You know, there’s this little shared but ever so prevalent fact about life: Not many know what they are doing. If anyone. You adapt and you try your best and things happen one way or another. You don’t have that much overall agency or the needed level of deeper understanding or foresight to control most things. You control what you can, endlessly despair over the things you can’t and still ever try and fail to control them, and at the end of the day you try your best to make it all make sense.

Some might even convince themselves that they are on top of it all. There are very few that genuinely are. Most of us don’t know what the hell we are doing and somehow stay afloat. Some better than others. I for one struggle.

I’m approaching middle age and genuinely have zero idea what is going on or what to do with my life.

Somehow things still work out mostly. Life is good. Good enough, that is.

All to say: try not to worry about this too much. You will just waste effort and energy trying to grasp on something even the best of us genuinely struggle with and only select few ever grasp. And those are mostly nepobabies. And the fact they grasp it, is mostly the endless opportunities they get to fail and try again with the safety net and resources they just have at hand.

Unless you have that kind of resources, just try your best to balance your passions, things that bring joy, and then time spent making some board member somewhere a fuck ton of money while getting scraps yourself. You need those scraps, the system is mostly shit, but the happiness is in understanding and accepting the chaos of it all. Not trying too much. You’ll just disappoint yourself.

Don’t expect to know what you want to do as in with your life. Try your best to focus and find joy in the things you know you want to do, as in individual actions. Then tolerate the time and energy you have to spend for someone else to get wealthy in order to sustain those little joys.

Eventually you’ll end up in a place that feels like home and where you have some clarity and purpose. Until then, you’ll think you’ve found them, you’ll fail, you’ll stumble and pick yourself up again, and that’s life.

The best you can do is just go with the flow and trust in what you know: yourself. Find happinesses, however small, and embrace them. Accept the rest for what it is. Mostly necessities to stay afloat to get with the small joys you know and want.

That’s the most any of us can do, unless we are born with a very rare set of skills, quirks or temperaments, or a golden spoon up our as. Seeing as the vast majority of us aren’t, you likely aren’t either. So don’t try to act like you do. You’ll just get depressed, suffer to no end, trying to fit a mold you were never going to fit.

I honestly came here to say the same: It really isn’t any less selfish to require or demand someone to suffer and remain, just because you want them to.

However it’s still vastly more complex than that. From an utilitarian perspective there would usually be many individual povs like that one, where there are great many people wanting you to remain, while you alone want to cease being. And subsequently the harm caused by the act alone would often have wide impact on several individuals, whereas you remaining would be only one person suffering.

But this isn’t me saying suicide is selfish or shouldn’t be done. This is just me trying to make sense of it as someone who’s struggled with these weighings and dilemmas recurringly in my life when I’ve been at a point where I couldn’t continue, but was kind of forced to. Not by anything concrete, but these exact consequences and this entire struggle to try and work out a way to see it through with clean conscience.

I never could.

But I do know this: Both sides are selfish. And that’s only natural. I don’t think being selfish is necessarily a bad thing. Often it is not. It’s all just a balance in a chaotic, complex world, that can’t ever be estimated well enough to gain any amount of confidence in the things you do. It’s all just too chaotic, too dynamic, too multi-layered and tangled together, to make sense of. All you can know or estimate with any level of certainty, is your own self, and what others present of theirs at any given time. And the time is continuously changing, marching on, and the presentations remain as fluid as the life itself.

You can’t really not be selfish. That’s all you have, if you need to ground yourself in some certainty.

To be fair, it’s too recent for us to have any robust data and analysis over it, but anecdotal and loosely backed claims do suggest a moderately reduced activity overall on contrarian accounts on popular platforms. The minority populists, depending on the country whether they are far right or some left wing niche.

I don’t believe the actual computational shape of a yandex data center would be right or efficient for bot farms, but i do think any external bot farms would use yandex’s indices and the currently trending hype word, “crawlers”, and all that, actual data center shaped work and resource, to carry out their work. The impact, if it’s real and not just imagined which is also entirely possible, would be the lack of resources for the bot farms to find the content to interact with and be efficient with the opinion shaping. That wouldn’t outright stop their work, just make it less efficient and convenient, which would make it slower and more laborious, which, if the anecdotes and such are right, would indeed show up as slightly decreased activity, not a full stop for the activity.

But right now it all depends on the anecdotes or the still fresh and dubious data claims, so it might just be there’s no real impact anywhere. But if there was an impact indeed, this would explain it. Nobody runs any sort of content mills manually, it’s all automated over something. Yandex indices seem entirely plausible as one part of that, and perhaps rented shared computational capacity to some extent too. And whatever else they might be using.

To be fair, I feel like either way it’s all blown out of proportions. The impact is definitely real, there’s real loss of compute and capacity, but I can’t see the bot farms and content mills being a primary symptom or anywhere close. Smells like populist and opportunistic media just doing their thing under capitalism and also the very same concept of opinion shaping on the “western” side of the conflict to me.

“Valo lisää valoa”

Roughly translates to “light brings more light”.

Equally fundamental to my being as “hymy tarttuu”, which is the corny cousin with narrower scope. “Smile is contagious” translated roughly.

Yeah, getting to be nice and spreading smiles and just happiness around is all anyone can hope for.

You win some and lose some. Careerwise or monetarily it’s tougher but not inherently. Just capitalism. And I’d rather lose there and win in warmness and having nice and amazing people around

As corny as it sounds, this is what I also emphasize. If you allow yourself to be evil, no matter how valid the reasoning for it, you are actively exercising the habit of being evil in general, no matter if it feels like it or not. Practice makes perfect, as they say. In good and bad.

Yeah it’s entirely valid, it’s intended to be a tough problem with different answers depending on who answers. I was just trying to elaborate on the other side of it since initially you seemed to imply there’s a “correct” answer which is yours, so I just gave my view on it with similar confidence to illustrate there isn’t one. All sides of it can be morally justified and since there isn’t any good choices there at all, by design, it’s kind of easy to lose sight of that.

And yeah, essentially the dilemmas are of the same form, but I believe it’s meaningful whether one is “supposed” to be there making the choices vs. someone from outside the situation that isn’t normally expected to be making the choice. If the conductor that drives the train chooses not to pull the lever, it’s different from a bystander choosing not to. The latter can more easily justify not participating, the former simply can’t, because it’s their very job to make that choice, and the levers being a part of the framework within which they work day to day, should make inaction much more significant and unseemly. Same for the doctor making the choices, but on top of that, there are the extra layers of having made the doctor’s oath, which a bystander wouldn’t have made, and also the fact that a bystander can’t be expected to know the implications and details and applicability of “cutting to pieces” someone like mechanical spare parts, which I assume isn’t as easy as that and a doctor would know to calculate that into it, unlike a civilian.

But I digress. Just wanted to illustrate that the choice not to act is not “correct” since by design there can not be a correct answer. But correct for you is valid. It seemed weird to talk about it as if it was objective so I got a bit sidetracked to throw my several handfuls of cents in.

The amount of people on the other track is meaningful, true, but the point I made stands just as well with 5 people instead of 5 million. Latter just highlights the dissonance we all battle with within ourselves when sweating the dilemma. But it’s the same hyperbole the hospital analogy does, so in reality it’s the same in taking the original problem and stretching it out to absurd proportions to make the point.

Even so, the doctor dilemma you present is a worthwhile one to get anxious about in its own right anyway, and I’m not saying it’s not. Just different. If the question was not that you are the doctor, but a person with a lever, pulling of which would send a nurse to take the otherwise healthy man to be cut up for parts to save the 5 others, then we’d be in the same realm. The trolley analogue of your dilemma would be that you are the conductor, perhaps, and as the conductor may choose to change tracks or not. Being an active party already in play is different than being a bystander forced in the situation without connection other than the action, or lack of one, to take.

It’s your choice how you’d do it, but at the end of the day, you doomed the 5 million to die, where simply pulling the lever, which was in front of you, a small convenient act, could have saved them.

It’s intentionally tough a problem that has no real correct answers. Is your conscience, your personal ethical purity, worth 5 million other full human lives? Perhaps. But not many others see it that way.

Technically you get to keep your hands clean, say you didn’t kill anyone, but really, you chose not to save 5 million people for that small privilege, which only impacts your own self, your own wellbeing, your own mental health. You save yourself from having to bear the consequences of acting, sacrificing 5 million others in the process. It’s entirely a selfish act that can be conveniently argued away, but only naively, by isolating the act of saving 5 million lives from the act of causing one death. The real question isn’t which is worth more, of the two tracks, but how highly you value your own convenience and the integrity of yourself against the lives of others. If you place your own mental wellbeing above that of another being, that’s one thing. Placing it above 5 million others that will never get to even have a mental health anymore, is a very high estimation of your own worth. But it’s valid. We see action by inaction every day, causing pain and suffering all over the world.

This is different from the hospital analogy you keep bringing up. And not merely on a technicality. The premise is not the same at all.

Oh yeah this war of mine is actually another one in this very same realm I believe, good catch! Been intending to play it, perhaps now’s the time finally

The Banner Saga series. I have had the first one in my library for perhaps a decade, tried to start it a few times and never got into it.

Until a week ago, that is, when I got past the slow start and oh my does it pick up from there! Currently nearing end of the second one and I’ve been devouring these games, outright unhealthily to be honest, but I’m going to let it take me, I think the third one ends the saga, so this has a natural end and I’ll let myself go wild until that.

It’s pretty amazing how much one can do with so little, kind of. When the story is good and writing too, and the art style works, it doesn’t need all that much in terms of technical fidelity to be amazing.

Edit: If anyone has suggestions for other games like this, I’d be more than happy to hear them. I hear king of dragonpass and its lineage is almost a perfect fit, and I remember trying one of the newer ones a decade or so ago and having a blast but never finished. Are there others?

There’s these ones I remember from some time back that made the rounds at least here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw

0:49 is uk english. They are short snippets but pretty fun for what they are

First time I hear that name, how does it differ from stremio, which it seems to parallel heavily?

And doing lasagne from your own raw pasta is one of the easiest possible cases for that. No need to noodle or shape, or dry for that matter, just fresh pasta rolled thin will be amazing and give it a bit of a personal touch and “oomph”. It’s like 15 minutes extra active work beyond the waits, and most people will be impressed since not many do it. One of the easier ways to score some “wow” factor if it ends up good. Which, lasagne, is almost guaranteed to do since it’s so forgiving like you say.

Yeah I’d recommend not to overthink it. Just cook what you usually cook, especially the kind you just “know” how to do without any recipes, eyes closed.

But if you really don’t have any such, your mom might be right. In which case you have some time to prep before if you really want to prove something that isn’t necessarily true as such. Enough to learn, enough to get some habits and routine going so you won’t need any references at hand.

Trying too much or something too new to prove a point might turn out to prove the opposite point you want.

Yeah that’s a big one on the list definitely, thanks!

They really seem to want to shake me out as a customer. The union busting, the trump asslicking, and now this.

Well, happy to oblige. Already replaced my macbook air with a pallet unit lifebook, and have my sight on the new framework laptops for the trackpad haptics and general principle of serviceability, even at the premium. I was an apple customer, I was always willing to pay for the premium to get a more consistent, robust quality experience. Framework really saw the writing on the wall, and I love it. Finally there are starting to be actually valid options for running Linux with the qol of apple hardware besides asahi.

On phone frontier I have zero clue where to go, but this is really just sealing the deal of me dropping apple there too whenever this one breaks. Motorola seems promising though, we’ll see…

Yeah I’ve had a similar experience, when I was in my early 20s, and have since chosen to accept missing the train or whatever is the reason I’d need to hurry, so as not to scare someone that bad. Jesus it’s awkward and it’s entirely understandable, but man does it get me questioning whether I look scary or weird or do I seem suspicious and has been a constant source of anxiety ever since. But I’ve realized it’s my job in that situation to clearly signal I’m not a threat, and I’ve chosen to do it just by slowing down myself so the distance grows and I become no threat to them (feels so bad to think of one’s self this way by the way, fuck me, but what can you do?) or alternatively if there’s a detour I could take to still catch the train as in your example, I’d rather go to another block and jog if nobody’s there and not miss the train. Either way, if I’m perceived a threat, there’s nothing in the moment that can be done about that other than no longer be perceived one, i.e stall or reroute away.

This only ever happens in dark, at night, and them likely drunk or tired, so it’s entirely understandable. I’d be fucking anxious too if someone bigger than me started speeding up on me. I have the privilege not to be scared this way due to my physique, so I also have to respect it the other way around too.

It’s so easy to go with the gut reaction of “this is disrespectful” without considering the scenario from a third person you know? I think this is where most end up in and start thinking “you can’t do or say anything anymore” and become either incels or too fucking loud magas or equivalents, because it is kind of hard on self confidence to be in that situation. But it’s always going to be worse for the other, they might fear for their life, and rightly so, so there’s no comparison there once you actually start thinking and exercising your empathy. So if you manage to get past the initial feeling of disrespect, frustration and self-doubt, then this is a real non-issue. And something very small to avoid and handle properly in the moment.

But if you don’t get past it, or lack the empathy to see it from others’ pov, well, you end up a shithead basically, coping unhealthily with that and it might even grow as large to be the whole identity ultimately.

Just rambling here I suppose, sorry to hog all the space, felt like I needed to let that out. I’ve had some friends go with the disrespect and self image and confidence shattering effect that I’ve helped get past it and see it objectively, and I just can’t help but think of everyone who doesnt have the help nor the inner capability, and stray from the sensible and humane path due to something so small as this.

“Veracity engine for real-time analysis” (“Vera” for short)

Sounds like normal human speech

I can give a lot of benefit of doubt to independent open source projects feeling vibecoded or ai assisted, I’ve had to partly try and get into it myself because the job market currently just demands showcases for that in the portfolio.

But the moment they ask money and get corporate, all bets are off. Fuck that. When it becomes “serious” like that, it should also be serious in how it’s built and presented. And gating something built using a tool trained on public corpus and the shared knowledge of the humankind, in good and bad, behind closed source and payments is exactly the kind of shit that makes it feel wrong too, not just embarrassing or questionable.

At this point I’ve had to accept some ai use in development is unavoidable when looking at cool projects, I use a tui editor called fresh that smells absolutely vibecoded, but it actually is decent and in my experience best in class for non-modal. So I am starting to feel less and less embarrassed or suspicious as a gut reaction, when I see one, and more inquisitive if I am interested, otherwise just move on without extra feelings about it. Unless it’s obvious slop that is. There are tiers to that shit too.

But if it’s closed source and paid for, it just feels lazy, embarrassing and actively annoying to me…

Oh fuck this is embarrassing