Mushrooms are pretty loud talkers, tbh. Just gotta listen to the right ones. 😂

I literally don’t set up my voicemail, and I typically don’t listen to recorded audio that gets messaged to me. Texting is functional and doesn’t leave me some anxiety-provoking message that I have to sit through and digest without saying anything. If a conversation needs to happen in voice, text to say that and see if it’s a good time.

Wild that people just ring a personal phone number unprompted in 2024 without that being an established routine.

That said, I also remember when it wasn’t at all weird to show up to someone’s house and knock on their door. Things have really changed.

Sure. Something like a poorly configured sprite sheet could be an appropriate metaphor too. Personally, I have PTSD. For me it tends to manifest as getting wrapped up in memories and in grappling with thought patterns that make it hard for me to process them or that leave me struggling with how I feel as a result. A lot of my own stuff is very internal, and often comes in response to my trying to process trauma. I feel less like I’m tinting the world than struggling with buggy internal processes. Not to say that interpretation of outside stimuli (social stimuli in particular) isn’t also a factor, but it’s not the main thing for me.

Where you put the error, whether in interpretation or in execution, is largely beside the point, though, to my thinking. The main thing is that you’re looking at an error versus a choice.

I do think that a lot of these destructive and malicious behaviors could certainly be seen as being the result of toxic thought patterns and compartmentalization, but I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as a buggy, error-prone brain.

Like, somebody who drives around in a massive pickup truck ignoring traffic laws and bullying their way around knowing that people will fear being hurt by their vehicle and will avoid them is just an abusive, dangerous asshole. There may be some underlying insecurity or discomfort that leads them to react that way, but it’s the reaction they’ve chosen and habituated to. We can discuss free will all day, but there’s a big difference between the guy who runs stop signs in a 2 ton vehicle and someone whose depression keeps them stuck in bed. One of those things is a pattern of choice-related behavior, while the other is someone struggling to have the energy to exist.

The fact that many of us seem to have a hard time conceiving of anyone making these kinds of choices on purpose, to me, is simply illustrative of it being related to volition. They make different choices because they’re a different person, who sees things very differently. When the behaviors are taken to their extreme and other people are hurt, it can be harder to see the volitional difference, but at a simpler level I think it’s a little more obvious.

Does knowingly blasting everyone with your high-beams indicate mental illness? Does being rude to service workers? Littering?

The volition aspect here is pretty obviously different in someone who, for example, dumps their trash in a river rather than paying to have it removed. We may not know exactly what’s going on in their heads, but we can at least sort out that they probably don’t really care about nature or pollution or the people swimming down-river. I think it becomes a little harder to see in those more extreme behaviors because it’s so extreme, but I don’t think the fundamental nature is all that different.

Someone carrying out a murder is not, in type, fundamentally different from someone who merely doesn’t care if anyone gets killed by their 8ft tall truck. They’re different in degree.

While I think this is a reasonable sort of surface-level interpretation, I think it misses a bit of what typifies mental illness versus just being destructive, malicious, desperate, or extremely entitled.

Mental illness is something your brain is doing to you. It’s not just a thought that you have and roll with, it’s a persistent pattern that you struggle against. Just deciding that the thoughts and feelings being produced are inaccurate or unhelpful doesn’t make it go away. It’s not just extreme emotion, it’s emotion that’s being switched on in a way that isn’t tied into the continuity of your more volitional patterns of thought and feeling. It’s not just that the thoughts and behaviors playing out are unhealthy.

To put it into metaphor, think of your life and your interactions with the world like a video game, with your brain being essentially your character controller, interpreting your actions and bringing them into the world. You can decide to do healthy or unhealthy things with your character, but those things are under your own volition. Mental illness, then, is like a poorly coded character controller throwing errors and causing unforeseen bugs. Like, for example, if I push the down button there’s a 30% chance that I randomly move to the left first, rather than moving in the appropriate direction.

That 30% chance might send me careening into a pit, but chances are that once I’m used to having this bug, I’ll be aware enough of it to try to compensate. It might not always work, and I might drift a little left occasionally, but if I give myself a bit wider berth for any obstacles on my left, I’ll probably be okay. This is distinct from someone who uses their volition to throw themselves into a pit on purpose.

Are both potentially bad for the character’s health? Yes. But only one is caused by a character controller error, and because my goal isn’t ‘throw myself into pit’, I’ll probably do a much better job avoiding pits than someone who’s jumping into them intentionally. These two problems are fundamentally different in that one is a product of a person’s volition, while the other is a problem with the means by which they interact with the rest of the world.

That’s not to say that people with mental illness are going to accidentally assassinate someone because they pressed down and went a bit left, but it illustrates the fundamental difference in making a bad decision versus struggling with errors in your brain.

That someone jumps into a pit on purpose does not imply that their character controller is bugged, especially if they smoothly beeline it while showing all signs of acting with intention.

Okay, but part of it is phones. Not in like, a ‘kids are always staring at their phones’ sense, but in terms of the ease of communication changing the social landscape.

When I was in my late teens and early 20s, if you wanted to go hang out with someone, you’d go downtown. You might run into the person you were looking for, you might run into someone completely different and have some crazy unexpected adventure, but it mostly happened in the same place. Even with old flip-phones, they facilitated communication but they didn’t derail or substitute it.

Want to see what someone’s doing now? You can immediately message them and either know they’re free or busy or that they’re not responding. And yeah, you could call somebody’s phone, but it was different. There was little incentive to keep a phone charged once you were off with your friends, and those early batteries did not last! I remember my mom giving me shit about never having a charge in my phone when she’d try to call me.

Every day was an unexpected adventure. Very little of it was planned beyond ‘go hang out in town’, but every day was something different. Once all my friends were on social media and carrying smart phones, it changed dramatically. I didn’t have to either go find someone or talk on the phone if I wanted to check in, I just have to message them. There’s no need to go have an adventure to just say ‘hey, what’s up?’. There’s no built-in incentive to team up and go find something to do the way there was when I had to physically get to someone to hang out.

And yeah, we can still make plans, but that’s different. ‘Plans’ were always there, just as something special and organized, but the default was just hanging around. I don’t feel that anymore in the same way. It’s still there, to some extent, because I see some younger folks hanging around, but not in the numbers we had. Plans require planning and come with some pressure that just seeing people around town never did.

I think that need to go out and run into random people in order to have a social experience gave us something that we’re missing now.

Also, like, we know a lot more now. We can see how screwed up humanity is. We know that a lot of our food is the direct result of dystopian sci-fi level torture of entire species. We know that the richest people are happy to light the world on fire to make a buck and that our measures for stopping them have so far not been as effective as we kind of need them to be. We know a lot of the horrible shit people have been doing to one another behind closed doors, and even out in the light of day.

We know a lot more about everything, but we haven’t really had the time to heal from it as a society or even really fully process it all, let alone change it. Given the limits of youthful autonomy until adulthood, it’s hardly surprising that it’s kinda distressing being stuck in the back seat of a car that’s careening toward a cliff while the previous generation’s driver mindlessly stares at a Facebook meme about kids be on their phones.

The whole thing is a mess, and younger people are right to be distressed about it. But technology and our struggle to adapt to it is part of that mess.

Is it?

Researchers discovered the skeleton of a young Neanderthal man who was about six years old when he died. Although researchers were not sure what the child’s gender was, she was named Tina.

I can only really guess whether they’re talking about one or two subjects here. In one sentence they call a six year old a man and gender them male, then in the next they gender them female and call them Tina. The pronouns keep switching back and forth.

Scientists noted that Tina’s survival to the age of six indicates that her team provided the necessary care for the child and her mother throughout this period.

Her team? Why does it show someone cared for the mother as well?

That all reads like bad AI writing to me.

It really seems like humanity’s feelings about who constitutes ‘us’ has been expanding significantly in the past century or so. It makes sense. Global communication went from being non-existent to a few bits of broadcast media and specialist communication to a massive information network spanning the entire planet, capable of instant communication with negligible latency inside of, what, three generations?

When I was born none of this stuff existed. You had like, dial-up networks like Genie and Prodigy and that was about it until I was like 8 or 9 or something. I think the first time I got on the Internet i was like 10 or 11. By the time I graduated high school, literally everyone was online. By the time I was 30, most people had a device in their pocket connected to the Internet with a speed and power (if not versatility) that beat out anything we had in high school. Now pretty much everyone has it. It’s literally easier to get an Internet connection than it is to have somewhere to live.

That has a lot of implications. It’s hard to hide injustice and bullshit when everyone has a video camera in their pocket and can connect to the Internet instantly. We know what factory farming looks like, we know that exploitation looks like, and we know the scale of our destruction of the environment in a way we didn’t before.

Probably most importantly, we’re learning, gradually, that what divides our interest is less and less national borders, physical appearance, or our different ways of living, but the hoarding of wealth and power. There’s some push back, to be sure, but the Overton window has shifted substantially from where it was at the beginning of this global communication phenomenon and it’s continuing to move that way a little at a time.

When we learn compassion for ourselves and the people around us, especially the people we were once taught were so different, it makes sense that we’d begin to generally become more practiced at compassion, empathy, and careful observation that is less and less rooted in our starting biases.

It makes sense that as that happens, the people controlling the purse strings and authorizing studies that might show that ‘us’ can extend further than we imagined might also gain more insight and be less defensive.

Yeah, that’s the bit that gave me the bro-y vibe, honestly. That and Brave. Also like, not that it’s necessarily a bad thing that I can see his muscle veins through his shirt, but that’s often a component of that particular corner of Joe Rogan-NFT-Bitcoin-Tesla.

But yeah, that makes sense. It definitely feels very sudden and artificial, which makes me wary.

Why are y’all spamming this Rossman guy suddenly? I had never heard of him before two days ago, and now I’ve seen posts about him every single day.

Seems like a bro-y tech dude. He promotes Brave and references sexual assault when talking about the behavior of software vendors with their customers. Honestly he gives me kind of a shady vibe on top of that.

So like, why is Lemmy suddenly full of his fans? What’s going on?

I mean, they’re both at least illustrative I guess. In the case of particles and waves I may be quibbling a bit over the distinction that something is a particle or a wave versus exhibiting the properties of one or the other.

In the case of Schrodinger’s cat, the thought experiment suggests that if the life or death of the cat is tied to the collapse of the state vector, an eigenstate of the two implies simultaneous life and death. But the varying interpretations of this problem aren’t so straightforward as ‘both dead and alive’, and it’s kind of misleading to just leave it at that.

Personally, I find it odd that they’d discount the cat’s own awareness of the state vector’s collapse. Obviously when the atom decays and kills it, it’s going to know before you are regardless of the presence of cardboard.

It just seems like a lot of kind of imprecise throw-away mentions of more complex ideas for one sentence. But again, maybe I’m being cynical.

Straight iced espresso for me. It does make me think of those particular customers who’d always demand an impossible level of no foam, though.

I did also end up reading about quantum foam anyway. 😂

Okay well maybe I’ll circle back to it, then. Maybe bad science writing has made me a little cynical.

The laws of quantum mechanics are confusing, predicting that particles are also waves and that cats are simultaneously alive and dead.

Okay, so, like, that’s punchier writing than the actual truth, but how am I supposed to buy anything else about physics in the article after that? The level of oversimplification of relatively commonly known concepts does not give me confidence that the rest won’t be pop sci drivel.

Yeaaah, honestly anyone who links this site should probably be banned, because nobody is going to link it in good faith.

Is this why Windows has started opening all my chromium apps in edge? They fuck up constantly and it’s really making me want to ditch windows.

If I understood Jack audio as well as I understand Voicemeeter, and if I could get my damn push to talk button working properly in Solaar I’d be done by now.

If anyone has a solution to the edge thing please help.

It’s still good to know this stuff so we know which labs to raid first when civilization collapses.

I feel like fraud is a big risk for, what, less than $100/mo? You can do better.

They’re literally an insurance company. They have lawyers coming out of their ears.

I mean, if you were trying to escape a mind-trap, wouldn’t you be inclined to try to move straight away from it? Unless they somehow manage to figure out a better escape trajectory, it seems natural that trying to escape would make it worse.

It’s like a biological finger trap set for species that aren’t particularly renown for their problem solving.

Holy shit, no wonder the insect biomass has reduced so much. Imagine how many insects we trap for entire nights with just something as simple as a streetlight. Forget about a few weeks of highway construction with flood lights at night. I’d imagine that causes a lot of them to starve, or just fail to mate, or exposes them to predation. Poor things.

Yet another atrocity caused by the ignorance and callousness of humanity. We have so much potential but we are just a fucking wrecking ball right now, creating concentrated suffering literally just for a little extra comfort and convenience. It’s so gross.

We really need to figure out how to do something to give back to the rest of this planet and start to turn things the other way. Not just to save our own asses, but because right now our species is absolutely monstrous. We have potential, sure, but we really need to get over our greed and cruelty like, yesterday.

That poor pig. :(