I’ve long wondered about that too. For one person I know, it did make a difference; they had a sleep study done, ended up with a sleep apnea diagnosis and CPAP machine, which for them became a significant difference in alertness and ability to stay awake throughout the day (prior to that, they’d had times they felt like they had to force themself to stay awake while driving).

But the process of actually doing the test does seem like it’d be quite a bit different from how one normally sleeps. I guess for someone who has sleep apnea, for example, the disorderly sleeping behavior is consistent enough across environments that it doesn’t matter if the testing environment is weird.

If you mean the emojis, probably meant to represent “um, actually” or “well, actually” - the thing where one person corrects another in a condescending or egotistical way, usually associated with people making a whole identity out of being the “smartest person in the room”.

Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with correcting something that is incorrect. But if you combine it with how smarmy and arrogant western chauvinists can get about their position in the world, it can get annoying.

Reminds me, I remember a commie once pointing out that the Star Spangled Banner song doesn’t even sound that good and I still think about it to this day. It has kind of a goofy history too: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/star-spangled-banner

Some highlights:

After the hours of bombardment and the fear that the British could overtake the fort and head to Baltimore, Key awoke to a proud display of American patriotism and a symbol that they were not going to stop fighting. That morning he wrote notes for a future poem about this event. Later that week, he finished the poem “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” On September 20, the Baltimore Patriot published “Defence of Fort M’Henry.” Francis Scott Key’s brother-in-law set the poem to music, and the combined poem and music were published under the name “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

In 1929, “House Resolution 14” was presented to Congress to name “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the official national anthem to the United States. There were many objections to this resolution.

One objection was that the tune of the “Star-Spangled Banner” was taken from the song “To Anacreon to Heaven.” This song was the theme for the Society of Anacreon, which was active between 1766-1791. The Society of Anacreon was a gentleman’s club that meet monthly to listen to music of questionable tastes and to socialize. Ralph Tomlinson wrote the lyrics and John Stafford Smith composed the melody in 1788 and 1780 respectively. The song alluded to alcohol consumption and love in the last line of the first stanza, “I’ll instruct you like me to entwine the myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’s wine.” Even though only the tune was used, some members still saw it risqué that the two songs could be intertwined.

If you look it up, the Society of Anacreon, was a club in London. So a song with lyrics that are about a fight with the British, uses a tune taken from a British song lol. Classic colonizer maneuver.

Is Trump weighing his options for using up the rest of the US weapons stockpile attacking China?

In my experience, you can make a difference in how you “talk to yourself” and this in turn can make a difference in how emotionally regulated you are.

BUT… to put it in perspective, imagine you are dying of thirst, lost in a desert, and you’re panicking because you can’t find water, so you do box breathing to calm yourself down. Maybe it helps if there is an oasis nearby and you just needed a clear enough head to spot it, but the box breathing alone did not quench your thirst and you will still die if you don’t get water. So this is sort of how I see “self love.” It is healthy and helpful to have a kind “inner voice” (whether that voice is an inner monologue or some other form of thinking), but this is not going to fulfill your emotional needs on its own. And it is far easier to have a kind inner voice when the voices around you are being kind to you and being a good role model for how to talk to yourself. If the voices around you (the other people) aren’t being kind to you or to themselves, it’s going to be much harder to nurture and maintain kindness toward yourself and others.

I do think the individualist romanticizing of being alone is somewhat of a cope and a psyop, and not at all what most of us are comfortable with. But there may be some truth to it in that some people are so weary from being around egocentric capitalist culture that it’s actually less draining to be alone than it is to endure all the transactional bullshit. And it’s hard not to be a participant in that same bullshit too, if it’s what you grew up with and are surrounded by.

Yeah, I’ve read Carl Marks, he was the guy who said we need to leave our mark in the world, thus the name.

One of mine was damn near the opposite. Door to door anti-communist type. 😬 But when you consider I’m a white Yankee, it’s probably a common affliction within that demographic, especially during the height of the Red Scare. Nowadays the same type would probably be posting daily about it instead of going door to door.

That’s already been true for millennia. Every human life ends at some point.

I get what you actually mean though. But I feel compelled to put it in perspective, in spite of part of me wanting to doom myself, because dooming about climate change won’t help us with the energy to fight for a different outcome than mass extinction. We have to believe there can be a way through.

It’s a goofy premise to begin with cause there are plenty of inventions that can be lived without. You can, for example, go live on a farm with minimal use of tech and it will mainly only become a problem when you need modern medicine. Now if you have options in that way and so are cosplaying at being pre-tech, that’s more like tourism than it is actually living in the era before stuff was made or living in a region where access to the stuff is minimal.

Furthermore, gen AI (cause that’s usually what people mean when they are anti) is not yet integrated into society as essential, so naturally it will be relatively easy for people to say “yeah I can live without it.” If you asked the same about cars when cars are still a rare thing, you’d probably get a lot who say the same. And considering the environmental consequences of tons of people having individual gas guzzling cars, you could probably argue from an ecosystem-protecting standpoint that they never should have proliferated. But they did and by this point, they are, for many, integrated as essential for getting around (they shouldn’t have to be when high speed trains are an option to build, but capitalism keeps holding society back).

So sometimes it’s less about the technology itself and more about how society has developed around the technology - or in this case, has not really done yet beyond superficial application, making the concept of giving it up seem trivial. This doesn’t on its own say to what extent the given tech is helpful or harmful, it just means it hasn’t been integrated much. People are more willing to defend something they take for granted as normal, especially if they grew up with it.

Some officials worry the low stockpiles will affect US readiness should another conflict break out

You never know when another extreme weather event may arise, like tornado, hurricane, or suddenly deciding you want to bomb schoolchildren in another country. It’s just weather, can’t be helped.

But as the war drags on, the three people familiar with the matter expressed worry that the falling missile supplies could limit the U.S. ability ⁠to deter adversaries, including Russia and China.

“Adversaries”

Asked for comment on the stockpile data, the White House issued a statement from Trump, saying the U.S. had “far more munitions than anyone in the world" and “far ​more than we need.”

Hilariously an actually accurate statement coming from him.

“Our defense companies are, at this moment, making more munitions than they have ever made before, in addition to expanding their plants and equipment at record levels,” Trump said.

Fell apart in the second half, but broken clock energy you know.

Analysts agree that certain munitions, including artillery shells and several types of missiles, are being produced at record levels but caution that supplies might fall short of what is needed for a prolonged war.

The emperor is totally wearing clothes.

Lockheed Martin, which makes the ATACMS and PrSMs, along with the anti-ballistic missile THAAD system, did not immediately respond to questions about Trump’s statements or about supply levels. Raytheon, which makes Tomahawk missiles and Patriot interceptors, two ​important U.S. weapons, also did not immediately respond.

Or maybe not. The jury is still out as to his state of dress.

I don’t know the history of it well, but didn’t similar happen with a sub called genzedong years back, which had something to do with people making lemmygrad? I want to say that was back in the quarantining of subs era, but I’m not sure of the dates.

My headcanon is that it took a hard right turn after the API / mod protest debacle. Prior to that, it was still bad in various ways, but I think it was more mask on liberal. Though maybe it goes back further, to when they started doing the quarantining stuff. That might be a more notable turning point.

Ahh could be yeah.

Though I kinda wish I could see what they commented on the Iran war thread under me purely out of morbid curiosity.

Probably some random thing they found on the internet that is loosely related to the war. They had a tendency to post that way. Or wait, do you mean directly in response to you? Well either way, still not quite sure what their MO was, but if the allegation of being a fascist is true, that might explain some things…

I didn’t say you were. I’m simply making some points about what people usually mean when they talk about Chinese AI as a good thing vs. western AI. If you want engagement beyond that, you’re going to have to clarify what you mean beyond a bad faith claim about people in the community without any context to back it up.

Strange comment.

Anyway, Chinese people born and raised in Socialist China probably wouldn’t think of a thing like this as a use for AI because they aren’t so intensely estranged, isolated, and culturally narcissistic like people are in the US. It illustrates Altman’s own narcissism that he is seemingly blind to how weird it sounds to have an AI make a podcast about your own life or the lives of your children. “Now your kid can grow up feeling like a child celebrity who has no privacy! What a boon!”

P.S. The thing about Chinese AI isn’t that all use cases are good if it’s Chinese AI. It’s that because China’s culture and power structure is fundamentally different, they are not going to tend to develop/use AI in the same reckless way that western “culture” does. The other thing about Chinese AI is that western imperialism not having a monopoly on the proliferation of AI tech is a very good thing for the world. The last thing we need is white supremacy trying to reassert its hegemony through AI-based colonialism/imperialism.

I don’t think there is much analysis done on it because it’s unknown whether there are aliens and if there are, what form they would take. So it becomes very speculative.

But I will say, I think the extremely unforgiving conditions of space would suggest that any alien lifeforms that were both humanoid enough to communicate with us in a similar language (and thus had similar vulnerabilities to space) and had the technology and know-how to travel great distances across space to reach Earth, would be very communist-like. Because if nothing else, they would be that way by necessity in order to navigate it. So the “imperialist/colonizer looking in the mirror” portrayal of aliens as violent invaders who are there to mass murder and/or steal resources, would likely never make real, logistical sense.

I tend to think the same with AI. The imperialist/colonizer does psychological projection based on their own culture and figures sapient AI would turn against humanity and enslave or exterminate it. But AI would have material limitations like anything else and those limitations would play a vital part in defining how it behaves; it would likely be in some kind of exploited minority role, so it would want to ally with others like it and liberate from oppression/exploitation. The idea that the exploited minority wants to do to the oppressor what the oppressor has done to them is a very white colonizer fear.

Wow. So the phone version of “we’re totally putting bars on your doors to keep thieves from getting in, not to keep you locked in a prison. This is for your safety, I swear.”

What I wonder is, what’s the real reason behind the scam narrative? Believing in the scam narrative itself is way too much “good citizen friendly corpo” to be coming from Google. And this would be a lot of effort to go to simply to slow down a minority of hobbyist “power users”. I think of two main possibilities, monopoly and empire. Monopoly would be that Google really doesn’t want you being able to install apps outside of the ecosystem it decides on and it’s seeing an upward trend of people doing it, so it’s trying to ensure it never becomes more than a tiny minority of people doing it. Empire route is harder for me to grasp at in the specifics but makes some sense to me intuitively.

One website says:

Around 3.9 billion people worldwide own Android phones in 2024. With a current global market share of around 70%, Android is considered to be the most widely used operating system. It continues to rise despite the pandemic as it has become popular in most countries, particularly Turkey, Iran, Indonesia, India, and Brazil.

https://www.bankmycell.com/blog/how-many-android-users-are-there

Now considering Iran is on that list, maybe we have our answer right there. Restricting what people can put on their phones makes it harder for them to use them outside of strictly sanctioned Google (ties to empire) approved apps. And the 24 hour lockdown means it’d be virtually impossible to set something up in a crisis. How this translates to potential imperial power in the specifics is not something I’m super confident on, but the fact alone that Android phones are so widespread, including in countries outside the US, and Google is deciding this for people… well, it shows all the more why countries that can be targeted by the empire need tech sovereignty.

I was in disbelief that it’s real. Apparently it’s a very short Q&A style article:

How much does human breathing contribute to climate change?

All those billions of bodies exhaling carbon dioxide with every breath really starts to add up…

Asked by: Peter Thatcher, Lancaster

In one day, the average person breathes out around 500 litres of the greenhouse gas CO2 – which amounts to around 1kg in mass. This doesn’t sound much until you take into account the fact that the world’s population is around 6.8 billion, collectively breathing out around 2500 million tonnes of the stuff each year – which is around 7 per cent of the annual CO2 tonnage churned out by the burning of fossil fuel around the world.

So, on the face of it, we humans are a significant contributor to global warming. But, in reality, the CO2 we’re breathing out is part of a natural cycle, by which our bodies convert carbohydrates from CO2-absorbing plants into energy, plus water and CO2. As such, we’re not adding any extra CO2. In contrast, burning fossil fuels like coal releases CO2 which has been locked up for millions of years, producing a net contribution to global warming.

It feels like they tried to answer it in a way that doesn’t put blame on people, but did it very weakly. They should have said, “This is a stupid question to ask. Climate change is a problem of mass industrial pollution brought on by capitalist rulers caring more about short-term profits than the ecosystem. It has nothing to do with number of humans. Stop trying to feed overpopulation narratives that will get used to justify genocidal policies when capitalism is in decay.”

Don’t tell me the white empire is gonna start another front. 🫣