suslik

Please don’t give euro commission ideas.

> Everything we have witnessed that arises also passes away. Every living thing, every dead thing - even stars and planets - arise and pass away.

The context was if biological aging and age-related death can be stopped / prevented / reversed, and I don't see in what you wrote an argument against that. Those are a set of biochemical processes, and if there exist a scientific principle which would prevent modulating them successfully, you didn't name it.

> Moreover, why would you want immortality?

First, this is an orthogonal question. Whether I don't want something to happen, doesn't mean it can't, or won't: I never wanted to be replaced by LLMs, but those got invented anyway. Anyhow, the immortality we're talking about isn't of the kind where you are unable to die no matter what, it's just you don't age. You are permanently 22 - but so is everyone around you. I don't know, maybe it gets boring after 300 years, maybe after 300.000 - but I'd rather try and take myself out when I feel like it than die feeling there's so much more to experience (which is almost certainly going to be the case).

Is there a reason why it can't possibly be stopped?

Of course it's a feature; it still doesn't mean it cannot be stopped or considerably postponed.

I am at a point where I simply stopped worrying and began to love the bomb. I did my best, I really did - degoogled before it was trendy, dropped all social media, built a homelab for complete data ownership, set up matrix messaging with family, and so on - but it feels like a wasted effort at this point.

All my data is out there, one way or another, and a dedicated cybercriminal - or worse, a government entity - can obtain or exfiltrate it without issues. I know it, they know it, everyone knows it.

The only thing I can change now is my reaction to this fact, and although the idea of off grid autarky is tempting, I am not there yet. I just don't want to stop living - flying abroad, going to doctors - I just accept that privacy in the current state of human condition is impossible, and move on with my life.

> you don't have the right to refuse

What happens if I still do? Or pretend that I forgot my pin and accidentally lock my phone down?

> physical spaces where people can meet in person for a low or zero cost

Singles mixers and speed dating exist specifically for this, but those come with their own problems - one needs to be confident to approach others, social enough to navigate a group environment, comfortable with receiving and providing rejection, which is much less subtle than in apps where a chat just dies, and so on.

But why do we need changes on the desktop? What was wrong with the desktops of Gnome 2 / Windows XP / Snow Leopard era? I'll never understand why we couldn't just stick with that - it felt that desktop was solved back then and is going downhill ever since, change for the sake of change, or maybe marketing to make things look prettier.

Depends on the coffee intake and stress; when I am on vacation, I sleep 7-8 hours without waking up. I am lucky that I don't need to pee during the night, though.

That was more than a decade ago, but I believe the highest I went for was about 4-500ug (according to the vendor, it was on a postal stamp so there can be quite some variance). I was exploring psychedelics several months in a row while increasing the dose, so there might have been some tolerance buildup. And it wasn't that I had no visuals at all - juar there was nothing visually profound, just some things shifting and moving here and there, people outside looking a bit strange, etc. Felt more like strange, weird drunkenness than anything. It was not at at all an uninteresting experience - just extremely cerebral. I tried DMT several times by the way, but couldn't break through - it gets very scary very fast, and the taste is like smoking a plastic bag, which was in itself quite off-putting.

I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.

For me it requires login even with ORR.

… a feature which, at least for me, is rendered almost entirely useless by massive cookie banners that always cover the entire field of view of the hover. But, surprisingly, not in this specific case.

I use the discover weekly / radio / and other discovery features all the time, and still never had a problem. I mostly use apple hardware + osx and ios, however, so perhaps mileage varies on other platforms. It worked fine in Firefox on Linux when I tried, but I didn't push it too hard - usually when I'm at work, I just listen via the phone.

I have been on Spotify from almost the beginning, and see zero reasons to switch. The app never bothered me at all - I find the reactions in this thread startling.

> it doesn't even seem like a game at first, you have no idea what is going on, and large swaths of options and features may take dozens of hours to stumble across

For me personally, figuring these things out was the most fun I got out of such games. I had an absolute blast loading CK2 without a tutorial and spending the next several hours trying to figure out what is all this nonsense about. Same with DF btw, once I figured out the idea, mechanics, control, and played for some hours to learn to build a somewhat sustainable fortress, it kinda stopped being fun.

The fact that it is a crime (if it is, indeed, a fact), only makes it even more fucked up.

A necessary condition is not always sufficient.

Very nice post. I wish life didn't ruin this for me. As a child, I was forced to pick berries and mushrooms alone when all my friends were playing football - and it made me hate the process with all my heart. But that was so long ago - maybe I should give it one more chance...

> misuse

Well that’s not really true; it covers completely legitimate use also.

> Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

I gave that book to my mathematician grandma, and she found it so boring she couldn’t finish it - “All this stuff was known for decades”. True anecdote.

When I lived in a rather hot area of Spain for a year, I was shocked to find out that many apartments don't have an air conditioner. In a place where a similar heat wave happens every year, for months. A friend of mine moved there from Germany and being somewhat frugal, rented a place without and aircon. Let me just say that he didn't enjoy the summer nights one bit.

I myself had one, but I could probably rent a car for the cost of running it.

> but does anybody actually browse through linkedin?

Sometimes I do, reflexively, when I check my messages or some specific people. I get no value out of it. But I do know people who seriously use linkedin, as in read, post, comment, and message people.

Yes it would be very much in trouble. I wouldn’t want to be around to witness that, though.

These are the good guys, haven't you heard?

I see this a lot, but it depends on how you define these terms. If person A defines British such as British = Briton, you categorically claiming that British =/= Briton is not really an argument, just a statement of belief. An argument would be why you think your definition is better, more correct, etc.

I can't just do that, she is an autonomous person, and quite willful also. Despite her age, she is not only as lucid as it gets - she still works (although from home) as an applied mathematician!

"God! I only asked her to be a hooker. It's not like I wanted her to work in telesales".

I stopped picking up unsolicited unknown calls perhaps a decade ago, and nothing was lost. It was impossible, however, to convince my 99-year-old grandma to do the same; she vehemently refuses because that would be 'impolite'. It would be great to have a tech solution for this, really, but I doubt printing another law is going to help with the scammier side of this market.

Proud? No, but I am not ashamed of it also.

I would be the first to admit my ignorance on the absolute majority of topics. There is a limited number of things I can learn in life, and kubernetes won't be one of them - I'm just not interested in it (and all the other infra stuff, to be honest), as long as it works.