I’d want to say “8 billion people”, but right now 3000 billionaires lead on.

After all, they maintain their position by masterfully playing people off each other and setting things up to be on top. They have all the resources to extend their influence.

If 8 billion people could turn billionaires voices off for anything larger than a day, then yeah, 8 billion all the way, and 3000 will run out FAST.

But the latter know this, and will never let this happen. We should.

Everything I do is wrong

Changing workplace, if possible

Nothing really matters

Meaningful activities outside work

I’m sure you heard it already, but both are complicated, which is why people often stick with what they hate. But both are so important and true you need to find ways to achieve it.

For me, I found meditation to be the easiest point of entry into shaking my life up. It takes 10 minutes a day, requires near-zero willpower to execute (unlike, say, exercises, which are otherwise great), it helps me ground, relax and find out what I really think of stuff when I’m not pressured by a concrete wall of stress.

After that, YMMV. I found out I can safely gear down and live a better life with less load for a while, even if it means less income (not that I was rich to begin with, but one thing even worse than poverty is living at work you hate). I’ve found inspiration in nature, long walks, and finding small things that matter. I also found it in people and joined some local activism. And from there, I looked for ways to get back to higher income without compromising my integrity.

I still struggle with exercises and sometimes healthy diet, but I fuck off myself and do what I can, and know I do my best. Now I wake up with purpose and get to bed without regret. It’s not sunshine and rainbows, but way better than it was before.

Oh, and I restored my previous income, but with less pain and misery, doing what I like. I’m sure I could again pick a better paying career and earn twice as much as I do now, but screw it, it’s not worth it.

Yes.

During prolonged and extensive stresses, a brain temporarily loses some of the ability to pay attention and remember.

When the stressful part is over, your memory will restore. I would not advise to strongarm through it, though - find a way to unload yourself and find better rest before your body forces you to by introducing stress-induced health issues you’ll have to address.

Been there, lost a lot of health to it, don’t recommend.

Also, agree with others saying you need to sleep well. Sleep is essential at sorting your memories and preparing you for the day. During the periods of stress and processing a lot of data it is more essential than ever.

All kidding aside, support for self-hosted server or just a local program to store and visualize your data would be amazing

Alright, we generally seem to be on the same page :)

(Except numerous great books and helpful short materials exist for virtually any popular major, and, while they take longer to study, they provide order of magnitude better knowledge)

While I don’t fully share the notion and tone of other commenter, I gotta say LLMs have absolutely tanked education and science, as noted by many and as I witnessed firsthand.

I’m a young scientist on my way to PhD, and I get to assist in a microbiology course for undergraduates.

The amount of AI slop coming from student assignments is astounding, and worse of all - they don’t see it themselves. When it comes to me checking their actual knowledge, it’s devastating.

And it’s not just undergrads - many scientific articles also now have signs of AI slop, which messes up with research to a concerning degree.

Personally, I tried using more specialized tools like Perplexity in Research mode to look for sources, but it royally messed up listing the sources - it took actual info from scientific articles, but then referenced entirely different articles that hold no relation to it.

So, in my experience LLMs can be useful to generate a simple text or help you tie known facts together. But as a learning tool…be careful, or rather just don’t use them for that. Classical education exists for a good reason, and it is that you learn to get factually correct and relevant information, analyze it and keep it in your head for future reference. It takes more time, but is ultimately much worth it.

Modern LLMs can serve you for most tasks while running locally on your machine.

Something like GPT4ALL will do the trick on any platform of your choosing if you have at least 8gb of RAM (and for most people nowadays it’s true).

It has a simple, idiot-proof GUI and doesn’t collect data if you don’t allow it to. It’s also open source, and, being local, it does not need Internet connection once you downloaded a model you need (which normally takes a single-digit number of gigabytes).

Just…do both, and keep some parts of your life separate. Have a public face, talk to regular folks etc, and then have your hidden community of privacy enthusiasts that you manage accordingly.

People got so deep into their allegiance games that they cannot comprehend anyone standing for the truth.

Fuck .ml China fappers, and fuck .world Russia-guilty-of-everything fans. You’re equally terrible in enabling atrocities.

As I said, some cases are confirmed, some are wild speculations. And latter are commonly used in future arguments as confirmations, despite them being mere speculated assumptions.

You can have a barrage of “something-bad” confirmations like these out of thin air, and this is a common propaganda tactic.

If they’re all gone, all the expensive protection measures are not necessary anymore, so it’s a very pragmatic question.

Yes. There are quite a few completely unfounded pieces stating it is Russia or China or North Korea behind thing X with no proofs whatsoever.

These do not go to prove your point.

Now, there were some proven cases, but attributing every attack to one of these now without judge and jury is nothing but blatant and bold propaganda.

Literally anyone until proven guilty?

Russian here; good fucking luck banning VPNs

First, they evolve very rapidly and are able to evade even the most sensitive detection methods Russia and China are using

Second, people in power never want to apply the same restrictions to themselves, so, ironically, they themselves are often VPN users and as such they undermine themselves

Now defend it from domestic one.

But this reactor turns mercury into gold, and is meant to produce power.

Nice site you got there! Made from scratch or using some service/app?

With all the care, I would strongly advise you not to go with “you must be in a survival situation to learn to swim” cliché.

Not only is it, well, dangerous, but it also doesn’t teach you to swim properly either. If you just try to stay on the surface, you’ll expend a ton of energy and can get water in your throat which will complicate things severely.

You should learn to stay on the surface by breathing only. Pick a place with still water (lake? calm sea? pool?) and learn to lay down on your spine without movement. Do it near the shore, of course. Just put your body in a star shape, legs and hands extended, and learn to breathe in a way that allows you to float still. Once you learn it, not only you have improved breathing technique helpful in swimming, but you can also take a rest on water anytime to restore without even having a jacket in the first place.

Then, knowing how to breathe to stay afloat, learn to swim. Now you can save a lot of energy because you don’t need much movement to keep you afloat, and you can just swim in the direction you need

Exactly

Or those “terraform Mars” fantasies

TERRAFORM THE DAMN EARTH FIRST

To me, there are two reasons we’re doing it too soon;

• We don’t really have technology needed to build a self-sustaining colony anywhere outside Earth; say, a colony on Mars is inherently dependent on Earth’s supplies, and will quickly die out as Earth does too; the technologies needed can largely be developed on Earth;
• The chance of some asteroid obliterating Earth in the coming millenia is so minor we might as well focus on much more real threats.

Yep, and I understand how little this message changes in the world

But at least it’s good to highlight the basics to ensure people understand the dangers and shortcomings