Damn, that’s awful. How allergic? Like anaphylaxis?

Twitter isn’t and never was useful as an organizing tool. Arab spring was a failure. Twitter is actually more useful to the ruling class than not because it gives a way for the masses to expend it’s restless energy without changing anything.

It’s okay to be angry, and to have big feelings. But also, remember that your parents are people. There’s two sides to that, everyone has biases and perceptions that they can’t see past, but there is also the spiritual and beautiful things that transcend all of that.

Beauty and love surpass all the other stuff. Look for the ways that there can be love between you, even when it also means holding the tension of love and anger together. It can work like that, and sometimes that’s just what family is. Also before you know it you’ll be on your own and that will give you a whole new perspective on family as you build a new life for yourself.

I remember when I still lived with my parents it was impossible to see past their flaws. But now as an adult on my own, I have a much greater appreciation for how easy it is to be shitty and how hard it is to be good.

At the end of it all, sometimes you just gotta feel your feelings, hoping that at the end of it you’ll be a little bigger and a little more expensive, able to hold more of life together and not less.

What I dislike about these threads is that it always devolves into shitting on blue collar workers. Of course pickups are useless city cars but have you all ever met somebody from a town of 1,000 people where every single person works in a blue collar trade? These things do work that you can’t do in a different type of vehicle.

Threads like this are echo chambers of privilege. Maybe instead of shitting on tradespeople, shit on car and oil companies who enshittify the whole system.

Also pickups in 2023 that look like this are more powerful and more fuel efficient than more modest looking pickups from 90s or 00s. You may not like the aesthetics of it, but who fucking cares, you’re not driving it, you’re just the one judging someone else for having different taste.

As Gabe Newell said, piracy is a service issue.

I’ve selected this text as I think it’s the heart of your post, if you disagree then let me know. I don’t agree with this statement, I think that it is a rights issue, and I think I can prove that with a thought experiment.

Suppose for example, game companies took this idea to heart and did not do anything to stop piracy, they only focused on providing the most seamless storefront and gaming experiences possible. They create a store that works perfectly, has all the features you’d want, and has no DRM of any kind - this includes no log in needed, they go by the honor system. They expect people to only download a game that they’ve paid for. Here’s the question: will people pay for the games or not? I have a view of human nature that people generally go along the path of least resistance, and I think this is born out by evidence (but I could be wrong about this). Some people will pay for the games on moral grounds, the vast majority will not. If a developer wants to get paid, they have to make sure people pay for it. And now we have DRM. The goal of DRM is to make piracy annoying enough that the path of least resistance is to just buy the game.

This, to me at least, proves that piracy is only a service issue in a world where DRM exists. Because DRM makes piracy annoying. If people find the DRM more annoying than piracy, it has failed to be effective DRM.

So to get to the heart of things, I agree with you that when DRM is more annoying than piracy something has gone terribly wrong. Denuvo, in my life, for the way I play games, is not and never has even gotten close to being more annoying than piracy.

But at the end of the day, I don’t think it is morally or ethically wrong to put DRM on a game or storefront. I just see it as something to work out on a practical level, case by case. But I made my original comment in the first place because it seems to me like a lot of people have issues with it on a moral level, which I think is silly.

It’s not evil. DRM as a concept is not evil. There is actually no real philosophical justification for why it is wrong to use DRM to protect your software. Because if you made it, it is yours and you get to decide how other people use it.

The paranoia that surrounds things like DRM show just how laughably selfish and entitled some gamers are.

I actually think the best solution for a space like Beehaw is to just turn off the creation of new accounts for the time being. The point of this instance isn’t to be the biggest, it’s to be a high quality space. People will still be able to interact with Beehaw from the outside too.

So what I’m hearing you say here is: “If smart people believe in magic sky fairy, magic sky fairy must be logical to believe in,” which is about the level of discourse I’d expect from someone unfamiliar with the concept of critical thinking. Thanks for being an object lesson.

This is such a bad reading of the comment that I can only imagine you’re acting in bad faith. You have made the assumption that reason will inevitably lead people to the same conclusions about the world, but that is not true, and that is what the OP is bringing up. How is it that many people, when presented with the same sets of facts, and using the same reasonable principles, can come to differing conclusions? This question should keep you up at night, but instead it seems you’re only interested in saying “those other people are dumb, I am smart.”

As someone who’s been there done that, this is the worst time to try and get into academics in the humanities. English departments are downsizing everywhere. There’s an incoming “demographic collapse” coming to higher ed by 2026 - i.e. birth rates went down between 2008-2011 by a large degree and that cohort is 25-30% smaller than previous years. A lot of small, tuition dependent colleges are going to fold. In preparation, non-essential departments are cutting people like crazy. STEM and business are money makers, English and History aren’t.

Best thing you can do with a creative writing degree is go into corporate communications/marketing. Find a gig at an agency and do creative writing on the side.

Many things are outside of your control. You were given life outside of your control, and you will die outside your control. Whether you die of cancer at 50 or climate change at 50, you die all the same.

We still have a moral duty to make the best choices that we can with the information that we know. A lot of the existential crisis though, I think, stems from a fear of mortality. Coming to grips with the fact that you must die sets you free to act rightly within the world.

You definitely added more than zero value! I begin to feel more and more that for a high percentage of my generation (born post-2000), learning how to navigate social networks IRL wasn’t a skill we learned. There’s a generational atrophy when it comes to organizing parties and mixers and social activities larger than your closest friends.

One of the things I’m trying to break down in my friend group is the apathy towards mixing different groups of friends. Like we think different communities won’t be able to get along with each other, and there is a paralyzing fear of any kind of social awkwardness. This also likely has to do with the friends I’ve made over the years, as someone who has struggled greatly with social anxiety I think I’ve naturally selected for groups of socially anxious people. Ack.

I’m of the opinion that it is time spent with a thing that makes it valuable. I’ve had my current car for a couple of years and hope to keep it for many more. Each year we have new experiences together, fond memories that get triggered when I sit in the driver seat. Eventually, when this car breaks down and I have to get a new one, some of those memories will be lost with the car.

Prayer, typically on my front porch, with a cup of coffee. Biking has also become a big thing for me. I don’t live near the sea but have lots of lakes nearby, so sitting on a beach also.

I don’t care if it passes SCOTUS or not. I say this as someone with current student loans, what matters most is directing that money towards public institutions to drive down tuition for students right now.

Forgiving student debt doesn’t solve the problem, it just pushes it onto the next generation. Let’s actually solve the tuition crisis first.

This is a typical take, but the the hard problem of consciousness has very strenuously denied neuroscientists for well over a century at this point. We know a lot more about the systems of the brain, but no more about the nature of consciousness itself.

It’s still an open debate, some people don’t believe the hard problem is unsolvable, but on every debate there are really smart people who defend absurd positions. The reason I think it is unsolvable is that consciousness is by definition unobservable, except by the subject.

We can know a lot about the brain, neurons and structures etc. But that doesn’t really get us closer to understanding how an aggregation of impulses and chemical signalling takes us from what is essentially inert matter to a brain.

If you’re interested, the book On Purpose by philosopher Michael Ruse has a chapter on it that is succinct and up to date with the latest neuroscience research. I am sure there are better books out there on the subject but I can only recommend what I’ve read.

I would go a step further and say that there are many things that science, by nature, cannot answer. For example, what consciousness is and how it arises as a phenomenon.

Yes, very much. I think it would be impossible for me not to be religious. If I wasn’t Anglican I’d be Buddhist or Baháʼí.

Everyone is already giving the generic advice of do hobbies or volunteer. This is good advice! That’s how you meet people. But the transition from “hobby” friend to “life” friend is difficult and frankly just awkward. It’s kind of like romantic relationships, there isn’t a right or wrong way. You just got to take leaps of faith and be vulnerable with people with the expectation that rejection is possible.

I’m still kind of navigating this phase. I have some good friends that I do my hobbies with, and then it’s like, how do I go from there? Really it’s just about being open and hospitable towards others. Opening your home and inviting people in, asking people if they want to come over for dinner or watch a movie with you.

Technology isn’t an end in itself, it is subordinate to the need to solve problems. I don’t see how we can have relevant technical progress if tech groups don’t consider “social issues” (in quotes because I’m abusing that label to include a lot of things in my head). Although maybe we’re thinking about this at different levels of scale.