Basman

AI was already being used for gooning purposes to a significant degree. This is just opening the floodgates more. Not sure if that is necessarily a sign of desperation.

How did China make you miss democracy exactly?

Page count: 154 Either a self-help book with a holocaust account attached or a holocaust account with a self-help angle depending on who you ask. That is not to say that either aspects are somehow diametrically opposed, quite the opposite. The holocaust account is an essential vehicle to frame the concept of logotherapy, or in laymen terms, having a strong purpose to deal with life's hardships. Such a concept would very easily end up as mental masturbation if not grounded in lived suffering. And there are few experiences as dehumanizing and miserable as the holocaust for its victims. I would go so far and posit that a book like this wouldn't really work if its author didn't live through and survive something like the holocaust. At least it wouldn't have the same impact. A concept like logotherapy needs to be "hard earned" for it to have any emotional resonance, as brutal as that may sound. About 2/3 of the book is dedicated to accounting his experience as a prisoner of Auschwitz and several other camps. While the book is clearly divided chapter-wise between the account of prison life and explaining logotherapy as a concept, the content itself interplays organically. The most illustrative passages of logotherapy are arguably during the holocaust account, where the author reflects on his spiritual attainment during the ordeal and what it meant. The logotherapy section contrasts in how much more informational and jargony it is as opposed to the more storytelling and reflective prose of the holocaust account. The author is clearly intelligent and educated and you get a sense that he is in his element when he discusses psychology especially. Originally, the author intended for the book to be anonymous because he didn't want the sensationalism of the holocaust to overshadow the important concept of logotherapy (he was eventually convinced to publish as himself by a friend). It illustrates how the holocaust account is more or less meant as a reflection as opposed to a sensationalist piece, though some sensationalism is unavoidable due to the cultural significance of the holocaust. The account doesn't delve deeper into the experience more than the essentials. Most of the time is spent reflecting on how this environment changes a man and forces them to cope with this brutal reality. How prisoners became emotionally numb, retreated into themselves for comfort or how the harsh environment exposes a person's morality. Certain people became viciously sadistic when in position of power over someone else, be it SS guards or kopas, who where themselves prisoners, while others where fair people. There is one excerpt of an SS captain who spent his own money buying medicine for the prisoners and was so well liked that the prisoners hid him during the liberation from the American soldiers. The experience culminates for the author down to what he would essentially coin as logotherapy by the time of the book's publication. My favorite passage of this book, which reflects the essence of its core concept of logotherapy: It should be noted that the author stresses multiple times the distinction between unavoidable and unnecessary suffering and that you should do your best to avoid unnecessary suffering. Just in case of any misunderstandings. 8/10

LLMs can become your own personal echochamber if you are not careful. Being highly identified with your stream of consciousness is correlative with insanity in my opinion, which LLMs will gladly help facilitate without you realizing. You want to use this technology responsibly to avoid the danger of becoming mentally ungrounded.

It works just fine for Australia. You can just vote blank if you don't want to vote for anyone. It should really be mandatory in every democratic society because you can't have a functioning democracy if people aren't voting. A cool one third of the population in America don't even bother voting at all. Parties are incentivized to cater to tribalism, as they are the only one who cares. You get a discourse dominated by extremes. Of course Americans are going to dislike the idea of mandatory anything that impedes with their freedom to be lazy and irresponsible.

Voters are responsible for needing politics to be a reality drama for them to even care. I think if voting was mandatory it would help make politics less tribalistic.

Taste like what you think dirt taste like. And you have to chew them thoroughly. Truffles are good for contemplation in my experience. Makes you hyper present and your thoughts accelerate in a way that they seemingly implode into themselves. On higher doses you might see patterns and feel like your steering your body like your a marionette pulling its own strings. I look forward to using truffles for personal development soon myself. They won't undo your autism I'm afraid.

Those things actually fit neatly into design, which you mentioned earlier you where interested in. But design isn't something that requires accreditation. How long into your CS degree are you? If you are close to finishing, it pragmatically makes more sense to just finish and then pivot towards design. Design you can learn autodictatically. CS will help you understand the coding as you bridge it with aesthetic design, so you don't become an airhead designer. You'll have more hard skills to implement your ideas with too.

Leftists may feel strongly about their ideals but many of their ideas tend to not be organically derived, but derived via osmosis and group think. Which is even more true for conservatives. Coming off as authentic doesn't mean your not being influenced by one's relative zeitgeist in an unconscious fashion. Or another way of phrasing, their diagnosis may be derived organically, but their solutions tend to be less original because politics is hard and very complicated and they may not be interested in questioning their beliefs. Centrists on the other hand tend to be more pragmatic and think in terms of cold hard facts.

They look like raiders from Fallout.

It's much more fun and mentally challenging to go dipping in a lake than cold showers. Jumping into a lake with friends can be a load of fun. I prefer exercise for creating a good rush myself, but that can get a little routine at times.

This is blatantly false. Access to porn correlates with a measurable decrease in sex crime.

Such a system is fundamentally capitalist and not the other way around, which is the point.

@Molaric What are your strengths?

Genuinely. I'm exhausted by the discourse surrounding Russia's actions. It's baffling the positions people hold. I'm not sure if they are genuinely pro Russia or just really anti-western.

I find AI effective at phrasing things in a succinct way. That is so far it's most useful aspect to me. I give it an idea and it'll phrase it much better. You can't really trust it to be truthful, so that's what ends up being it's prime use in my opinion. It's also pretty good for funnies.

Why? AI needs you and other people's content to work. It can't make original or high quality work.

What are your thoughts on truffles? I've taken truffles a couple of times, but I was too immature at the time to really use them to their true potential at the time. I don't experience with a breath of different psychedelics, but truffles feel like a simple psychedelic that enhances your ability to contemplate deeply with little faff.

Isn't there a danger of people hurting themselves or getting into legal trouble when you put that info out there like that? People are dumb.

Can you get hearing aids?

-as opposed to being still by default? It also seems like the mind wanders more, daydreams more, when physically fatigued, which is strange because even though you have less energy, the mind becomes busier, but in a more thoughtless and automatic manner. When you are tired, you don't want to be present. You want to watch slop on TV and do nothing instead of literally doing nothing and taking in the space. I guess a better question would be, why is the mind so attached to "noise"? I wonder how human minds compare to animal minds in this regard. Animal minds seem to be less busy, less conceptual and more present compared to us, but it is hard to tell, right? Animals having less complex minds counter-intuitively simplifies happiness for them, assuming their needs are met.

You shouldn't just believe people, especially if they make huge claims like that. I think it is interesting, but I'm not going to believe them outright. Especially since Sadghuru seems to treat this notions as a given.

I'm not as optimistic. It is in general extremely hard to replicate natural processes. Artificial cell production requires expensive machinery and skilled experts to work whereas a cow just needs a patch of grass and doesn't care if it gets dirty. Dumb cows effortlessly convert grassland into meat.

Religion is a social game. You can't practice spirituality effectively while being locked into an ideology that presupposes that it has all the answer, especially when that religion is rooted in the middle-ages. Like, not eating pork makes no sense in the modern age. It's fine to play that game I think. It is a form of community. I've myself gone to church a couple of times for the experience. Just don't get lost in the sauce. Though I don't think you really need it. Personally, it is impossible for me to subscribe to any one religion as "the truth". I'm too aware of how religion is a product of collective imagination. There might be aspects of that imagination that are rooted in something wise and spiritual, but those ideas are treated as dogma, making them effectively noise. Which is why you have to think for yourself. Most people are religious primarily because they where raised as such. They programmed/brainwashed depending on how you want to interpret that. That is huge when you consider the epistemic quality of religion. Which also explains why religion is intertwined with culture. Islam is culturally Arabic and vice versa, just like western culture is Christian and India Hindu. You cannot subscribe to religion without also subscribing to culture, which is to a large extent unavoidable. Western culture is rooted in christian beliefs and values. Though those beliefs and values have been watered down and lost their religious edge over time, those values where originally christian, like seeing nudity as shameful.

What are your goals? Why are you studying CS?