People like Musk are cynical, attention-seeking manipulators and narcissists. They aren’t afraid that their way of life is being threatened, they’re using the fears of others to further their own ends, and consider themselves above it all.

That article was the most cogent take I have seen on this subject. I have a similar cultural background (rednecks and urban, religious Polish-Americans), but see myself as a science-literate atheist. I have seen this first-hand, but wasn’t able to articulate it as well.

Thank you for that!

I think I can say it now, except I keep wanting to put a Scottish “ch” at the end of Llangrannog instead of a “g” sound.

I just tried to pronounce the name of that place, and now my tongue hurts. Beautiful picture.

Never watched it because the characters all look creepy to me. I remember other kids watching “Speed Racer” back in the 70s, so I referred to as “that crappy Japanese animation style” until I learned the name for it when it really took off in the US after around 2000.

I know that makes me something of a Philistine. I’m aware that it has a rich history and millions (billions?) of devoted fans.

It still creeps me out, though.

… And that’s the same year I graduated high school…

Nor am I. I’m also not the sort of person who expresses their comments in absolute terms.

I can see your comment, and I don’t think that everybody on .ml is a troll. They just seem to have an awful lot of them, and I have no idea what the reason is. People arguing in bad faith, etc.

I enjoy reading the comments, but the top comments from most of the .ml-origin posts always seem to degenerate into name calling, and very quickly at that. The criticisms other people have called out further down in this thread sound accurate to me.

And clearly it isn’t just me seeing this, since somebody is downvotimg your perfectly polite posts in this thread. (It isn’t me.)

My suspicion is that there are a few instances either controlled by bad actors or indifferent to them. Blocking those can make lemmy a much better place if you aren’t interested in conflict on this platform.

And if you enjoy arguing or just want to hone your debate skills against trolls, you can do that, of course.

You can block entire instances. I blocked hexbear and lemmy.ml, and my feed became MUCH more pleasant to read. The vast majority of trolls seem to be on those instances.

So what I love about Lemmy now is that comment threads rarely turn toxic like they do on Reddit.

That is my experience too. It’s because there is no distinction between posts and comments, I think. It’s about as interesting as my sms chats with friends would be to strangers.

Every morning for the past 20 years. Mostly TWIM, but only for 20 minutes as a formal sit. Lots of short meditation breaks during the day, though. It has made me way less of an asshole, and a happier person.

Same

Pluto was discovered because the orbit of Neptune didn’t match predictions, so astronomers decided that there must be a ninth planet out there. It was very close to where the math predicted it would be.

It turned out later that Pluto was much, much smaller than at first thought, and couldn’t be the 9th planet. It then turned out that the mass of Neptune was greater than expected, and the orbit actually matched expectations without the need for a 9th planet.

I took a smoking flight once. It totally reeked. Even as a smoker it was unpleasant. I also smoked in my hospital room after an appendectomy, which in hindsight seems absolutely nuts.

I quit 12 years ago after trying dozens of times. I credit e-cigs with helping me finally wean off of tobacco.

As a kid in Detroit? Distant gunfire, most summer nights.

Now as an adult in the suburbs? Usually a fan, because my wife prefers that and I don’t mind.

What a flock of raging assholes. How did they justify forcing working conditions like that on you that you clearly did not want? Did they offer any excuse for doing that?

Is this more of an ADHD thing, or an ASD thing?

I don’t like bright overhead lights, either. I was diagnosed ADHD at the tender age of 56.

Enough that I can code in pretty much anything. I think the typing point was when I coded professionally in my 4th or 5th language some time in the early 90s.

I’ve tried paid versions of ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. I am currently using Gemini, and it is working reasonably well for me.

I mostly use it to replace searches. I haven’t used Google in years, but mainly relied on DuckDuckGo until SEO made it less useful. My secondary use case is for programming. I tend to jump around to a lot of different languages and frameworks, and it’s hugely helpful to get sample code describing what I want to do when I don’t know the syntax.

Once in a great while, I will have it rewrite something for me. That is mostly for inspiration if I want to change the tone of something I wrote (then I’ll edit). I think that all of the LLMs suck at writing.

Same. I bought a 4-pack of toner refills with it. I’m on the 2nd one.