Zaleramancer @ Zaleramancer @beehaw.org Posts 1Comments 65Joined 3 mo. ago
It's complicated. The current state of the internet is dominated by corporate interests towards maximal profit, and that's driving the way websites and services are structured towards very toxic and addictive patterns. This is bigger than just "social media."
However, as a queer person, I will say that if I didn't have the ability to access the Internet and talk to other queer people without my parents knowing, I would be dead. There are lots of abused kids who lack any other outlets to seek help, talk to people and realize their problems, or otherwise find relief for the crushing weight of familial abuse.
Navigating this issue will require grace, awareness and a willingness to actually address core problems and not just symptoms. It doesn't help that there is an increasing uptick of purity culture and "for the children" legislation that will curtail people's privacy, ability to use the internet and be used to push queer people and their art or narratives off of the stage.
Requiring age verification reduces anonymity and makes it certain that some people will be unable to use the internet safely. Yes, it's important in some cases, but it's also a cost to that.
There's also the fact that western society has systemically ruined all third spaces and other places for children to exist in that isn't their home or school. It used to be that it was possible for kids and teens to spend time at malls, or just wandering around a neighborhood. There were lots of places where they were implicitly allowed to be- but those are overwhelmingly being closed, commericalized or subject to the rising tide of moral panic and paranoia that drives people to call the cops on any group of unknown children they see on their street.
Police violence and severity of response has also heightened, so things that used to be minor, almost expected misdemeanors for children wandering around now carry the literal risk of death.
So children are increasingly isolated, locked down in a context where they cannot explore the world or their own sense of self outside the hovering presence of authority- so they turn to the internet. Cutting that off will have repercussions. Social media wouldn't be so addictive for kids if they had other venues to engage with other people their age that weren't subject to the constant scrutiny of adults.
Without those spaces, they have to turn to the only remaining outlet. This article is woefully inadequate to answer the fundamental, core problems that produce the symptoms we are seeing; and, it's implementation will not rectify the actual problem. It will only add additional stress to the system and produce a greater need to seek out even less safe locations for the people it ostensibly wishes to protect.
The classic conflict of automation. Due to the structure of our economic system, the benefits of reducing labor are not that we all have more time to pursue art, philosophy, joy or love- instead talented, interesting people are forced out of jobs they can do well (and enjoy) and into financial stress and confusion.
I think it's very telling that the medication's success metrics in part of the longer article linked in this one are about if the meds made them perform better academically, as opposed to making them have a happier and better experience of their own lives.
They really focus on it, like, "Oh, sure, they seem like they're doing better but it's only how they feel, they don't suddenly get smarter."
And, yeah, my ADHD drugs don't make me smarter, but they drastically reduce the strain of dealing with tedious, pointless and unstimulating tasks.
I wonder which sci-fi novels it's mimicking here.
I'm thinking about doing some personal writing about my feelings on the Internet of my youth and how I need to let go of it. So, somber?
Yeah! Also, sometimes I use emulators that work well on phones to play older games, I had fun playing Final Fantasy Legends 2 with RetroArch.
I enjoy the way this game plays with dice- it's nice to see a designer who's thinking about them as physical objects and trying out novel ways of employing them.
Over-all, I think this game is very cute- I like the way wounds/stress is represented and I think the variable dice sizes are fun. They put me in the mind of the Devil City and it's 77 Vicious Princes. While I admire the creative and thoughtful exploration of dice as a tool, I do feel like this project seems a bit aimless. It think as a project it feels more like a personal thought experiment than a game, not because of a lack of complexity, but because of an unclear intention.
I would be pleased to see other things they make, because I think their ideas show promise.
My suggestion is to either change the context you play games in, or pick games that are very cognitively different from what you normally do at work.
You can change your context with a new console, but I think it may be cheaper to do something like buying a controller and playing games while standing up, or on your couch/armchair, or playing games while sitting on a yoga ball. The point is to trick your brain, because it's associated sitting at a desk in front of a computer with boring tedium. Change the presentation and your subconscious will interpret it differently.
You can also achieve this by identifying the things that you have to do in your job that mirror videogame genres you enjoy and picking a game that shares few of those qualities.
I worked at the post office for years, doing mail processing, and my enjoyment of management and resource distribution style games went down sharply during that time because of the cognitive overlap- I played more roguelikes and RPGs as a consequence.
Thank you, I am trying to be less abrasive online, especially about LLM/GEN-AI stuff. I have come to terms with the fact that my desire for accuracy and truthfulness in things skews way past the median to the point that it's almost pathological, which is why I ended up studying history in college, probably. To me, the idea of using a LLM to get information seems like a bad use of my time- I would methodically check everything it says, and the total time spent would vastly exceed any amount saved, but that's because I'm weird.
Like, it's probably fine for anything you'd rely on a skimming a wikipedia article for. I wouldn't use them for recipes or cooking, because that could give you food poisoning if something goes wrong, but if you're just like, "Hey, what's Ice-IV?" then the answer it gives is probably equivalent in 98% of cases to checking a few websites. People should invest their energy where they need it, or where they have to, and it's less effort for me to not use the technology, but I know there are people who can benefit from it and have a good use-case situation to use it.
My main point of caution for people reading this is that you shouldn't rely on an LLM for important information- whatever that means to you, because if you want to be absolutely sure about something, then you shouldn't risk an AI hallucination, even if it's unlikely.
I'm not a frequent user of LLM, but this was pretty intuitive to me after using them for a few hours. However, I recognize that I'm a weirdo and so will pick up on the idea that the prompt leads the style.
It's not like the LLM actually understands that you are asking questions, it's just that it's generating a procedural response to the last statement given.
Saying please and thank you isn't the important part.
Just preface your use with, like,
"You are a helpful and enthusiastic with excellent communication skills. You are polite, informative and concise. A summary of follows in the style of your voice, explained in clearly and without technical jargon."
And you'll probably get promising results, depending on the exact model. You may have to massage it a bit before you get consistent good results, but experimentation will show you the most reliable way to get the desired results.
Now, I only trust LLM as a tool for amusing yourself by asking it to talk in the style of you favorite fictional characters about bizarre hypotheticals, but at this point I accept there's nothing I can do to discourage people from putting their trust in them.
Intellectual labor is hard and humans don't like doing difficult things, paired with a culture that's increasingly hostile to education and a government that wants you ignorant- it's easy to see how this happens in the US.
Getting annoyed that Meta brought so much attention to shadow libraries that make a lot of otherwise inaccessible academic information available to the general public.
Hopefully everything goes smoothly. Based on my experience, once you get to specialists they can pretty quickly arrive at a diagnosis if they're not being purposefully obtuse. After all, the signs are pretty clear once they've been laid out in front of you and you've had personal experience with identifying them.
This is really heartening to see. Thanks for sharing it.
I took a two week break from social media because I wasn't engaging with the political crisis situation in a responsible way. Now I'm just going to try to engage in more productive and meaningful discussion.
I wish you the best of luck. If it doesn't go well, I suggest looking for people who specialize in ADHD/Autism to go to if you can. Hopefully, though, everything goes great! It went very well for me and my partner when we sought a diagnosis, and I hope you get similar fortune. : )
When you say that about her being mentally ill with no empathy, what exactly do you mean? I'm asking because it's easy to draw a lot of different conclusions from that statement, and I'm trying to make fewer assumptions when I don't know people well.
Yeah, it's a nightmare looking for jobs online right now. You could not design a system more unfriendly to neurodivegent people if you tried, it's miserable to use your limited focus to put together a very effortful thing and it's just being tossed in the blender.
You're expected to tailor your resume, re-enter your resume information, pass personality tests, prove you have years of experience for an entry level position, make yourself maximally available for interviews, risk scams and exposing your information to botnets, write cover letters that are never read, do research into the company to be prepared to show interest in it- only to just... Never even hear back
I have never felt more like an animal performing for the amusing of a jeering, abusive crowd that this.