cygnosis

Literally? No. We're all subject to the same laws of physics.

Perceptual reality? World view? Yes. I only know one person in real life and not online (my wife) who shares some of my views of reality. For instance, I am a doomer. I am convinced we are well into the sixth, and by all accounts the most devastating, mass extinction. Humans are clever, but we depend on a stable environment for our food. That stable environment is turning into a series of alternating droughts, floods, fires, blizzards, and other extreme weather events. TBH, I'd be surprised if our species lasts to the end of the century. Hanson figures that, after feedbacks, we are on track for 10c of warming. That's apocalyptic. And every time scientists talk about it you hear words like 'faster than expected'. We are doing exactly nothing to prevent it, and are, in fact, accelerating the collapse by increasing our consumption, population, pollution, and environmental destruction. COP has been talking about it for so long (almost 30 years) that we've missed the boat. We are well past the point where we could stop it. We're in the 'find out' stage now.

Yet people keep having kids and planning for the future like everything is going to be just fine. Can you not see what's happening? When's the last time you scraped bugs off your car windshield? They're all dying out. The biosphere is collapsing around us. But sure, keep contributing to your 401K. Keep talking about how the 'fertility crisis' is the big issue. Keep thinking that somehow windmills and recycling are going to save the planet. Tell me more about how voting is going to fix the problem. I feel like Kate Dibiasky saying we're all going to die while everyone around me wants to talk about their PTA, the latest social issue, or which politician they like.

(deep breath)

Yes. I do feel like my perception of reality is different than most people I know. I don't know most of humanity so I can't really say, but it sure seems like it.

Enshittification in action.

"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die."

Facebook, TikTok, Amazon, it's everywhere. Once a platform has lock-in from users it turns its attention to vendors. Then once they're locked in it rakes in the profits until nobody can tolerate it any more and something else takes its place.

“We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their behavior.” Stephen Covey

In support of your argument.

Report: 44% of all Single-Family Home Purchases were from Private Investors in 2023

edit: see corrections below

I've done some blacksmithing as a hobby. The two most common ways of heating the metal are a gas or a coal forge. The coal forge normally has some sort of forced air coming from the bottom to feed the fire. The coal starts burning real smoky like, but then turns to coke and burns hotter the more air you force through it. Typically you pile some coal around the sides of the fire so it converts to coke then you scoop it into the fire as needed. Also it produces a waste product called clinker that builds up at the bottom of the fire at the tuyere (the nozzle or grate the air is forced through). It's kind of like stone or metal and it needs to be cleaned out to keep the fire going.

Have you ever tried telling a friend that you didn't like their partner and they should not be together? They are much more likely to get mad at you and stop talking with you than they are to leave their partner. Just search the advice columns on 'how to tell a friend their partner is bad'. Every one is filled with comments like "I did that and they got mad at me", or "we told her and she ignored us and keeps going back". I'm not really surprised nobody intervened.

I wonder if you were mostly angry at yourself for being in that situation. Maybe angry you could be so foolish or naive. Then you projected that anger onto your friends and family. Anyways, I'm glad you made it through that period.

It pays to watch ad-free videos or else it gets the hose again.

Which is an issue if those artists want to copyright their work. So far the US has maintained that AI generated art is not subject to copyright protection.

https://earth.nullschool.net/ realtime global wind, pressure, temp, etc.

If you want a big list of these check out https://www.kissthisguy.com/

Here's one from there

Like a virgin touched for the thirty-first time. Artist: Madonna Song: Like a Virgin Real Lyric: Like a virgin touched for the very first time.

14 years. The reddit protest was a great way to exit an unhealthy relationship with a site that was devouring way too much of my time. But now lemmy is slowly starting to draw me in more and more...

Does bamboo count? It's a common wood flooring and cutting board option. Lots of furniture is made from it. It's used like wood, even though it doesn't grow quite the same as a normal tree. And people have been eating bamboo shoots for a long time.

It's funny to see this comment downvoted so heavily (-14 at the time). I wonder if it's disagreement or just "I don't like that idea"...

The simple facts are we've dumped over 2 trillion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. A bit over half has been absorbed by the oceans. We have no realistic way of removing it. And combined with other GHGs it's driving an unstoppable global warming. We can talk about reducing emissions and renewables. But even if we stopped all emissions today, it still wouldn't be enough to prevent the global average temperature from continuing to increase.

I've struggled with this for my whole life (and I'm not young) but haven't succeeded in developing my willpower much at all. I think it's just part of your 'personality'. In quotes because you can change your personality somewhat with therapy or other growth techniques, but it takes a lot of work and there is no guarantee it will happen.

That said, I do use commitment devices to substitute for willpower sometimes. One that works for me is to join a class or group for exercise or other things. In my case it has worked for meditation, exercise, martial arts, and others. I find that when I wake up and feel like 'I just want to lie around and play video games all day' I then remind myself 'the folks at the group will notice I'm gone, I'll have to explain it, and It would feel better to just attend'. And so I get my exercise. Usually. If my brain can convince me I'm not feeling well I still skip out sometimes.

Surprised I haven't seen Quantum Break in here. It's a pretty good shooter with some magic powers thrown in for fun. You don't get much say in the story, but it still kept my interest all the way through. And it has an interesting take on time travel, woven into the story quite well. It was made by Remedy Entertainment, before Control but after Alan Wake. Also I liked how they cast real actors in the game and made them recognizable. I picked out Courtney Hope in the game from seeing her in Control, even though her character is different in QB.

First of all it's completely understandable for you to feel frustrated and stressed in a situation like this. You really don't have the power to fix other people's problems. Have you ever been to a therapist? The one constant among good therapists is that they don't give you advice. They don't tell you what to do. And they don't try to fix the problems in your life. But they do end up helping you. So what do they know that the rest of us don't? They know that the best way to help someone is to listen supportively, to validate their feelings, and to give them a chance to think about their life while leaning on the emotional support of someone who cares about them. There's more but that's a good start. And if you can do that you really are helping a lot more than you think.

Take as an example, a conversation I had with my wife today (remembered as well as I can). She was in a really bad mood and wasn't talking with me.
I asked her "what's got you feeling down today?"
She angrily said she didn't want to talk with me about it because she knew what I would say and she didn't want to hear it.
(That, by the way, is a pretty clear hint that someone is not in present time emotionally.)
I said "so you're saying I'm never supportive of you when you're upset?"
She said "I'm feeling overworked and stressed. There's always too much to do. And I know you are just going to say you also have too much to do."
I said "I did say 'I feel the same way' once when you said you could use a day off. But that doesn't mean I can't appreciate that you're overworked. I understand. There's a lot going on right now and it's hard to keep up."
She continued talking about how she felt. I continued validating her feelings. And she cheered up and her mood improved.

My point is, "just being there" is code for listening supportively, validating someone's feelings, and helping them regain the balance they need to address their problems themselves.

Edit: to be clear, I'm no saint. Sometimes I'm the grumpy one and my wife is the paitent one. It works both ways.

dang, cosmology is weird. I went to reply about the big bang, the age of the universe, and how it can't be infinite, but instead decided to look it up. I really don't understand this stuff.

He's referring to the fact that the Effective Altruism / Less Wrong crowd seems to be focused almost entirely on preventing an AI apocalypse at some point in the future, and they use a lot of obscure math and logic to explain why it's much more important than dealing with war, homelessness, climate change, or any of the other issues that are causing actual humans to suffer today or are 100% certain to cause suffering in the near future.

The issue with quests in RDR2 is that they give you no autonomy. Most games set a quest objective and give you a dozen ways to achieve it. RDR2 forces you to follow the exact path through the quest that the game wants you to take. If you deviate it either fails to progress or simply fails the quest. It felt more to me like an interactive movie than a game in that respect, though you get full freedom outside of quests.

I'm playing that one now too. You're right, it's annoying that you can only drive for like two or three minutes on the bike before it's out of fuel. But I quickly got used to looking for fuel cans and planning around gas stations. There are enough of them. It's a deliberate choice, I think, to increase your engagement with the world and prevent you from just driving through it.

Overall I'm very impressed with the game. The story is really engaging. The gameplay and mechanics are solid and well balanced. The rules are not always intuitive, but once you learn them they are consistent. The longer I play it the more time I want to spend with it.

Thanks for the correction. I remembered seeing that number but didn't analyze it in any depth. A more detailed analysis of the market, by Freddie Mac, concluded that there were four main drivers for the recent surge in prices, and investors weren't on the list.

1. record low mortgage rates in 2020 and 2021, and the race to beat future rate increases;
2. limited supply from underbuilding and below average distressed sales;
3. an increase in first-time homebuyers due to favorable age demographics; and
4. increased migration from high-cost cities to areas that already had a housing shortage.

Institutional investors apparently even reduced their purchases in 23 - some of them were even net sellers - because of prices and interest rates. That doesn't mean they aren't still villians in this scenario. I don't think big investors should own single family homes at all. But still they aren't as big a force as my previous comment indicated.

Funny thing is, no matter how you arrange to do that it becomes a de-facto death ray. Stick a terawatt of solar panels in space, use the power to shine a laser/maser down to earth, then build a station to turn the laser power back to electricity? Great, until some hacker figures out how to control where the laser is pointed. Then you get Dr. Evil holding the world for ransom.

As a kid, probably Lode Runner. It ran on my pc. Some arcade games were fun. I enjoyed Asteroids. Colossal Cave, and the Infocom games like Planetfall were fun too. Though what really hooked me was Doom. It was the first real 3d FPS game and it blew my mind. It's been my favorite genre ever since.

Just finished Breathedge. Subnautica in space? Sort of, but with a 'ha, aren't we game developers funny' kind of humor. Portal is an immersive game that's really funny. The humor in Breathedge, however, insures you can never really settle in to the game. Even so, It's most impressive what such a small team was able to accomplish.

Just started Plague Tale: Innocence. Stealth survival with hordes of rats - a little creepy and I'm not really expecting an uplifting ending, but we'll see how it goes.