How about Arwen? She’s charismatic, has no hate for anyone, and needs a place to live. I’m sure she’d be a great candidate.

I’ve been moving toward GOG to prevent DRM/update annoyance, but I’ve used isthereanydeal to find some other places to get things I want on steam.

I have a particularly weird view on this so I don’t know how helpful it will be, but I share it when people discuss alcohol.

You, as a person, are basically an imaginary construct given meaning by consistency. Your friends trust you because you consistently behave in a way that says they can trust you. The pattern of behaviours is you because the physical parts swap out all the time. When you drink, you distort yourself a little, because it distorts the behaviour. Anyone who says it doesn’t is delusional. For some people, the distortion is minor. For others, it distorts them a great deal. The drunk you is always so distorted as to be essentially a different person, but one for whom you have total responsibility, because you ‘gave them the keys’ as it were. You are letting the funhouse mirror version of yourself take control of your body so you can be amused by the distortions. Everybody’s mirror is different, but they are all distorted. How much do you trust someone who is much like you, but distorted?

1. Modulate expectations. Nothing will let you be 100% productive, 100% of the day. You don’t want that anyway. The moment you get 100% productivity, they will demand 105%, which you are not capable of. Even if you can hit 100% for a moment, you can’t maintain it. It’d be like redlining an engine. Find your sustainable level of work and maintain it. You won’t get paid anything if you kill yourself trying to do more.
2. Take breaks before you hit the wall. Work an hour, go for a walk. Work an hour, close your eyes and do deep breathing for a bit. Work for an hour, sing along to a few songs. Don’t think actively during the breaks. Your unconscious needs processing time. This keeps you from hitting the wall so hard, and might let you get an extra cycle or two.
3. Make the things you do on those breaks activities that do not require strong attention but do get air moving through your lungs. Part of fatigue is build up of waste products in the brain. Get air and blood in there and it’ll help.

Arguably, if you are burnt out after 3 hours but force yourself to keep trying, you are still only pretending to be working, and possibly making more work for yourself later by making mistakes.

If you were ‘connected’ via instagram, you were not connected. You were pretending.

If I had my understanding of the world that deeply shaken, I’d be in the throws of Lovecraftian insanity. I would have even less certainty of anything than the already low certainty I have now. That’s a ‘vampire problem.’ There’s no way of guessing what I might do if I was that fundamentally derealised.

A cat in assless chaps, eh?

Realistically, it’s just media visibility. People were doing ML research for ages before LLMs became ‘the next big thing.’ The things developed by that research are often incredible but also incredibly narrow. ML based protein folding systems were big news among nerds several years ago. The amount you have to explain to even have the groundwork to explain how important that development is could never fit in a clickbait headline or article. You know what does fit in a clickbait title? ‘Celebrity ignoramus talks to chatbot, decides it’s God.’ ‘AI company insider says their product is the best thing since sliced bread and everyone who doesn’t pay them money will commit suicide.’ and ‘You are doomed because of AI. Click here to find out why.’ No one outside of the field those narrow ML systems are built for can understand their output. Anyone can understand ‘You’re absolutely right!’

People. I don’t see any mention of people in that itinerary. If you want to FEEL good about what you are doing, you need a human in there somewhere. People need social interaction, and the real deal, not something transactional. So, learn to be human. It’s a powerful skill that will help you survive turning yourself into a machine to analyse market data. Pick something you can do with other people. Play a game like chess face to face. Find a reading group at your local bookstore/library and learn some literary analysis. Whatever it is, just do it with people who aren’t there to seek more money.

Re-reading the Sundering duology by Jaqueline Carey at the moment. I loved it years ago so I’m checking to see if it really was that good or if I was just young. It has held up fairly well. I highly recommend it for anyone who likes fantasy.

Teacher: (looking at term paper which consists entirely of em dashes and explanations why it is a large language model) “Well, this student hasn’t paid any attention in class all year, has managed not to be automatically failed through skipping classes, but only just, shows no sign of actually wanting to learn anything, swears at me when I say they should be doing schoolwork in the classroom, lies to their parents that I’m failing them because I’m racist, and is supported in those lies by their friends and family. I could fail them, which will bring them back to this school, and probably my classroom, and probably with a grudge against me, and the admin will say I failed as a teacher by not getting them to learn enough to pass… or I could give them just enough credit to get a D-- and make them some other teacher’s problem so I can concentrate on the students I really feel like I can help next year.
…
Have fun in college, shithead.”

In a number of places, it’d be great in a number of ways.

The big issue, as usual, is cost. Want a house? Fast growth wood frames can be built in a workshop/factory, stood up quickly, capped with more fast growth wood roof frames, skinned with thin boards made from woodchips and sawdust, or just chickenwire and cement, roofed with tar, and slathered in cheap acrylic paint. The engineering is all off-the-shelf at this point because it’s so common.

Want a U-house? You’re going to be digging. Digging down a foot or two isn’t that big of a problem but tends to get more difficult the deeper you go, so expect a lot of excavation costs compared to the stick-built house. Then you have to make all those walls strong enough to hold back the surrounding earth. Get ready to spend a lot more time doing engineering tests to make sure the retaining walls will hold, the water won’t turn it all to mush, etc. There is an earth pressure underground just like there’s water pressure in the ocean. Then there’s the roof. If it’s really underground, that’s a lot of weight to support. All that support has a material cost. All the engineering work to make sure it’s safe has a labor cost. Hiring workers who have the kind of training needed to do more than run a nail gun and a paint sprayer has a labor cost. The finding of those people at all can be a difficult task for the contractor/developer, and can be quite difficult when most house builders haven’t been doing that kind of construction.

And at the end of all this you have to get someone to pay for it. Getting people to pay even the same cost as the stick-built house for a house that doesn’t fit into their dreams of looking like the vision of success implanted in their brain by the pop culture of their youth is way harder than just cutting corners and being the Walmart of housing. Being a slacker sometimes pays incredibly well. Greatness can never succeed in capitalism because the one-size-fits-most model is always more profitable.

That joke started failing to make anyone laugh the first time it was told.

My ‘favourite sport,’ by means of being the only thing called a ‘sport’ I don’t find utterly boring, is sepak takraw. It has elements of hacky-sack which I like, and while I wouldn’t do them myself, pros regularly do backflips as part of the game, so it’s actually not painfully dull to watch either.

My favourite ‘exercise’ is just walking. When it’s not overly hot out, it’s quite pleasant but quite good for you in comparison to the amount of effort it takes.

Layers of depth in a fluid is the best metaphor I have.

The ‘top’ ‘layer’ is the ‘loudest.’ It has the word-thoughts. If I want to solidify ideas and plans into an expressible form, it happens here. Almost everything that comes out of my mouth is formed into word-thoughts first, and then repeated aloud. If I want to ‘rubber duck’ a problem, I do it here. Sometimes ‘bubbles’ come from below and disrupt the structure of these thoughts.

The next ‘lower’ ‘layer’ is the image space. Things I am actively imagining are here. Images, 3D forms, music, conceptual mapping, etc.

The next ‘lower’ is the semi-conscious. Thoughts I haven’t established fully into expressible thoughts or images are here in half-graspable form. Sometimes it feels like something lower pushes elements up into this space as ‘important.’ Sometimes those things are pushed up strongly enough they press into the layer above.

I can sometimes sense things happening deeper down, parts that are processing inputs in ways my metacognition can’t perceive.

Across the whole space is a certain turbidity representing emotional disruptions and physical mental hindrances like lack of sleep, etc.

Up and down votes are intended as indicators of quality that people abuse as markers of taste. If you downvote because the post/comment is unhelpful/useless/etc. that’s just voting as intended. If you are about to downvote because something is hateful, just report it to the mods instead. If you use certain clients, like Voyager, you will also see cumulative totals for your personal votes on users, which can be a great way to spot people you shouldn’t interact with, and probably just block. If you can’t tell the difference between people who are willfully nasty vs ignorant, maybe focus on learning to tell that rather than participate too much.

If you’re going on down to Nashville looking for a sole to steal, look under your seat.

It takes a bit more effort to engage with people using language that will be more likely to reach them but if you want to get someone to understand, and are capable of it, speaking to them in their native tongue is more effective. When talking to someone who has never been given a basic understanding of communism, or who has been given an intentionally misleading false understanding, while you have, you can say things that do not translate because you are effectively speaking a different dialect of English from them. When you say ‘I’m a Stalinist-Marxist Communist,’ that translates as ‘I am a genocider-terrorist mother-fucker.’ They are less likely to understand you than a person from Kazakhstan because at least the Kazakh hasn’t been trained to hate you. Learning to say things in the local tongue is the only way to bypass the filter long enough to get them to learn the better definitions of all those words.

Read before responding, guy.