There are (illegal) substances that are highly effective for treating these issues, PTSD, etc. Psilocybin, ibogain, etc. Obviously when administered correctly, with therapy, etc.
It seems to me that cannabis users aren’t seeing the benefits of the aforementioned group. My experience of cannabis stoners is that it’s used to numb out and for escapism, which certainly aligns with what you’re saying.
That’s valuable: I thought the whole thing was dismissed based on the brown dwarf explanation, this is interesting that that’s not the case.
It’s hard to keep up with all the news, particularly so given all the slop floating around. YouTube in particular seems to have a bunch of AI channels that just talk about this endlessly.
"Their self serving reasons are irrelevant" - I disagree, we have no idea what kind of filtering or injection of BS has been done to this model.
When you outsource your thinking, you have to be extremely careful that the model doing your thinking is acting in good faith. I have no idea what the CCP may have put into this thing. Not that the US based models aren't suspect, but the CCP certainly doesn't engender trust here. That said, I still use them, but I'm under no illusions that "their self serving reasons are irrelevant".
I see you're getting downvotes, but my intuition strongly aligns with yours. Many of the top minds/academics in (North) America are from overseas, and most of the time that's India and China. And it's been this way for a long time, and it basically makes sense from a numbers perspective. Note that I say this without a particular bias for or against.
So when many of the top minds, publishing most of the top papers in your country got educated in USA but will most likely return to their country of origin - that needs to be factored in to the calculation (especially if tensions increase). At the end of the day I think it's arrogant and wrongheaded to pretend that the USA has dominance in R&D, against China in particular.
Thanks for that, and you directly hit the point that most fear to express. Also, you mention India, which strategically, is probably the one critical nation that without, American stands little chance of keeping pace with China. The tariff nonsense and other blunders, have squandered that opportunity though, with many billions now dedicated to stable cooperation with China and a pivot away from the US. What I think many do not see are the repercussions that have yet to show. Forward looking, I see a bleak future. And as an American patriot, I think we're being outdone, in too many ways. On the abstract, I think if we were to nix all the corruption, (and maybe put nootropics in the water supply), we might have a chance, but competing with a highly disciplined collective-oriented society in 2026 onward, I think is a predictable loss with our current paradigm. But at least we have fighting cages on the white house lawn, nu? Our MMA guys can just beat up the Chinese engineers, and anyone who questions our greatness, I guess.
"US intelligence has killed and ruined the lives of far more people than China has" - please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources.
I'm no apologist for the US Intelligence and related organizations (not by a very long shot), but that is a very extreme statement to make.
How many Russians, Palestinians, Afghanis, Libyan, Sudanrse, Somalian, Syrians, Iranians and Yemenis people do you think US intelligence has contributed to killing over the last decade?
Or are those not people to you?
China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people.
Every decision the US military, or State Department makes is a product of US intelligence
The foundation of US Intelligence was built by people who literally cried in the meeting when FDR broke ties with Nazi Germany. They proceeded to pardon and protect the perpetrators of genocide after ww2, then went onto hire them. US intelligence is literally built by Nazis.
The CCP was founded on the back of a peasent uprusing. The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist. The people of the US are generally good people, but the Empire itself is pure evil that fuels itself with death and destruction.
First off, you're arguing with someone who mostly is in agreement with you.
"please provide a strong argument for this statement, with numbers and sources" - I see you provided me none of what I asked for.
"Or are those not people to you?" - can't you read? Why pull in this kind of derogatory bullshit.
Again, I'm no apologist - far from it - for the crimes of the USA's hegemonic foreign policy and meddling in other country's affairs. But I specifically asked for numbers here. Even including the various conflicts you mentioned - not to mention Vietnam, Cambodia, most of Central and South America - you must have an upper bound for that number.
But you don't seem to mention anything about the actual reality of the CCP and its horrendous toll on human life - mostly to its own citizens. The OP was saying the USA has killed far more than China. That is stupendously, outrageously wrong - Mau is responsible for far more deaths than even the wildest accounting of US atrocities.
"China doesn't go around the world using it's military to force it's will upon people" - it literally has secret police stations in the USA and Canada where they punish Chinese abroad that have disobeyed dictates. WTF are you on about?
"The US is the 4th Reich and the most evil government to ever exist" - for Christ sake. Yes, there is a tremendous amount of really shady shit in the USA's (recent) history, but 4th Reich? Most evil government?? If you really believe that then I'm wasting my time here with someone who's brain is broken.
Ahh, looking at your history of 1-liner comments it's clear you're mostly into low effort trolling. And your comment is so outside the bounds of reason that I must presume you're either wildly uninformed or acting in bad faith.
Thats not propaganda. If you are a Chinese citizen who went through the Chinese Ducati in system, are you telling me they successfully convinced you that nothing happened in 1989? Or more people didnt die in the siege of Changchun than say when Japan invaded nanjing?
PLA has always been focused on battling other Chinese, it’s literally in its name [the L stands for liberation, it’s still an army aimed at domestic subjugation rather than doing anything abroad).
A lot of things. In the past century USA had plenty of "no blacks" signs around, Operation Barrel Roll happened against a neutral country, so I doubt USA have the moral high ground you think it has.
If we specifically refer to the past decade though, it looks much worse for USA.
I’m still waiting for those well sourced numbers I asked for.
Again, I’m not making any excuses for the USA, though you seem insistent on believing so. Two things can be true at the same time: that the USA has been a destructive world influence and contributed to much suffering, as well as China having killed an astronomical number of its own citizens. Both are bad, China is worse, full stop.
And why move the goalposts to the last decade? That’s like excusing Bill Cosby because he hasn’t done any raping lately.
The thing is - everyone complains about AI stealing our attention and understanding. But you can just as easily use an LLM as a tool to gain a deeper understanding. It's just the default path for most folks is "Hey clanker, do the thing" rather than "Hello clanker, please tell me about how that thing works".
I've done at least a little of the latter, and it's amazing how underrated it is as an educational tool - especially for the solo individual.
That’s the “diets don’t work” line. I’m not denying that most people use AI for the path of least resistance, but I am saying that there’s more potential than just that, and it’s almost entirely overlooked in the broad debate.
Bad counterexample, c.f. the current obesity epidemic and the popularity of GLP-1s.
I get what you're saying, it's just that I think what you're saying is not overlooked, it's simply insignificant to the debate about the effect of these tools on society. Your argument comes off to me like someone saying "everyone is complaining about how these cigarettes cause cancer, but you can just as easily use lit cigarettes to warm your hands on a cold day. This is what everyone's missing in this debate."
I don't think we can change each others' minds with talk, we'll just have to see how it plays out in the coming decades.
That's precisely why it's a good example. It's always taken work to lose weight, just because it's not common doesn't mean it's impossible. The common rhetoric loses that nuance, that's my point.
I didn't say anything else, you're reworking what I'm saying here and distorting my message.
The book/written word is also a technology that has preferences on how it’s used and transformations that it imposes on its users, and they’re much different than those of TV or computers.
Absolutely - you used to have to control the richness of the fuel mixture manually. You used to have to crank it to start it, manually interact with a clutch to shift gears, etc.
I appreciate the tactile joy of interacting with simple systems like those, but most times I just want to get where I'm going. Freeing my attention from those tasks allows me to pay more attention to the (inattentive) drivers around me, and try my best to not die.
Eventually a computer will handle driving for most of us, and we can lament about all the things we've lost there too. If you zoom out, most of us don't have an in-depth understanding of how an entire city works (power, garbage, sewage, maintenance, public services, politics, etc), and couldn't coordinate the various activities to keep it running if we had to. We live in towers of abstraction.
My read is that there does seem a clear difference between simple -> advanced machines vs simple -> "smart" machines. Nearly every smart machine is bullshit enshitification-in-waiting. Rent-seeking in-waiting. Smart tvs, smart cars with touch-screens. some would argue apple products. These things proclaim advancements but what they really do is black-box and dumb everything down to the lowest common denominator, then quite literally impose control over the air, and shove ads to you.
I'm all for just getting to where I need to go by using the appropriate tool, like a reliable car. But no not if it means foregoing the liberty of other options.
I think the dumbing down of things is a closely related yet adjacent issue. And I too absolutely despise the enshitification you’re describing.
I drove a BMW rental recently, and I swear it felt like I was driving around a toy. Such obvious HCI usability concerns, even my wife (non techie) was appalled and able to call out many obvious and stupid design decisions. It felt like a vibe coded car. A vision of the future, no doubt.
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