"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"

Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).

I didn’t say complete abandonment. You’re imagining what I’m imagining.

Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.

Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.

>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner

People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".

Very intelligent people need intelligent-others to bounce ideas off of, and the LLM can be that.

Very intelligent people should be able to grasp that a LLM is not intelligent.

Have you tried to "rubber duck" an idea with an LLM. The latest models are pretty damnably good at it.

I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either.

I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.

Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.

Yes, I use LLMs this way, they're not friends, not therapists, not persons, they're tools, like a word/language calculator.

Gardening and horticulture are ancient human activities that are incredibly old, the act of tending to and cultivating one's garden is a really delightful way to center the mind and get into a place where one is more grounded, connected to nature, and about as disconnected from capitalist interests a thing as you'll find. It's humanizing.

Just because the suits took a metaphor from gardening doesn't mean you have to think like the suits, maybe you want to liberate yourself from the kind of dehumanizing thinking where capitalism rather than nature is the central frame of reference.

Good luck with the beetles, man.

At least they didn't choose ants and termites. =3

I've been vegetarian a long time, I remember eating Bac'n Bits in the 1980s since they didn't actually have any meat in them.

I knew I wanted to be a birder since I was a kid, but wasn't sure how to make that happen, now I can bird by ear and pick up a lot of species, have 700 wild bird species on the life list with photos, and hit the trails every weekend to look for birds, I run feeders, and track local wildlife with iNaturalist/eBird. I do think as some folks age they recognize that they want to be more connected with nature and work on that in their ways, my family was mostly the same. Nature's more real than what you see on the glowing rectangles.

"many people are meant to be slaves is also a fact" - you definitely need to spend a while researching what comprises a fact.

'meant' was a wrong choice of word which i stated above.

you come across as a child by being snarky - you definitely need to spend some time learning how to behave like an adult.

You literally posted that some people are effectively born slaves, that's beneath contempt and if you said it to my face I would certainly have been far, far less kind. Also you definitely need to spend a while researching what comprises being an adult.

don't kid yourself -- learn to read and comprehend the totality of what has been said. also, stop acting tough on internet forums, iow, grow up.

please, I encourage you to feel free to share your amazing and brilliant insights with strangers on public transit in the Bronx, see how it goes, they'll surely admire your brilliance and very serious thoughts - you're so smart!

Using AI to generate content isn't expressing yourself. It's expressing non-human AI content that's actually not a part of your self - AI content is the opposite of self-expression, it's other-expression. That's why people dislike seeing it peddled as self-expression.

You are missing the point, let's take "2001: A Space Odyssey" the novel book cover was not made by the writer Arthur C Clark. But by artist Robert McCall. Well not everyone can afford to hire an artist. You can be creative in your field, and still hire a human or use an AI to do art instead. What's the difference?

In traditional publishing publishers view the cover as a marketing tool - Arthur C Clark had negligible influence over what appeared on the covers of his books in his career when 2001 was released. That's not self-expression by any definition. You could hire a human to do art for you if you like, that's also not self-expression, nor is using an AI to do art for you. There's no meaningful self-expression in the act of having other people make things for you, they're doing the expression, you're enjoying (or not enjoying) the result.