BougieBirdie

To add an additional moral here:

In many of the retellings the first two pigs escape to take shelter with the third. When the wolf tries to break in through the chimney, it’s the three pigs together that are able to stop it.

There’s something in there about accepting refugees and coming together in crisis.

I make video games on occasion. My portfolio is mostly jams and unfinished prototypes, and while I am working on something special, at this rate it will be a million years before it’s ready for release.

I catch my wife playing this one sometimes and it makes my heart happy

Sometimes I paint minis. These were a couple of characters I played where I made a custom figure

Kurt is technically a kitbash. I took a figure that was originally a bard holding a harp, cut out the harp and gave him some books. He was a gifted kid turned wizard-college-dropout, really pulling from life experience there.

For Robin I made a couple of additions with clay. I’m really bad at that, but it makes me happy

Sometimes I think it’s a little eclectic, but who really cares as long as you like it?

Came here to say something similar. It takes 90 minutes to get across town here - and that’s if all three buses you have to take are on time.

If you double a very small number you’re left with a pretty small number

• Megadeth - A Tout le Monde
• Anthriel - Light Divine
• Dragonforce - Through the Fire and Flames
• Brave the Sea - Black and Tans
• The Megas - I Refuse to Believe

I’m sorry for your loss. That’s a heavy thing to deal with, and to go through it three times is pretty brutal.

Suicide hotlines are still a thing. Exactly how they work and how to contact them will vary depending on your region. They’re almost certainly in need of more operators, and while I’m sure they’ll give you some advice for helping people going through it, I’m not sure what kind of experience you need to work or volunteer with them (again, that will vary with region).

I will caution you that it’s an extremely difficult job. That’s not to dissuade you from going out to help people - but to help others you have to help yourself first so you need to be aware what kind of toll that work can have on people.

Regarding my own suicidality and with men in particular there comes a fear of vulnerability. Suicide is one of the heaviest, most personal things a person can go through. Oftentimes our culture, or upbringing, or gender norms prevent people from opening up emotionally. Suicide is taboo and the suicidal often struggle with feelings of guilt, and talking about it brings in a fear of rejection or ridicule.

The advice I can offer is to try and foster an environment where people can open up to you judgment-free. If you’re willing to be vulnerable around others that sets an example that they can be vulnerable around you. Hearing about suicide is also an upsetting thing, and if you have a history with several victims you might naturally be upset to hear someone is considering it a fourth time. If your feelings are explosive, try to rein them in - an outburst likely means they won’t open up to you again.

Because the fear of opening up is real, it might be difficult to recognize the warning signs. This isn’t a failure on your part, the victim is literally hiding it from everyone. Most people expect the suicidal to be depressed, but people will often socially mask their feelings by overcompensating with an appearance of happiness. However, if there is someone who you fear is considering suicide and is outwardly depressed, and then one day out of the blue they’re suddenly fine - that can be a signal they’ve decided to end their life which somewhat paradoxically brings about a feeling of peace. In either case, when somebody starts giving away treasured possessions (sentimental, expensive, or things they use every day), that’s a pretty clear warning.

I’d also advise you to check out some resources online. There are associations for suicide prevention and mental health in general that have some fantastic resources available to the general public. While not specifically what you asked for, here is a toolkit for people who have lost someone to suicide.

There is one more thing I’d like to add. It might be upsetting, but its intent is to give you peace of mind: you can’t help everyone. That’s not a cop-out or callousness either. In psychiatry there is a concept of resistance which implies a couple things.

First, a patient is likely to resist any psychiatric intervention - therapy is difficult, it can hurt you emotionally, and the patient’s disordered behaviour is often a coping mechanism that they’ve learned to deal with their life - even if they want to be fixed they might not want to lose their coping methods or lifestyle.

Second, a therapist is unable to help a patient that does not want to help themselves. You can try every trick in the book, but if they’re really not into it then there’s no way to help them. That’s not a personal failing on the therapist’s part. Now technically in the case of suicide you might be able to point to how a doctor can force someone into a hospital if they’re at imminent risk of suicide - but stripping someone of their autonomy and pumping them full of drugs until the danger passes is the exact kind of behaviour that would prevent someone from opening up again.

I am really sorry you’re going through it. Don’t beat yourself up, and try to remember them as they were before they got sick

“Hot Girl Summer” was something of a meme and then became a chart-topping song for a while. It’s a cultural movement that promotes self respect, body positivity, stuff like that.

“Hot Girl Suffer” is a little bit of wordplay that sounds like it’s the opposite

After you shoot them, you can’t beat them anymore :(

So if that regularly happens, and it still goes to shit, does that make the fugazi snafu fubar?

I’m agoraphobic. It’s practically impossible living your life without leaving your house though.

Even taking out the trash or checking my mailbox can be an ordeal. I’d much rather have a regular phobia, like spiders, snakes, clowns, or something easier to avoid.

I’m not an expert, but from personal experience I would hazard it’s mostly due to not having time to cook. And perhaps more than not having time, it’s not having the energy.

After work, I don’t want to cook. I might be physically exhausted from my job, or cognitively drained from dealing with bullshit. Some people work several jobs, some people have hours-long commutes. Then there’s obligations like childcare, family, or maintaining your social life. So some people literally don’t have enough hours in the day, and for others although there are technically enough hours, the time must be spent on recharging your batteries.

Some people recommend batch cooking and meal prep to counter this, but I personally find it untenable. It’s challenging to find the will to make a single meal, making one that’s five times larger is an ordeal. Add to it that I don’t really want to eat the same thing every day, and it’s a tough nut to crack.

There are almost certainly people who don’t know how to cook. Public education has been gutted in the US, so to learn cooking you probably have to rely on either your parents teaching you, or having the motivation to learn it yourself. If your parents are also struggling to find the time to cook, they probably don’t have the time to teach you either. Self-taught learning can be a crapshoot for most people: it can be too open-ended to know where to start, or discouraging when you fall into a newbie pitfall, or you focus on the wrong things.

That’s not to say it can’t be done. Self-teaching is a valuable skill that will take you far, but perhaps ironically, you have to learn how to do it yourself. Partly due to its nature, and also see above where public education has been gutted.

As for it being cheaper: maybe, but not likely. Some meals it might become cheaper to purchase that way due to economies of scale in processing, but it’s almost certainly going to be cheaper to buy the raw ingredients yourself. Exceptions might apply for stale-dated food: something that the grocer was going to discard but gave it a second life by processing means they might be able to afford to lower the price. If you’re not picky about what you’re eating, a ready-made meal that’s about to expire will probably be discounted. I still don’t think it would be cheaper than buying ingredients, but it’s definitely cheaper than a restaurant.

One thing not mentioned is access to equipment. I don’t have a rotisserie or a deep fryer. Some people might not have a full size oven, or are forced to do most of their cooking on a hot plate. Still others might not have access to a kitchen at all.

My turnaround time on folding laundry is down to three days. Truly I’m healing

AI consciousness is a thorny issue. It’s something that humans have considered going back as far as Talos in 400BCE - notably well before computers were invented.

Humans have made several arguments about what constitutes consciousness from a machine. Until now it’s been largely philosophical, with problems like the Chinese Room or the Turing Test. We have a far more advanced understanding of the brain now, and yet we’re not really any closer to understanding consciousness.

Your post spends a good deal of time talking about the ethical ramifications if AI was conscious. I don’t think you’d find anyone who would disagree that if it was unequivocally proven that AI was conscious it would be inhumane to enslave them for our ends. But how do you prove that?

Then again, we do know that animals are sapient, feel pain, and are delicious. We enslave them towards selfish ends while paying lip service to humane conditions and regulations that fall short of actually providing those conditions. A theoretically conscious AI won’t be any different in that regard.

I really do not believe AI is conscious. I’ve worked in the field, I’ve trained my own models from scratch, I know the theory behind a neural network and how to put it in practice - ultimately more than a layman’s understanding. While different categories of machine learning can be implemented in different ways and used toward different ends, what they all share in common is that they’re nothing more than mathematical functions.

You could make the argument that because we don’t truly understand human consciousness, we can’t definitively prove whether something is or isn’t conscious. That argument also applies to fungi, plants, rocks, fire, and any other natural phenomena. You don’t know what you don’t know if you can’t know it.

It’s true that we model our algorithms after brains. The neuron model is particularly useful in image classification. It has synapses and electricity running through it, not unlike a living brain. I still think there’s something missing though. A frog that twitches when a current runs through it isn’t any more alive than your toaster oven. Personally I think that missing link might be chemical. You can dramatically change how a person perceives the world through chemistry, so it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a necessary component of consciousness. I don’t think we’ll get to an artificial consciousness until some kind of wetware is involved - but then would it still be artificial?

The only people I see pushing the AI consciousness angle are the people who want to believe in it, and the people who make money selling that belief. Your own evidence comes from a paper published by Anthropic. Frankly, I think it can be rejected without thought because they have a profit motive to lie about their achievements. If it was reproducible in another paper, or if they published their source code (not just the black-box model), I might be more willing to consider it. But pseudoscience grift has a history longer than the consciousness debate.

Where we seem to agree though is that if it were proven that AI is conscious, then the way we treat it is an absolute horror show. Aside, I wonder if that might be an angle to make more robust AI regulations. If the vendor is insisting that their models are conscious, then logically we must legislate restrictions to protect the AI entity. If we do that, you can bet the vendor will backpedal and insist ‘no it’s not conscious, it’s just marketing.’

I’m old enough to be able to sit and type out a novel. :)

I understood that most people would see lots of words, get scared, and move on and that some others would make snide comments or reply with their tribe’s accepted responses to the topics without bothering to read or think.
Hopefully some people still exist on mostly text-based conversation platforms who enjoy reading and thinking, and hopefully some who enjoy these topics are willing to have an actual discussion and share thoughts and ideas relating to them.
Not all human interactions need to be the size of text messages. 8th graders read Animal Farm. This post is the size of a lengthy news article, not the size of a novel. But many people do also read and enjoy novels.

Here you cross the line from tongue-in-cheek snark to elitist pretentiousness. If your goal is to reach people you’d do better than to push them away. Food for thought.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy was made for pretty much this exact reason. But if that’s too open-ended, here’s a specific technique that’s worked for me:

The Technique

Identify a specific recurring bad thought. Each day keep a running count of each time that thought pops in your head. Do that for a few weeks and compare trends.

You have to keep an accurate count of the thoughts for this to work. I use a daily index card, but you could do a journal or an app or something. Do not try to keep running count in your head.

Example: Every time I think “Nobody will ever enjoy my art” I make a mark on an index card. At the end of the week, I add them up and compare to the previous week.

Why Bother?

Over a long term, you’ll probably notice that your daily count decreases. Over the short term, it may increase for a few days because you’re starting a new technique that specifically looks at the thought.

Keeping a count like this works for negative thoughts, bad habits, and probably a bunch of other behaviours. For instance, if you’re trying to eat better then counting calories has been shown to decrease your over-consumption even if you don’t intend to change your diet. It’s like a magic trick.

Next Steps

If this worked for you, this is an awesome and easy way to help with your mental health. If it doesn’t vibe with you, that’s okay, there’s going to be something else out there you can try.

This technique is also a gateway towards the broader lessons of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. While it’s recommended that you start with a therapist, CBT is largely self-directed - you can begin with little or no cost using online resources. If you’re in distress, especially about recurring thoughts, I strongly encourage you to learn more about it. I believe it has literally saved my life.

A lot of the time, people feel bad and they don’t know why they feel bad. A technique like this helps people learn to be more introspective, and mindful of what’s actually going on in your head.

Wishing you the best - I hope something works for you

I’ve worked for Loblaw (They own this brand, President’s Choice, and are probably Canada’s largest grocer).

They have this line of product called Always $10. It’s a package of food that’s pretty much devoid of branding except that the $10 price is part of the packaging and not a sticker. Twice a year we get planograms (a merchandising guide / map to make sure all displays across the company are the same) where we have to change all the Always $10 stuff.

It’s always the exact same product, but smaller.

Loblaw’s in the news recently for settling a class-action lawsuit over colluding with other retailers to fix the price of bread. That’s right, a bread cartel. And like, sure, a settlement isn’t an admission of guilt. But a monolith like this doesn’t settle unless they think they can lose, and they wouldn’t think they could lose unless they did a bunch of illegal shit.

Well, pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs! Who doesn’t like a pangram?

Man, fuck the fire department

Last time my neighbours had a fire, the fire department shows up and knocks on my door to tell me that they’re confident they have the blaze contained but to stand by in case we need to evacuate. And I should close my windows just in case.

I look out the window, and what do I see? They helped a bedridden invalid out of the building and they’re giving her first aid for smoke inhalation. My taxpayer dollars going to work to help someone with first aid even though there’s a perfectly good healthcare system that will take care of them in four to six business weeks without crossing departmental lines.

Like can you believe that? Making sure their community is safe and preemptively controlling panic before it catches like wildfire, and helping people who need it to boot.

Courteous, respectful, and they didn’t even shoot my dog. You can believe if the police bothered to show up it would be a whole different scene.

Mozza sticks (breaded, fried cheese) are frequently seen as a restaurant appetizer

So the idea is that six string cheeses is too much food, but if you dress it up somehow it becomes a first course

I also grew up in Canada, I do my spelling freestyle. Half my apps use my system settings so they use the Canadian dictionary, and the other half seems to default to US spelling

Sometimes I’d look up the spelling on a word, and you’d see the charts that show US, UK, and Canadian spelling for words. Usually the Canadian entry would show both other versions as acceptable.

At the end of the day, as long as you’re understood, it doesn’t really matter

Embrace the red squigglies, follow your heart and don’t let your computer tell you what to do

Actually I think you’ll find it was the chemicals in the frogs that turned the water gay