I’m not sure if this is a typo or you’re a prophet of The Great Burn and the subsequent mutant takeover of the world.

Man I went into the ER after bleeding out of my asshole for weeks, eventually bad enough that I was bleeding through my pants and underwear during the work day and staining my chair. The attending made me feel like I was absolutely wasting his time, then squeezed a blood clot the size of a lemon out of my asshole and sent me home.

I thought I was fucking dying when I went in. Then I thought I was dying when he was squeezing that fucker out. Then I thought I was dying from his withering disdain.

I think if I ever wind up with those symptoms again I’ll just wait for death instead of going in.

I think if your objective is to use a Linux client with a Microsoft back end, you’ve lost the thread. This is neat in a technical sense, but this is fixing the wrong “problems.”

OneDrive integration

They should not.

Elon Musk seems like a genius up until he starts talking about something you’re familiar with.

So Elon Musk is basically AI? A piece of the bewildering puzzle of what the fuck is wrong with the world today has suddenly clicked into place.

Poors hanging out in rich folk places is a superset of the homeless situation.

It depends. Is someone richer than you upset about it? Then it’s loitering.

Mate, the laws are written so that if someone wealthy or powerful doesn’t like what you’re doing, it’s illegal. And if what you’re doing isn’t illegal, they find something you’re doing that is.

It’s not really in my interest to ensure my employer crashes and burns. I’d rather guide them along responsible use of AI. And frankly that does involve a bit of letting certain initiatives fail while insulating my developers from the worst of it. I have a plan to make sure we keep the developers in development and that tools are used to support them rather than replace them. That requires tracking success metrics and ensuring we are doing developer-led development in parallel with the slop generation.

Having a knee-jerk anti-AI stance would only ensure skepticism is left out of the conversation.

I understand why, but I also think exposure to AI workflows that are expected at jobs is important as well. Also there is so much AI psychosis or whatever you want to call it that I think skepticism of AI is an important life skill.

Hopefully the future of AI is open source, local, more efficient models, but it’s not going anywhere, so ignorance should be discouraged.

I will leave that judgment to whomever eats me.

I think the technology is cool and holds a lot of promise in certain niches. I’ve been into it since 2019 and learned a lot just watching it evolve.

That said, I’m skeptical and I think some folks rely on it too much. I work with someone who just copy/pastes Claude on every response. You have to do your own thinking and you have to double check everything it outputs. It follows direction, but it doesn’t hesitate to make incorrect assumptions and inferences, and often the things you tell it isn’t what it does.

I saw an AI guy explaining some prompt technique where you tell the AI to ask questions until it is 95% certain what you want it to do, but it doesn’t have certainty and it can’t achieve 95% of something it doesn’t have, so it asks questions — sometimes pointless ones — until it has performed the ceremony of achieving 95% certainty. And I suppose maybe that that ceremony does help in some cases, but it’s not doing what you tell it to do.

AI has a lot to offer. Sometimes when I ask it to write code, it does so using libraries and annotations I wasn’t aware existed. I learn about things that way. It writes cleaner code faster than I do because it doesn’t hesitate and overthink. But everyone knows about the hallucination issues. And you have to make your instructions as narrowly scoped and unambiguous as possible — approaching the complexity of code.

I get frustrated because I am a believer in AI, but I’m surrounded by people who don’t seem to know how to use it appropriately and it’s frustrating. Skepticism and critical thinking is crucial to successful use of AI, otherwise you’re going to be caught with your pants down, having relied on it to do your thinking for you, and suddenly you realize you don’t understand the very thing you’ve supposedly done.

My 14yo is on Linux and has been troubleshooting the VR setup. Not going to say she knows Linux well or better than me, but motivation is the key.

It would probably behave like AI in fiction because it’s a fiction machine and since AI stories tend to go a certain way, thus so would ChatGPT go.

My observation is that most people just want to be respected and treated like human. Very few people are going to be offended that you don’t know what you haven’t been told. The ones who are are pretty much assholes if you need a box for them.

I’ve hung out with a lot of trans folks who were just happy to live as themselves in a space and with people where they weren’t under threat or treated like freaks. They wanted to talk about the same nerdy things as anyone else I enjoy hanging out with, they just want to do it as the correct gender.

That said they are people, first. They have good days and bad days. Days where someone said something that primed them to react as if you intend harm or offense to them. Days where they are just fed up with all the cis fuckers.

Just do your best and that has to be enough for everyone.

I think this is asking for clear categorization of what sends clearly to be a spectrum of humanity. I’m married. I won’t fuck anyone else. So from your point of view am I gay or straight? Ace? How my spouse identifies is none of your business. What they have in their pants only I and Schrödinger know. Whether we even fuck at all is unknowable to you. Does that make a difference to you?

Suddenly you can’t define me without knowing things about other people. So is your definition about me or them? Like, to what end are you trying to put folks in boxes?

I kinda get it. When I was younger these sorts of questions fascinated me as well. But I’m older now and I’ve been friends with straight folks and gay and trans, watched an old friend transition. I don’t care any more. They are doing the thing that makes them happy. I don’t need to understand it. I don’t even really need to know what it is.

When I was younger, I avoided much of the “chore” stuff, and I have been reaping what I’ve sown ever since. I would have told my younger self, among other things, to think ahead, and to not put off hard work for tomorrow (advice I can still barely live by).

I don’t know anyone with a different story. I had plenty of people giving me advice I didn’t take just to learn they were right — I doubt I’d have listened to future-me either, but we all want to go back in time and wring our little necks for creating so much harder a road for present us :)

Keep playing, mate!

We’re the same age, lived very different lives. I don’t think either of our lives has been better lived. Would definitely be good times to compare notes. Based on geography we’ll probably never get that chance but it’s interesting to me how we shared the same sort of conceptual space growing up and took our different paths. It’s interesting the things that drive our path through life aren’t what we think they are.

I was not raised by my biological mom. I never talked to her until I was 18. I met her and my siblings still years later, and my youngest brother was probably 15-20 years younger, but damn he reminded me so much of myself.

I never thought that much of my bio-mom after meeting her. But that little version of me grew up, got into drugs, got in trouble with the law, and is already dead. And it would’ve been so easy for him to just not do that. Or maybe had I grown up in that life, it would’ve seemed impossible to escape that path. I wonder what the inflection point was from that curious, kind, thoughtful kid to what he became. I wonder if there was ever a chance to help him escape it or if the seeds of his self-destruction were already planted.

I guess that’s why other paths from where I started fascinate me so much. Hope things go as well as they can in the health front. Good travels, friend!

It can for some people. I promise you I don’t feel empty or meaningless without any belief in the supernatural.

Spirituality is just a lens for looking at the world. A kind of grubby, smudgy lens, but the point is, like art it can unlock some wisdom inside us without words, and when we try to put it into words or find “truth” in it we must always fail, but generosity, helping one another out, appreciating what we have, accepting what we lack, those are valuable lessons that are easier to understand through spirituality than deriving them from first principles.

We are all connected and lifting my neighbor lifts me even if on the surface he has more and I have less. Spreading kindness is worth doing and makes you a better person and the world a better place, even if you don’t see any rewards. Spirituality is just a way to communicate that feeling — and largely fear of nonexistence — a way to share truths that are hard to explain. Also in the form of religion, it appeals to those who seek authority for how they chose to live.

So if people use spirituality to communicate those truths and understand how to live a meaningful life, great. Those who use it to justify hatred have learned the wrong fucking lessons because they focus on finding (creating) truth in the words, not on the truths about how to be good people.

Or you can do it all without spirituality. It’s harder, but doesn’t come packaged up with misleading reasoning.

I’m an old cis het white guy. Those fuckers have nothing on me.