I was out of work for over a year and jobs have been coming in again since two months. The many indications that this unholy shit bubble is finally bursting has me smiling, dancing and singing “The robot is dead, the robot is dead!”. I hate the AI hype with a passion, not just because of my work, but because of the ghastly slop we’re being exposed to everywhere online. I hope it disappears quickly into the same hole NFTs when to fuck off into.

Now before the billionaires come up with the next stupid hype can we at least eat a few of them?

Don’t use AI. Huge negative environmental and social impact just to create slop. Not going to play your games, sorry.

I’m a translator, and we’ve been plagued by MT (machine translation) for years. A year ago translation jobs stopped completely and all I was offered was “Rating AI results”. I refused all of that garbage and turned temporally very poor. I went to shovel manure like a proper peasant to not have to engage with this shit. A year later translation seems to bounce back a bit, and I suspect art will do so as well. Most people can’t stand this slightly-off uncanny slop everywhere. It’s not just us artists and writers who react with almost visceral hate to this life-less soul-less crap. The hype will die down (don’t forget to diss it wherever you can in your free time!)

Lots of good advice here already, especially regarding IFS, which is a therapy approach that works with splitting one’s inner monologue into a conversation between different voices.

Since a lot of commenters seem to equate inner voices with schizophrenia or psychosis I’d like to let you (and them) know it’s not that unusual to have inner voices with different personalities! I found my inner voices very helpful to deal with my mental challenges and this never turned into anything uncontrollable. I had a similar very critical inner voice which I then recognized as mainly being my mother’s way of criticizing me - even after I went no contact with mom, she was still occupying space in my head telling me everything I did wrong.

The way out was really simple, CBT-based: a therapist reminded me to be kind to myself and I just practised - like giving myself an inner hug every time I used the unkind voice and remembering that kindness to myself is important (not beating myself up for being unkind!), and to avoid self-deprecating humour. It just took some time, maybe a year, and now I see clear improvements. The voice is pretty much gone. At the moment I have no need to separate into different voices and feel quite at home within myself. Hope you get there soon, you seem a be on a good path towards it!

Not knowing what number 3 is

What the fuck, that looks absolutely desperate! I’m sure it will have the opposite effect. Fuck reddit.

The majority of German media reports as if Trump was a normal politician doing normal politics stuff. Where I would expect some voices calling out the absolute awfulness of human rights violations being committed and laws disregarded it all sounds like “This is fine! We might not agree, but there is nothing outrageous! He’s just a very silly guy who happens to be the president of the USA!” - It is absolutely chilling to not have any larger news outlets getting absolutely alarmed, all is just business as usual. But then it’s the same with Israel - “12345678 more children died in the ongoing conflict (we are not going to tell you that they were murdered and who did it)” instead of “Israel commits murder and genocide and needs to be stopped.”

I’m German and terrified. I find it difficult to grasp that the playbook that was used in Nazi Germany is right there to compare, how the whole thing happened has been taught in schools to several generations in a row, there’s memorial places to visit - the whole wealth of information is there so it doesn’t happen again!!

And here we are, and it is happening again - in what seems an even more overt way than old Adolf ever dared to pull off. They just built a concentration camp in Florida and are loudly bragging about it. People are randomly being kidnapped from the street, based not even on their immigration status but their skin color, by groups of unidentified thugs. All while the media - even international media - still seem to be unable to call “Fascism” to what is happening.

I would have hoped that us being the eternal Nazis would at least have a deterring effect on other people to not fall into the same trap.

It was probably a range of plants and fungi seeking interaction with a species that could care for them and bring them to new places. Maybe wheat and yeast ganged up to control the apes? However the first plant humans propagated were fig trees, and apparently the first plant we grew in a gardening context was the bottle gourd (pot to ferment stuff in!) Maybe we find out one day which of those fuckers are responsible for us having credit scores and 9-5 now!!

A lot of fermented stuff like bread, cheese, wine and beer most likely started as “stuff forgotten in a pot” - not very complicated. In case of bread you need: two stones for milling the grain, a pot to mix it with water and store it, and then a fire to bake it. Not medieval tech, but way earlier.

Beer has been known since at least the bronze age, there are recipes known today, but the initial stage was, yet again, mill some grain, mix with water, forget in a pot.

Wine: forget some fruit in a pot.

Source: Reading history, plus my ADHD brain keeps forgetting stuff in the kitchen. I accidentally invented soda one of these days, because sometimes the forgotten stuff gets fizzy, too (you do need to invent the hermetically closing jar for that though, open clay pot doesn’t work in that case)!

Btw one of my crazier theories (although I’m not the only person considering it) is that it wasn’t us domesticating the world, but that we were domesticated by yeast. So it was inevitable that we kept producing vessels and feeding the fungus with sugar in ever more refined ways. Fungus wants to grow.

How is leisure time terrible? And it wasn’t the only thing I was looking at. Clean air, clean water, sustainable production, green spaces, quality over quantity of products, sustainable production… But then I feel like you don’t want to actually engage. Go on and continue “industrial revolution good, low tech past bad” - I can’t help you here.

If you read history in more detail you’ll find that that’s not quite true. The industrial revolution only improved the quality of life for people after the rich and powerful made sure to enclose the commons and invade countries all over the world making living conditions for people worse in the process. Hunters and gatherers had more leisure time than the industrial worker, even medieval peasants had more leisure time than the industrial worker, living conditions got worse when people were forced into cities (once again, by stealing communal land that made it possible that villages were pretty much self sufficient).

Better living conditions nowadays are only possible because the environment is being destroyed at a record rate, and are declining again as we speak, with pollution making life in those glorious industrial cities worse every day.

History is written by the winners so you have to read between the lines to figure out how much of this supposed better life for all is actually propaganda.

Search for tech coops, quite a few seem to be popping up recently. I’m not directly in tech and still haven’t found who I’d really love to work for, so I can’t help much, but it’s a lovely question and I’m curious about other people’s answers!

This hints at a problem of academia being in favour of ‘lots of expensive words good’. They start training us for this at school - more often than not churning out a longer and more complex text is rewarded over writing succinctly and in language that is easily understandable to all.

Yes, I understand using accurate terminology is a thing, and that this terminology can get extensive and complex. But it doesn’t account for all of the word salad produced because we expect academic texts to sound a certain way. And that’s how we get desperate people using robots to keep up with the silly demand for overcomplicated word salad and then other desperate people using robots to work their way through the aforementioned word salad.

Not good arguments imo. Art can be this ‘blood, sweat and tears’ thing if you are into it, but art also can be an activity you do because you enjoy doing it, without a single fuck given that the result looks like the wet fart of a 3yo. I mostly don’t care how people make art. Scratch your art into rock with a baguette if you feel that’s the level of pain needed, or paint with your period blood if that floats your boat.

But use AI? It is incredibly bad for the environment, uses other people’s work without their consent, and it’s being owned by fascist fucking tech bros who want to drown the world in doom. You wouldn’t kick a puppy and call it art, same goes for AI.

He took a day longer to arrive, but has been with me since yesterday and seems to settle well. Not sure about a name yet. It’s so good to have someone to care for again, keeps me from going down depression lane first thing in the morning because I’m busy with litter box and cat food.

I won’t fight a war together with any moron who will fight others based on their looks, so I guess you’re on your own there … I’ll probably fight others based on their actions, so hit me up again once you’ve reached that stage of moral development.

Guess what, to the conservatives you look evil. Let’s just not play this game, it usually doesn’t end well.

I want to take peoples’ money for a subscription to the best art generating model ever created, and then send them a pencil and some paper in the snail mail

I made a tasty lemon cake because life has blessed me with more lemons than I can turn into lemonade. Kid told me he might be able to visit soon. I adopted a kitten (going to get her tomorrow). Had a few really nice visitors and we talked about women’s stuff, community and multilingual poetry. I’m noticing with some surprise that I start liking my lemony life again.

Hey @LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone, thanks for encouraging conversation and keeping people engaged in such a positive way, I really appreciate it!