Have you tried Discord? I’ve met a ton of people on Discord servers or in games that have a focus on Discord, and we talk at length on a regular basis, both in text and in voice. Hell, sometimes I’ll sit in a voice chat with them and talk about nothing in particular all day or literally just sleep in digital proximity.

Instagram or any social media with DMs is probably shit for chat because it’s literally not intended as a chat client. That’s a function that’s tacked on as an afterthought and usually pretty poorly.

Something like Discord, Element, or IRC is probably a way better bet. It’s the same as trying to hold a conversation over email or Livejournal in the late 90s or early 00s rather than using an AIM, ICQ, YIM, or MSN client. Or like, IRC or even Palace or just some small web-based Java chat. You’re just kind of doing it wrong, I think.

Thank goodness Boint Boint is here to explain.

I quit eating meat for a year once and it was pretty shit for my mental health. I do try to avoid the worst of factory farming as much as I can, though. Organic eggs (in my state regulations on organic eggs include a number of anti-cruelty measures), minimal chicken to reduce the death to meat quantity ratio, things like that. But also, I personally don’t feel as though the suffering inflicted on insect populations or rodent populations, or the damages of large scale farming, or the cruelty involved in transporting bees for pollenation are particularly okay either. I’m not really sure there’s such a thing as effective veganism in modern society unless you’re growing your own food at home, and I don’t have the energy, financial security, or access to land for that.

Nearly every product we consume leads to suffering and destruction. I don’t think being short of the point where you’re willing to radically change your lifestyle means I should deny that, though, even if all my spoons tend to be spent on shit like dragging myself out of bed and ensuring air quality that triggers my asthma and allergies as little as possible.

Humans are a mess. There’s a substantial cost in physical and psychological resources and energy to dwindling the impact of that mess, but there’s very little cost to at least acknowledging it and advocating for growing as a species.

I’m not vegan, but I find it absolutely wild that anyone thinks being kind of annoying sometimes comes anywhere near the level of moral or ethical bankruptcy involved in being complicit in the mass torture of animals for the sake of convenience. Like, okay, yeah, it’s not like we have the option of just deciding on behalf of powerful capitalists to just end factory farming. But deciding to at least try not to participate in it by changing your diet is at least something.

Don’t worry about being a “good vegan” if that means having to tiptoe around the fact that the rest of us fuel immense suffering both monetarily and through social normalization. You’re trying, and that’s great.

Scifi aging poorly is honestly a plus. I love sci-fi that contains incidental retro-futurism. Super high tech but everyone uses tape cassettes and coin operated everything? Sign me up. High tech but for some reason the style choices are all 20 years old?. Yes please.

You joined 11 days ago and your comment history includes you using slurs, saying you’re racist, and warning against “turning mental illness into an identity war like LGBTQ”. Now you’ve made a thread saying you “secretly” hope Trump gets elected so that “radicalized” people will suffer.

Somebody out here quacking like a duck.

I literally don’t set up my voicemail, and I typically don’t listen to recorded audio that gets messaged to me. Texting is functional and doesn’t leave me some anxiety-provoking message that I have to sit through and digest without saying anything. If a conversation needs to happen in voice, text to say that and see if it’s a good time.

Wild that people just ring a personal phone number unprompted in 2024 without that being an established routine.

That said, I also remember when it wasn’t at all weird to show up to someone’s house and knock on their door. Things have really changed.

Is this why Windows has started opening all my chromium apps in edge? They fuck up constantly and it’s really making me want to ditch windows.

If I understood Jack audio as well as I understand Voicemeeter, and if I could get my damn push to talk button working properly in Solaar I’d be done by now.

If anyone has a solution to the edge thing please help.

None.

Google results are garbage compared to 10 years ago, but they’re still miles ahead of ddg.

Okay, sure. I agree that this is an unfair advantage. But like, I’ve been using DuckDuckGo for a while and the best thing about it is the ability to easily search other search engines. Their own actual search engine isn’t exactly great.

Mostly using it makes me realize how much time Google saves me by already having my location and search history. I still don’t trust them and it isn’t what it was a few years ago, but it’s the actual quality of their search that’s keeping them on top.

Also like, why does clicking a thumbnail in video search not take me to the video? Dumb.

Technically, misrepresenting a copyright claim in a takedown notice is purgery. Within the notice itself you have to indicate that you are a representative of the copyright holder (or hold the copyright yourself), that you have a good faith belief under penalty of purgery that the use of the copyrighted material is not authorized by the copyright holder, its agents, or the law.

However, good luck finding someone who wants to spend the money to prosecute a legal document that can be easily contested or often simply ignored.

The other issue here is that many of these probably aren’t actually in bad faith, but have been submitted to both the actual file host and the site it’s linked on, or have otherwise misidentified the correct recipient, or have misidentified usage that would actually fall within fair use.

It’s often the reality that it makes more sense and gets better results to submit your DMCA notice to both those technically hosting the file and those who may be swayed into removing a post linking to it. Sometimes it’s more about rapport building with site owners in countries that don’t care about DMCA, or finding relevant local laws to wave at them. Often if they don’t follow through it’s literally just left at that, because chasing foreign legal entities is hard.

On the other end, it’s pretty easy to contest a false DMCA as long as the host doesn’t default to removal with no appeal, at which point they basically have to either spend the money on a court case in the US or drop it. That, of course, assumes that the host’s country cares about DMCA at all.

But essentially, people reporting infringement and it never going anywhere the majority of the time is DMCA working as intended. As a process it’s really more of a legal shield for hosts than it is an extremely effective method of enforcement. Often it’s tact and rapport that’s more important.

Thinking about disgnosis reminds me of some of my experiences on LSD.

Several times I had these relevatory moments where the ephemeral nature of the universe and its gradual slipping into entropy over time became intimately tangible. When this would happen, I’d usually find it terrifying. I’d feel like the world was falling apart around me, because it literally always is.

But in these moments, I was so focused on seeing that entropy in a way that felt new that it would take some time to realize it had always been this way. It seemed like the end of the world, but the reality was that it was just a normal day and I was examining aspects of my world that I didn’t normally and making connections. That’s all.

Some of those connections were silly psychedelic-fueled nonsense, with whatever meaning that might lie beneath lost in some cryptic and half-undestood internal symbolism, while others were perhaps a bit more useful, but none of them were new.

To me, though, these revelations felt apocalyptic in the moment, and of dire urgency. It felt as though the realization itself presented a dire threat, as if it itself was entropy, but in reality the only thing that had changed was my awareness.

Diagnosis, to me, is a similar beast. We’re attempting to peel back the falsely self-protective veil of ignorance about our own internal workings, and we see these things as though they were new and should somehow define us. The reality is, though, that we’re just learning how to classify and examine what was already there. We’re not describing something different from what we might have assumed otherwise, we’re looking at the guts of what’s made us who we are.

For some people making those connections may lead to things that can help improve their lives. For others it can be a way to divorce a person from themselves. We’re taking the huge variety of human experience and trying to pigeonhole it just based on people that share various sets of common characteristics that some of them have found difficult to cope with or to make work with the expectations of their social context. If we’re focused on mental health only in terms of disfunction, that’s all we’re going to see when we start classifying it.

Don’t Look Up

Honestly, my YouTube consumption went down when Hipyo refused to endorse trans rights and then the Linus stuff came out shortly after. The one two punch kind of made me start seeing nearly all YouTube personalities as unhealthily egotistical and probably kinda scummy. There are some creators I like, but at this point I just really don’t care what most of these people think anymore.

I’ll always tune in for Philosophytube or Contrapoints, though. I’m a sucker for the format when it’s done well. And I do enjoy Matt Colville and that D&D animated guy.

That’s making a lot of assumptions, any of which could be wrong.

For one, consciousness as an emergent property doesn’t necessitate a continuity of consciousness. Fire is an emergent property of the proper fuel and sufficient heat, but that doesn’t mean that every fire is the same fire.

Consciousness could be an emergent property while also being unable to be transferred from vessel to vessel by destroying the body.

Sleep isn’t death, it’s sleep. If someone destroys your body while you’re sleeping, that’s a distinctly different state. Just having a break in the narrative you’re currently paying attention to isn’t equivalent to death unless we make a bunch of further assumptions.

As far as believing people who ‘came through’ a teleporter, that’s a pretty terrible decision, as we’d expect that they have no idea that their predecessor is dead. That’s the whole point. We’re hand-waving an ambiguity that’s literally a matter of living or dying.

So if you had a biologically identical twin would you be ambivalent about losing one of the two of you?

If there’s an actual stream of the same matter, where did Riker 2 come from?

There’s a book called the Crystal Phoenix that explores this kind of stuff. People will get addicted to heroin for the weekend, then upload themselves to their crystal and let someone pay to murder them horribly while their memories go into a new clone. It’s really dark.

Tell that to the second Riker.