Emrie

On a positive note though, I've been really loving the developing. It's just been amazing, and I honestly can't wait for my new job that I'll be getting!

No I'll be scared I just need to accept the fear, feel it fully, ground myself, and just do it. I can walk around crowded places just fine, it's engaging with someone directly that scares me. I'll start with what you said, that seems doable. And fun fact I am "new here", I've moved to this city only recently and I really don't know it well at all. So it'll be super useful actually. I'm thankful I posted here and exposed myself, really forces me to do it, I'm pretty sure I'd have forgotten about the whole thing by the end of the week if I hadn't. So thank you for pushing me.

Hi, A while ago I saw this Ted talk: I thought that sounded cool, but I've never done it. Well I decided to take charge of my social life and I came to the conclusion that I'm just deeply afraid of people in general. So I'm gonna do this challenge. Every day starting tomorrow. I'll be reporting here every day what I did.

My primary score is 1.1, lower than 96.81% of people (aka higher than 3.19%). This makes sense, I'm deeply afraid of people and will do everything in my power to accommodate them. It's a curse really, you don't want a score this low. My secondary score is 2.1, lower than 70.74% of people (higher than 29.26%). Once again, I'd say that makes sense. Read up there, I'm afraid of people meaning I'm more likely to be antisocial. Also sidenote here folks. if your score is around 50% it's not average, it's median. Average would be taking the actual scores of people, summing them, and dividing the sum by the number of scores, and they wouldn't tell you yours is higher than X% of people, they would tell you like your score is Y% off the average. Your score being higher than 50% of people means there are as many people above and below you, literally the definition of the median. What would be useful would be having the standard deviation, that would give us an idea of how far off we are from most people.

I wonder if AI is the thing that's going to push us to socialism. If AI starts threatening enough people's livelihoods, there's no telling what people will start demanding.

So anyways I got scared and I didn't do it.

Thanks. I'm actually really looking forward to it. It'll be fun! And also scary. Tomorrow I'm thinking of, at the gym, going up to someone using a machine and asking them to go use another machine so I can use theirs.

Alright so here's what I'm going to do. I got some momentum because I got the job so let's build on that. Let's not lose the momentum and end up in a worse state than we already are. Here's the vision, yeah? Let's say ... two or three years from now. Oh, actually, I just turned 27, so I feel like my thirtieth birthday is a good time horizon. It gives me essentially three years. I'll be a software engineer. Like fully software engineer. I'll have mastered it pretty well, or at least I'll have mastered everything in my job pretty well, and I'll have the title and salary that come with that. And I think this will be great for me, but it will also be great for the people at my work, who will be happy to have someone do a great job. AND it will be great for the people in my immediate social circle, because I'll be happy and fulfilled with the work I do, so that'll bring a lot of positivity in the rest of my life. You can see it now too, tbh. Me saying these things and doing these things, I'm only doing them because I got the job. I'm not really worried about being good at my job. This is just the natural way of me working, it's just my mindset. I'm always trying to do the best I can at my work, always trying to learn and improve. Hell, part of the reason why I'm changing jobs is to learn more. Because I kinda stopped learning here at my current, kinda did everything there is to do. Now, second thing. And this is the big thing. I really really REAAALLY need to develop my social skills. I am just a broken shell of a human being when it comes to social skills right now. I am just terrible in social situations, I struggle to be fun and to add value to social situation, I struggle to relate to people, it's just a bad time. And actually last year I moved to a big new city specifically to improve my social skills. And I didn't!!!! It actually sent me into a depression. So here's what I'm gonna do. Firstly I need to heal my trauma. Therapy I think is a good idea. I'll have to look into options for therapy, but I think it would be really beneficial if I find a good one. I'll also have to spend some amount of time once a week to some sort of trauma healing activity by myself, outside of therapy. I'm thinking books to read, videos to watch, exercises to do, potentially also just straight up do psychedelics, that kind of stuff. And then secondly I gotta just get out there. Join clubs, go out to bars and night clubs, socialize with random people and just get good at all this through direct exposure. This brings me to what I'm doing right now, today. The 100 Days of Rejection challenge. You can look up the ted talk if you want. But basically the idea is simple: do something every day that will cause you to be rejected. This is really meant for me to get out of my comfort zone and to be rejected by other people. Right now my biggest obstacle to developing my social skills is that I'm just afraid of other people. Deeply afraid of them. And this 100 day challenge will be perfect to get me used to people judging me negatively. Also what's great about it is that I'll have to think about what I'll do to get rejected. Ideally I'd find requests that are too ridiculous that I'll know I'll get rejected, but also somewhat realistic enough that it seems plausible that I could ask. I will be reporting in a separate thread, every day. Just wanna keep things organized. And then beyond that I'll be doing the 1-hour podcast thing I talked about earlier.

Haven't been posting much in here lately. I guess we can do a little catchup thing. Oooh that reminds me. I saw this. Uhhh .. I think it was RSD Julien, I don't remember. Dude was like, here's what you do for self-esteem, confidence, charisma, just like social skills in general. Once a week, make a podcast about yourself. Just one hour, once a week, talk about yourself. It's really useful because it gets my mind used to collecting information, stories, anecdotes, just interesting stuff going on in my life, that I wouldn't otherwise. And then I can talk about these things with other people. Also forces me to talk for an hour, not run out of things to say. You know what I'm gonna go do that right now.

I scored 11, with vanity maxed out, then self-sufficiency at around half, and then decreasingly exhibitionism, superiority, entitlement, authority (each slightly lower than the last), with exploitativeness at 0. To be honest, I didn't like a lot of these questions. Like the second question on modesty, my answer was bad because I don't have a clear picture of myself regarding modesty. I really can't say if I can truthfully consider myself modest or not, it's too hard for me to self-assess on that. Or one of the last questions, asking if I want someone to write a biography vs I don't like people prying for any reason. Those are two wild extremes and my answer should be "neither of these". I'd say I'm an open book and happy to answer questions, people are very much allowed to pry with good reason, but I don't want someone writing a biography of me, that's crazy.

To be completely honest, it started out as just a third leg exercise to do but now I like it because I do a variation that allows me to go really deep on them and it works my glutes and hamstrings in a way that squats and deadlifts don't.

My leg days are Squats, Leg Press, and Deadlifts. In that order. It does everything I feel I need it to.

Dear lord I have done nothing these past three days it's insane. And when I say nothing, I really mean nothing. Like it's been BAD! Literally glued to my bed nothing. Almost glad to be back to work tomorrow so I can get out finally.

By "extremely attractive" do you mean what you would consider good looks? If, so the answer is no. It's all about how you carry yourself. If I carry myself well I can be attractive to people, and if I carry myself badly I'll be unattractive to them. I still have the same body and the same looks, though. Having good looks *might* help your confidence but I'd say work on that instead of looks.

By the way I thought people might want to hear this here. It seems they are going to adopt a subscription model and have setup a survey to ask people what they'd be willing to pay for it.

It's legal here in Switzerland. The only criticism people have of it is that the families of older people can put pressure to euthanize so they don't have to pay for the nursing home and whatnot. It's a somewhat weak criticism and most people like to have it.

Your public service announcement that Top/Bottom/Vers is not the same as Dom/Sub/Switch. A top is someone who gives pleasure, a bottom receives said pleasure, and verses can do both. A dom is someone who leads the situation, a sub follows the leader, and a switch can do both. It is possible to be a top and a sub at the same time. It is also possible to be a bottom and a dom at the same time. Learn the difference.

I broke it with a simple math problem: It's a language model that's designed to generate language, not do math. That's not to say that it is not amazing, and I don't really need it to do math in my particular use cases. But I've used it for coding, I've used it to help me in conversations I didn't know much about, I've used it to plan activities and offering gifts to people I didn't know too well. It's an amazing companion in my daily life and I really love it.

I was always weary of New Years' Resolutions, and I still am. But it's interesting because I'm like instilled with a sense of renewal right now. Like I want to change things in my life not because it's a new year's resolution, but because I just want to change them, out of intrinsic motivation. It's stuff I've always told myself I should be doing and not doing. But this time I actually really want to do and not do them. So yeah, I'm happy right now

Uhh what? This show teaches nothing about game. This is a teenage girl focused on solving a monster mystery and who is, despite her best efforts, forced into social situations she supposedly doesn't care about, although I guess she does end up caring? I'd argue they wrote her as aroace but couldn't dare have their protagonist be any kind of queer so had her involved with the coffee shop dude.

I'm sick. I fell sick a few days ago, it's been slowly improving. But too slowly, I still have a pretty strong headache, and I cough sometimes. Kinda sucks, I can't go to my new year's eve party tonight, my body just can't handle it.

I feel like I'm at a point in my life where I'm just soo broken as a human being, it's really bad. Like I .. I can't even talk to people anymore sometimes, because I'm just soooo deeply afraid of what I'll say and how they'll react. I see people living their normal life and I'm like ... I simply cannot be in such a situation in my life, I'm just not compatible, it would just not work. It makes me sad, like, I feel like I can't live life anymore.

Small question, OP. Will the AI, of its own volition, just write "more balanced and nuanced philosophical conclusions" on its own? Spoiler alert, NO. And you're never going to type in like "Help me understand the Liberal mind" and it's never going to spit out Leo's 3-hour video transcript. EVER. It still needs humans to use it and it needs Trained Professionals, people who actually know what they're doing, to use it. And it always will. I'd even argue that AI art isn't even going to just take over artists jobs. Artists simply need to leverage its power and incorporate it in their workflow. And they already do, have for years, I personally know 3D artists who've been using it for years.

I don't know how I feel about this comment my mom made. I went with my family for the past three days for Christmas and there was one thing that... yeah it's a mess. So basically we were talking about random people and stuff and one person came up. This person cut all contact with their family because their family were really toxic to them so they made what I believe to be the right decision. My sister, jokingly, said "No one is safe", implying any of us would also cut our parents out of our lives if need be. It was a joke, of course, we would never, and I think everyone got that, it didn't get a negative reaction at all. Though my mom did say this one thing... "Why? Are you a lesbian?" *sigh* I really really reaaaally don't get it. Is my mom insinuating that she would disown her daughter if she were a lesbian? Is my mom insinuating that her daughter would cut her parents from her life if she were a lesbian? WHY THE FIXATING ON THE LESBIANISM? What's lesbianism gotta do with any of that? Where is it written that healthy family relationships and sexual orientation are related in any way? I really wish I could talk to my mom. Understand her perspective a little more. But it's impossible. Firstly because it's been a few days and I'm pretty sure my mom already forgot but also because it'd definitely egg her on to the fact I'm not necessarily straight myself. --- I've been thinking about coming out to my family. If my instinct is correct, my family would disown me if I came out as bi. This would actually be a good thing, I'd actually be happy with that. My family has caused a lot trauma to me and we still don't have a great relationship. I would say we have a relationship. "My family are definitely people in my life", I'm completely apathetic to them now. But the worst possible (and honestly most likely) outcome, is they don't believe me. They'd think, well you never had a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone so how would you know! Of course they don't know shit about my life, I may have chosen to keep my relationships to myself. Maybe because, OH I DON'T KNOW, I'M NOT STRAIGHT?! But beyond this, it's such bull, like people know who they're attracted to before having sex! Fundamentally they would deny the bisexuality because they disapprove of it (fun fact my family has never approved of anything I ever do in my entire life, this is true). And they WOULD disown me if they actually accepted the bisexuality, but they also don't want to admit the homophobia and the biphobia, and they don't want to cut me out of their life, so they get it both ways. They don't accept me for who I am and still keep me in their toxic cesspool of hate and bigotry. And I give up. Because that's all they've ever taught me to do. Give up. Let other people have their way.

In response to the latest blog post, I would like to further this discussion. I consider myself a communist, I would like to move beyond capitalism and I really don't see anything other than socialism and then communism as the next steps. I am of course open for suggestions and I reached this point actually quite slowly and carefully. There are some things I don't fully understand in the Killing Sparrows blog post. Please explain here. What exactly are the reasons it exists? Why does it work so well? The way that I see it, capitalism causes some serious problems and the only way to solve them is to get rid of it completely. Namely: colonialism (including its arguably worse current form: neo-colonialism), the accumulation of wealth, and therefore power, the corruption of government, wage slavery (the biggest one here, way too many people literally fearing for their lives enslaved to work), and climate catastrophe. That last one I'll admit is somewhat debatable, there are solutions, but the concept of infinite economic growth at all costs really annoys me. And that's not even mentioning world hunger and homelessness despite having plenty enough food and housing available to everyone. My understanding is that capitalism is peak stage orange and it empowered the bourgeoisie during feudal times and we built this society that we're living in with these great promises in mind, where anybody, regardless of "their blood", could theoretically build a great life for themselves with entrepreneurship. Is this it? Is there something else? And if we're going back to empirical data, saying that all the communist societies failed, therefore communism doesn't work. I'd actually challenge this quite a bit. The US and a lot of the European powers did everything in their power to attack communist countries on all fronts. Covertly via the CIA funding and helping anti-communist groups, overtly via just direct wars like Vietnam. The USSR essentially went bankrupt because they had to spend a ridiculous amount of money on their army to keep up with the US. But the USSR achieved a lot of successes: 1) Abolished illiteracy 2) Abolished homelessness 3) Abolished unemployment 4) Abolished hunger 5) Literally became one of the two biggest superpowers in the world And they did all this coming out of feudalism much later than everyone else. They've actually done studies where they compared countries that were at approximately the same level of development, one country would adopt socialism, the other capitalism. And almost all socialist countries had better quality of life indicators: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/. Variables included indicators of health, health services, demographic conditions, and nutrition (infant mortality rate, child death rate, life expectancy, crude death rate, crude birth rate, population per physician, population per nursing person, and daily per capita calorie supply); measures of education (adult literacy rate, enrollment in secondary education, and enrollment in higher education). So conclusion of this big ramble: My point of view is that Karl Marx's scientific analysis is really good. This is the scientific, disconnected from reality, non-empiric, theory that you are right to point out may or may not work in practice. However, taking the neo-liberal theory is just as bad. A theory with perfect economic agents acting in perfect self-interest with all the information available with the law of supply and demand working perfectly and with perfect competition that maximizes the potential of society, I find quite absurd. And my opinion is that we don't really have good empirical data for socialism and capitalism because capitalism was allowed to build itself and flourish without interference from anyone else. Once we beat feudalism, capitalism could grow and thrive without anyone sabotaging it. But when we tried socialism, the capitalists did everything in their power to prevent it from succeeding. And even with that I would say it succeeded plenty, see above. So I would like to try socialism without interference. Capitalism worked (emphasis on past tense), but now we're seeing its shortcomings. And unfortunately it might spell the end of humanity (I already know people are gonna call fearmongering and we'll just solve it via technology, ugh.....). Did previous communist societies make mistakes? Sure, absolutely. The huge incarceration rates, silencing any semblance of capitalist sentiment within its borders, see Leo's dad having to leave the USSR to build his own business, and I'm sure a lot of others. But you know what's great is that we can try again and maybe learn from our mistakes, not make them again. The science works, now let's apply it properly.