CromulantCrow

Sounds great. Can I get it without spyware?

Early 60s. She was prone to distrusting authority. She believed the youtube doctors who said colonoscopies aren't worth the risk, so she delayed getting one for years. Eventually she had to because nobody could explain her symptoms. At that point she was 57. If she hadn't waited she may have been in time to treat it successfully. After the diagnosis she told her sister (5 years younger) who then went to get a colonoscopy. They found polyps that would have become cancer, but because it was early it was trivial to remove them.

That was the argument my wife was giving me six years ago. The stool tests she took showed nothing. She died two weeks ago after a grueling battle with rectal cancer. You're not going to convince me.

Seriously, do get a colonoscopy, when appropriate. The risks are minimal and the reward is not having to go through years of chemo, radiation, and surgery and then dying of colorectal cancer.

Pro:

• It's good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it'll give you an answer immediately that's tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that's hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It's like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It's growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many other arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that's no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con:

• It's fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don't even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.

Okay, if you can explain to me in detail how four dimensional topology is going to be important to me while I'm stocking the shelves of your grocery store, I'll give you an answer.

Visiting Tijuana for a few weeks. I usually like to brush up on my Spanish before heading South. Didn't have time this go around. But I'm using anki and talking with the locals asking a lot of questions. I'm learning more than I expected. I'm a newb still but I'm taking the opportunity while I can.

Looks like the truck skidded sideways into the beam support, knocked it over, and then the beam fell on the truck.

ITT

"It's a lie!" "It's the truth!" "Nuh-uh!" "Uh-huh!"

It's almost as if obfuscation of the truth were the goal. I wonder who that benefits...

My uncle took his own life when he was 19. He didn't leave a note. He didn't warn anyone. Just one morning my grandmother walked in and saw him hunched over on his bed completely pale, all the blood drained out of his face. There was a glass of cyanide in water on his bedside table.

It broke them. Neither of my grandparents recovered. Years later I was staying with them for a while and I overheard my grandmother say "we have our son back".

Every suicide is like that. It's like a bomb that shatters the lives of everyone close to you. It isn't a solution. It doesn't end the pain. It just passes it on to everyone else. But nobody would do it if the pain were bearable. “Suicide is not chosen; it happens when pain exceeds resources for coping.” There is no blame, no judgment, only tragedy and pain.

But people who survive and find help Will tell you that it gets better. That they're glad they survived and that recovery is possible So if you are thinking of suicide, know that it is the worst possible option, no matter how hopeless it seems. There's always another way.

Dvorak at work, QWERTY away from work. I occasionally start typing Dvorak at home, but it doesn't take much to reset the brain to QWERTY. I learned touch typing in high school in the 80s on a mechanical typewriter.

So is it just the DMT or is the psychotherapy part important? How important? What type of psychotherapy are they using, CBT, IPT, MPCT?