solid especially when it comes to the security side of things. I reckon you'll always need human experts in the loop to ensure you're getting good software out - those jobs won't disappear. The most likely scenario is that there will still be coders, but they will be more like "prompt engineers" where the AI does all the grunt work, and the coders have all the ideas. This is neither good nor bad, just different. But, there will still be jobs.

My feeling on it is that magic/k is not what most people want it to be. Literally immediately manifesting solid objects is not going to happen, or 1 million of your currency in your bank account. It's more about shifting probabilities and becoming more attuned to your reality. It's all about coherence. Reality seems to have a strong preference for things making sense and hanging together - so magic has to work within the bounds of that restriction. But if you give up the idea that reality is completely deterministic, then you open up the possibility that you can "guide" or "bend" the outcomes of reality while maintaining coherence. When things go out of your conscious awareness, where do they go? They kind of slip into an amorphous soup of probability, at that point things can become a little looser and that's where reality can bend. And when they slip back into conscious awareness they are changed, but still coherent. Magic has to work on the things you're not currently aware of, because that's when they're most pliable. We're also constantly getting information about things outside of normal conscious awareness (such as synchronicities and so on), but you can become more attuned to them and learn to understand that information. There's a kind of "leakiness" to reality's goings on, see it like a distribution, with the normal stuff being extremely common, but the more whacky stuff still possible just not very common. It's also possible to shift the probabilities so that the whacky stuff happens a little bit more. What makes magic seemingly so random is that coherence must be kept at all times, and so the whacky stuff that happens must fit into that frame.