Rottcodd

Sort of.

More it’s just the way I’ve pretty much always been. Before I was even really aware of it, I apparently figured out that I couldn’t control the outside world but I could control how I reacted to it, so that was what I focused on. One could sort of say that I did it simply because it made sense to me, but even that makes it sound more conscious than it was. It’s more that it just never occurred to me to do things any other way.

It was only much later that I discovered that there was a philosophy called “stoicism” that advocated that.

“You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength.” - Marcus Aurelius

I recognize that the universe is so vast that it’s likely that life forms other than us exist in it, but that’s the extent of it.

I’ve seen no verifiable evidence that they in fact do, so I don’t “believe” that they do.

Really, I don’t “believe” in much of anything for which there is no verifiable evidence. I don’t even understand how that works - how it is that other people apparently do. It’s not a conscious choice or anything - it’s just appears that there’s a set of requirements that must be met before the position of “belief” is triggered inside my mind, and one of those requirements is verifiable evidence. Without that, the state of “believing” just isn’t triggered, and it’s not as if I can somehow force it, so that’s that.

As far as I can see, governments are comprised almost entirely of psychopaths, opportunists, charlatans and fools, so I see little likelihood that they possess concealed knowledge regarding any nominal extraterrestrial life. First, and most simply, if they did possess any such knowledge, it’s near certain that somebody would’ve blabbed something by now.

Beyond that though, I think it’s exceedingly unlikely that any alien life form capable of traveling interstellar distances would, on arriving on the Earth, seek out contact with a government, much less limit its contact to a government. If they’re that advanced, it can only be the case that they, in their own development, either never bought into the flatly ludicrous and clearly destructive idea of institutionalized authority or overcame it before it inevitably destroyed them, and in either case, I don’t see any reason why they would lend any credence to our mass delusion that this one subset of humanity forms a specially qualified and empowered elite that rightly oversees everyone else’s interests. That’s our delusion - not theirs.

Right, but it’s not a paradox - it’s a conundrum. It’s not just that the person saying it is part of the first group, but that they necessarily are.

Since people want to believe that they “know better,” there’s a strong urge to count oneself among the second group, which immediately places one in the first.

There are two kinds of people in the world - those who think there are two kinds of people in the world and those who know better.

What “entitlement?”

I don’t expect anyone to start a web site or service or to give me or anyone else access to it at all, much less for free.

I’m just making the very narrow point that when a company chooses to do all of that, and manages to make enough money to build a plush corporate headquarters on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay its executives millions or even tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, then starts crying about not making enough money, that’s self-evident bullshit.

If anybody’s acting"entitled" in that scenario, it’s the greedy corporate weasels who spend billions on their own privilege, then expect us to cover their asses when they come up short.

I expect a wave of internet users to get upset and call paying for used services “enshittification”, because people don’t realise how much running these AI models actually costs.

I am so tired of this bullshit. Every time I’ve turned around, for the past thirty years now, I’ve seen some variation on this same basic song and dance.

Yet somehow, in spite of supposedly being burdened with so much expense and not given their due by a selfish, ignorant public, these companies still manage to build plush offices on some of the most expensive real estate on the planet and pay eight- or even nine-figure salaries to a raft of executive parasites.

When they start selling assets and cutting executive salaries, or better yet laying them off, then I’ll entertain the possibility that they need more revenue. Until then, fuck 'em.

I deliberately avoided having kids and I don’t have any particular existential dread, so I’m just sort of sitting back and bemusedly watching it all play out. I just read the latest bit about one or another obscenely wealthy and/or powerful blatant psychopath doing or saying something gibberingly insane and I marvel yet again at the fact that the world is run by literal lunatics and nobody seems to even notice.

And when it stops being cynically amusing, I shut it off and go do something else.

Money wins, every time.

And right there, you answered your own (presumably rhetorical) question.

The money people jumped on AI as soon as they scented the chance of profit, and that’s it. ALL other considerations are now secondary to a handful of psychopaths making as much money as possible.

Firefox.

Seriously. Every app I’ve tried has come up short in one way or another. Lemmy is best in a browser and the best browser is Firefox.

It doesn’t matter how much money he has - every time I visualize Musk posting to Twitter, I see him as a teenage edgelord in a shabby suburban tract house, hunched over an off-the-shelf desktop PC in a room with green shag carpeting and fake wood paneling, lit only by the glow from the screen, giggling to himself.

Yeah - I used to check in on it from time to time, and there were always new responses, and new people trying to argue with him, and he’d just run them in circles with hilariously overly literal (mis)interpretations of whatever they said. It went on for years.

I’m pretty sure I remember the admin deleting part of it while it was still active, and eventually deleting it entirely. It’s a shame - it should’ve been saved for posterity.

Years ago, on IMDb, a poster called rabbitmoon kept a thread going for years on the Rambo board that is still the best I’ve ever seen.

The whole thing started with him posting that he was shocked when, about a third of the way through the movie, there was a scene in which a character was shot with a bullet from a gun. Then he countered, completely earnestly and deadpan, every response he got.

The original thread is long gone, and the only thing I could find of it is an excerpt that was posted on Reddit - LINK

And not only will you make everyone’s lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you’re often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you’ll be right.

That’s the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you’re wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you’re wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won’t be. You’ll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.

If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you’re wrong, then you’re instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you’ll actually be right. And if you don’t get it that time, that’s fine - just freely admit that you’re wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.

So you’ll not only make everyone’s lives more pleasant - you’ll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?

Decentralization isn’t an ideal - it’s a fact. It’s the reality of the fediverse.

That was a rhetorical question.

Ah well… I didn’t have much hope that it’d work.

That’s literally the point of the federated decentralization, so people can be allowed to make their own decisions…

This is not quite accurate, and it neatly illustrates the problem.

“Allowed,” in this context, is incoherent. There can be no “allowed” unless there’s some authority empowered to, and mechanisms by which to, allow this or disallow that.

The literal point of decentralization is to move entirely away from institutionalized, hierarchical authority by arranging things so that it can neither be claimed nor exercised in the first place.

And one problem is that people tend to drag their authoritarian habits of thought along with them.

Okay - let’s pretend that everyone on this thread agrees that X is what “we” should do.

Then what?

Of course they did. That’s the next step in the perpetual war assembly line.

The entire thread and the entire concept underlying it and all the other threads in which people yammer on and on about what “we” should do plainly miss the most crucial part of the fact that the fediverse is decentralized - it’s not just that you don’t have the power to decide what “we” should do, but that the power to decide what “we” should do does not and can not exist at all.

For fucks sake - which part of “decentralized” do you people not understand?