Well ok yeah less sweet cheesecakes are alright

I think it’s better just to make and eat desserts less frequently than try to mess with the sugar ratios, especially with baking. Like if you want something healthy maybe make a fruit tart instead of something that involves something like Nutella or cake icing where it’s supposed to be overwhelmingly sweet.

I close bathroom doors, mainly to keep in the habit of doing it

Well sort of. Is it really yours if you can’t be secure in your person or belongings? Being homeless wouldn’t be so bad if you had a magically powered hiding space that can be accessed from anywhere that no one else can get to if you don’t want them to.

wdym?

It doesn’t read like AI slop. This is a well structured essay that has a moderately complex point and efficiently explains and gives specific evidence for that point with citations. It even has a (highlighted for emphasis, near the beginning) note explaining to what extent AI was used:

This article is written by me and spell checked with AI. Many of the images are generated by AI and are mostly to break up the wall of text.

The images mostly actually do add to it by illustrating the concepts and being relevant. I’d only really criticize the first (fiber internet infrastructure vs water supply infrastructure) one for being a little lazy in having a duplicate text bubble, and the choice to format with text bubbles with arrows when the arrows don’t actually point to anything and it would have been better as bullet points or something.

Living space. Imagine being able to instantiate unlimited pocket dimension instances and invite people to live there for free, would be really cool.

Maybe there’s an argument to be made there, but to me the privacy issues with all of the source material being sent to the servers of some AI company, and that company having the ability to put their thumb on the output in addition to the risk of the data being misused or leaked, are so much more of a thing to worry about. Those issues exist independently of how doctors use these tools and what risks those particular uses may have, which honestly I know nothing about, definitely not enough to argue that it is ok, it just isn’t something I would personally stress over as much as the other stuff.

I would only be ok with an AI note taking app if the model is running on hardware the doctor physically has in their office because otherwise any privacy assurances don’t mean that much.

Regardless of political labels and what makes them accurate, you’re right about war being bad

You’re mostly right that it’s not about child safety, but in that case why are you asking for suggestions about how to do it? What goals should age verification have if child safety is not accepted as a goal?

Parental control already exists, but seemingly valid criticisms are that it is not a default, has limited effectiveness, and is not easy enough to use. The important detail here is that there are not widely accepted standards for it to interface with online platforms, which are now being pressured to develop privacy invasive child protection schemes they implement independently. What I’m suggesting is that instead of that, letting them rely on “verification” of whether a user is on a restricted device would do mostly the same thing in terms of benefits and be less harmful, if more work is put into building a standard for that and making it an easy to use default.

IMO the issue is way deeper than the method of age verification because you cannot automate child safety (from what I’ve read Roblox and Youtube Kids are notable failures here), and tech platforms are going to pick between some half-assed attempt at such automation and entirely banning minors, at which point they find a way to bypass it or go somewhere else on the internet that is also unsafe for children. It’s all about deferring blame to someone else, not creating a society where people are making sure the kids are ok, and cannot possibly address the actual problem.

But if the idea is that people are too stupid to understand this and it’s necessary to come up with the least bad form of plausibly functional age verification to placate them, maybe the best bet would be something like those self-attesting OS verification laws but modified to be less shitty. Something like a more voluntary system where when you buy a device, there’s a prominent option to get a version of it that is for kids and has parental control software preinstalled as bloatware. This could (optionally!) broadcast a flag (only to preapproved apps and websites!) that lets the service block the user from seeing or interacting with certain stuff, and otherwise do parental control things. It could at least somewhat work since kids don’t have the ability to buy their own hardware. It could be open source and collectively developed and funded as a set of common standards that experts have thought about and agreed on.

It wouldn’t solve the biggest issues, but at least it might make it a little simpler for parents who are overwhelmed and need a simpler solution for handling the problem of the raw internet.

I think it would be pretty cool if this was used on leaked proprietary source codes

Yes, there is empirical evidence that giving people money directly is effective, just denying it doesn’t refute that: https://ubiadvocates.org/9-successful-ubi-pilot-programs-that-will-change-your-views-on-free-money/

As for why that is, poverty is partly about mindset and decision making, but all of that is strongly influenced by the effects of being in a financially precarious situation and being around others who are. Just knowing that you aren’t at risk of your life falling apart because of relatively minor problems makes an enormous difference and allows people practically and psychologically to think beyond the short term and not get taken advantage of financially.

UBI pilot programs give a lot of evidence to the contrary

I bet there are way more people who think their life is below average than there are below average lives

excuse

People don’t need an excuse to not want to talk to you, which incidentally is itself one of many “great” ways to learn to be quiet. As an example, I once had a roommate who was on some kind of medication for social anxiety, and he was one of the most irritating people I ever met. Failing to overcome his inhibitions was clearly not the main problem, those inhibitions were totally rational, and could have been a stopgap to avoid stepping on people’s toes despite not having any intuitive understanding or intrinsic interest in how to do that.

Probably the girl who is dashing around the room squeeling with joy every time a new person arrives and giving them a huge hug, the girl who is excitedly talking about her hobbies, job, or emotional revelations to a circle of smiling friends and acquaintances, the girl who is grabbing people and dragging them onto the dance floor to get the party started.

…

And maybe someone will say that this whole analysis is shallow and misguided, and that pursuing any of these things by opening their mouth and speaking more would be a betrayal of their deep inner self or something.

I think something that people who are casually socially successful often don’t understand is how important it is to that success to have the correct emotional reactions to other people, and how difficult it is and how wrong it feels to fake those. That is a betrayal of yourself. You should strongly resist approaching friendship as an instrumental goal or a puzzle to be solved. For this reason it isn’t well described as a skill, because the most important factors are not skills.

and you could very easily end up completely alone if you never developed the skill of meeting new people and developing relationships with them.

Solitude really isn’t the end of the world, it could be a lot worse, despite how challenging it is to face. It does no one any favors to think of this as a high stakes game with solitude as the punishment for losing, that’s not actually how it is.

If you want quiet people to talk to you, the main thing would be helping them understand that it is genuinely safe to do so. If you want quiet people to talk to other people, that’s probably none of your business.

Every time this happened to me, it was followed shortly after by sewage backup. It happened because the air in the pipes was forced upwards into the toilet. Might want to take precautions such as move bath mats out of the way, buy a shop vac, etc.

I think you are correct to identify it as a contradiction, and shouldn’t fight your feelings. For lots of people absence of durable connections inherently just hurts you and you can’t change that by pretending like it doesn’t. How you are treated is experienced as an opinion, and in a real sense it is one. Something that helps to cope with it though is realizing that the opinions about you that society expresses by being such an environment are disingenuous and deluded. So much about the way people think about and treat each other is wrong, both factually and in terms of whether it makes for a good way to live, but even if you can’t ignore it you can object to it through the way you treat yourself and others.

Maybe in some ways it’s better, but being pushed to spend 4+ hours a night on homework and encouraged to think it would be the end of the world if you get a bad grade on an exam really sucks.