First they send you this...

What I wanted to write is how good my life is and how grateful I am. That's what such views provoke. But no! I am fucked. Because being in such a place and not being in the real moment, but thinking what I am going to post is just a mental illness. Let's admit it.

If you think you can ignore generative AI as a developer to keep your code pure, you're hamstringing yourself. In fact, it's just meta-coding. You still get to write instructions, just as a prompt. Top left 3 lines are mine. The rest is @AnthropicAI Claude. And the code works.

To be a professional developer, you have to learn your limits and communicate them clearly. If you're unsure you can implement something, say it. If you know you can't meet a deadline, tell it in advance. If a requirement looks too weird or hard, speak out and get help.

Interesting article on high end gyms filling gaps in human connection & unwanted commercial real estate. Will companies ditch the office and buy gym memberships for employees instead? What do you think?

a mind boggling amount of work went into the world around us. I can't believe anything works at all. It's actually remarkable, shocking, absurd. Us humans. We really figured it out

We are creating a world that is only fit for machines. We built machines to serve us, that was the whole point of science. Not to expand our knowledge for knowledge's sake, but to create industry. To create machines. And now, we exist to serve the machines. We sacrifice the liveability of our neighbourhoods to make them more suitable for cars. We subject ourselves to endless EMF radiation for the sake of our mobile phones. We pollute the planet and strip it of all of its rare earth minerals in order to make more and more machines, while we poison our air and our water. We destroy nature-- both the nature for our own enjoyment but also the nature that animals require to live-- in order to build more and more, always expanding our cities. But never with buildings that beautify our surroundings or serve some higher human purpose, but ugly buildings that will be dated in 20 years and torn down in 50 to house various consumer industries to sell us more machines, just to take up more space, until the domination of technology over nature is complete and the only trees you see will be plastic replicas. Be sure to get that microchip so that you can serve-- I mean, "interface" with the machines better. Never mind that it will probably give you cancer. With all our scientific progress, why have we not figured out a way to make our planet cleaner and healthier for organic life (especially us!)? Why has all of our "progress" resulted in us becoming further enslaved to machines? And the Leviathan will march ever onward, in the name of science and progress, into a transhumanist, techno-communist hell... We could have created such a beautiful world. Instead, we live on a polluted, overcrowded planet where we are depressed, anxious, and sick all the time. Was all this "progress" really worth it? Was it even progress at all?

The subtle imperfections to someone’s writing are slowly becoming one of the big tells to me that AI didn’t write it. And I think we’ll see more & more of it. The more polished it is, the more people will learn to ignore it.

This meme is revealing, both in its brilliance and its shortcomings. I'll start with the brilliance. Social media algorithms have a deeper and more intimate understanding of their users than most of their best friends do. They know our quirks, our desires, our lusts, and our aspirations. They know things about us that we don't even know about ourselves. So yes, they disturb us by showing us our own shadow. What about the shortcomings? The algorithms cater to our short-term desires instead of our long-term ones. They suck us in with political dramas, viral videos, and all kinds of porn. Like a box of Pringles, these things are irresistible in the moment, but leave us feeling regretful after the fact. So yes, like junk food, social media can ruin lives by preying on our impulses. But our information environment doesn't need to be polluted like this. This begs the question: How would algorithms change if they prioritized our long-term desires?

“Through caring for certain others, by serving them through caring, a man lives the meaning of his own life. In the sense in which a man can ever be… home in the world, he is at home not through dominating, or explaining, or appreciating, but through caring and being cared for.”

This should be obvious. Once you become an adult in a position of responsibility, there's no more "well-meaning." An actual well-meaning person would research the topic, talk with people, make small tests, pre-mortem, etc. If you didn't, you don't get to claim you meant well.

Of course Indians and Asians would not understand that you learn things for fun and curiosity, not merely for “utility”. That’s why they usually become robots, cogs in the machine. And never the creative force. The university was invented by European aristocrats who loved learning for the sake of it. Not peasants always scrambling to be “useful”. Useful to whom? To what end?

I encourage everyone on Twitter to listen to this episode of the Cosmic Matrix podcast with @lauramatsue and @veilofreality because almost all of you could benefit from hearing it. The kind of polarisation they are talking about is rampant on Twitter. One of the things they mention is that when you swing hard to one extreme, you actually strengthen the opposite. Everything in the cosmos seeks balance and this applies on every level of reality. If you can’t hold the tension of opposites and you collapse into one extreme side or the other, then you produce an equal and opposite reaction on the other side. Every incel creates a new feminist or vice versa, for example. Holding an extreme position is generally anti-truth. Ideology is designed to protect the ego more than to illuminates objective reality. In my many years in extremist politics, I’ve noticed that the genuine truth seekers always inevitably end up learning to hold the tension of opposites and coming to a nuanced understanding, while those who want comforting lies cling ever more tightly to ideology. Any -ism is fundamentally anti-truth to some degree. It’s a lot easier to indulge in self-righteous anger and rage at a hated “other”, but this is very low-vibe and the mark of an unhealthy and unbalanced mind. One should instead strive to maintain equilibrium and refuse to be affected by extreme rhetoric. Another thing Laura and Bernard mention is that polarisation necessarily seeks the destruction of the other side. This, too, is something the cosmic laws do not allow for. The framework of the cosmos is built upon the tension of opposites and the destruction of one means the destruction of the other. When you take up an extreme position, not only do you contribute to the very problem you are complaining about it, but you also close off any pathway to a constructive resolution. So the question you have to ask yourself (and honestly reflect on) is, do you just enjoy being mad or do you actually want an effective solution? Sadly, I think a lot of people just want to indulge their anger and actually revel in the very destruction they nominally complain about.

I think this is one of those issues where men and women are talking past each other. Men fixate on the statistical realities and assume that women must be dumb for not understanding the math. Men aren’t wrong about the statistics, but what’s lacking is an understanding of the emotional content. Women are comparing the bear to the behaviour of men that they’ve experienced. They aren’t talking about the statistical realities, but about how hurt they have been by men. Men are getting offended at being essentially accused of being inherently violent towards women and I think men have as right to be offended by that, since most of them don’t fit that profile and are far more likely to want to defend a woman than hurt her. But they are perhaps taking it too personally and this prevents them from hearing what women are actually saying about the fear they have towards men because they have experienced something terrible and dehumanising at the hands of men in the past. The reason this video is resonating with women is because this man understands what they are actually trying to say, whereas men who focus on the statistics are talking about something completely different. I think both groups have valid points, but neither is really hearing what the other is saying. Both sides seem far too triggered to listen objectively or with compassion.