I’m sure there are companies that are at least more good than bad. Teachers pay teachers. Meetup. Bandcamp before they sold. That’s all I have off the top of my head. But even so capitalism invites cruelty, and the best intentions can easily wither under the pressure to make more money.

I work for a very large company involved in medicine. They make machines to do like blood work. That’s fine. People need that. But they treat many of their workers like trash. I don’t get paid for holidays and get the legal minimum sick leave per year. Their mission isn’t especially evil , but their behavior sucks.

I’m still good friends with two of the people I dated non monogamously. They’re good people. Not all the matches were strictly better- there are a lot of theater kids and burning-man types, and that’s almost never my type. A lot of lawyers too, surprisingly, but I think some kinds of lawyers are super hot so that worked out.

100% agree that people aren’t taught how to be clear about their needs, and the common problems of guesswork and assumptions. Non-monogamy practically requires you actually talk about what you’re aiming for.

Monogamy also often imports some unhealthy behaviors, like just assuming you have full access to your partner all the time. With non monogamy you typically have to be more intentional about plans and time together, and I think that makes for a better relationship.

I was in a monogamous relationship and had feelings for someone else. I didn’t want to cheat, but it felt wrong I couldn’t do anything with this other person that I felt chemistry with. I knew I wouldn’t be upset if my partner had other people so long as she also spent time with me. After that relationship ended (for other reasons) I decided not to put myself in the same situation.

Ironically, pursuing non monogamy means there are far fewer people to date. I was getting a viable match like once a month or so, maybe less. When I switched back to monogamy as an option, it was like 1d4-1 a week.

• swinging: just sex
• open relationship: sex and limited emotional investment
• polyfidelity- multiple whole relationships, but the system is closed to new members

I think a good step would be if people could admit the companies they work for are making the world worse. I’ve met some people who work for Google who do some backflips about how no the company is good and definitely they’re good people and it’s not the $300k salary talking.

Linux is free, for a trivial counter example.

It’s debt in the sense of obligation, not literal finance. If we get more volume, we’re going to be obligated to change this so it does something smarter than dumping output to a csv on disk. For now it’s fine, even if it’s annoying to scp and parse the files every time you want to see something.

I don’t think there’s less stuff. I think there’s more slop and trash, so the percent of good stuff is lower.

When we’re constantly ‘killing time’ on our phones/screens

Reminded me of that quote from House of Leaves

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

After a particularly potent evening of farts, someone whose identity I will protect had their ass dubbed “the gates of hell”. I can imagine this hanging in their bathroom.

Forums were cool. They often had their own culture and in-jokes. People would become well-known on the forum. There’s a couple names I recognize on here, but it’s mostly transient. (On the other hand, I’ve probably had a vicious argument with someone and then a nice chat with them later, without realizing it was the same person).

Most internet users seem bland, and just congeal onto youtube, discord, twitch, and other nightmares.

People don’t really like change.

Think about free public libraries. They’re fairly popular, and not controversial outside of fringe libertarian types and assholes. People like that you can borrow books and other media for free. Usually there’s a bit of a backlash if there’s a movement to shut down libraries or limit their services.

Imagine if free public libraries didn’t exist, and someone tried to invent them today. People would be having screaming fits about communism. It’s stealing from the authors. it’s ruining publishing. We don’t need tax dollars for this when we have amazon. Blah blah blah.

It’s the same with other things we could socialize. health care is a privatized nightmare. If we somehow got a public option in, eventually people would start reflexively defending it.

So what I’m saying is many people don’t really have a set of internally consistent beliefs. They just don’t like change.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-somewhat

The other day I accidentally looked at YouTube without adblock, without history off, and it was a nightmare. Just AI slop and rage bait. Absolute trash.

I pretty much only use YouTube for music and very specific clips. It’s a bad place.

[mode="snob] read more books. [/mode]

People are being ground up by capitalism and it’s easier to just look at tiktok or play Baldur’s gate than actually engage with a messy person.

I try to stay in touch with people but it’s hard. I’m also kind of an insufferable asshole, and I think some people leave because they’re tired of “capitalism sucks” coming up

Of course people are using AI. It’s the default behavior of Google, the most popular web search. It confidently spits out falsehoods. This is not an improvement.

And there are definitely people “needing to convince others to use the tools.”. Microsoft and Google et al are made of people. They’re running ads to get people to adopt it.

Buying stuff online and email are useful stuff in ways LLMs can only dream of. It is a technology nowhere near as good as its hype.

Furthermore , “the general public likes it” is a dubious metric for quality. People like all sorts of garbage. Heroin has its fans. I’m sure it’d have even more if it was free and highly advertised. Is that enough to prove it’s good? No. Other factors such as harm and accuracy matter, too.

This is very heteronormative and gender binaried. Queer people exist and date.

That said, anecdotally, from the handful of women I’ve talked about this with: many don’t like making first moves on these apps.

Using dating apps is a skill, and if you haven’t been practicing sending messages you’re going to be bad at it. The vast majority of first messages I got from women were “hey”. Trash tier. Probably because they just haven’t done it very often.

It seems to mean people who don’t consume AI content not use AI tools.

My hypothesis is it’s a term coined by pro-AI people to make AI-skeptics sound bad. Vegans are one of the most hated groups of people, so associating people who don’t use AI with them is a huge win for pro-ai forces.

Side note: do-gooder derogation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation ) is one of the saddest moves you can pull. If you find yourself lashing out at someone because they’re doing something good (eg: biking instead of driving, abstaining from meat) please reevaluate. Sit with your feelings if you have to.

Trying to get people to use signal. People don’t care about ideals or principles or future problems, so it’s a difficult sell.

Lack of money is certainly a chilling factor. Went bowling the other week, and it cost like $30/person. That’s pretty cheap, but not if you’re dead broke. Went out for brunch and a short bar crawl this weekend, and they cost like $50/ea for food and a few drinks. Not that expensive, but also kind of a lot.

You can socialize for cheaper. Had a little get together the other week- I spent like $40 for pizza and snacks, but could’ve probably gone cheaper. The real limiting factor is getting people who will show up.

I imagine it’s hard to bootstrap that, if you have no friends or only sad-sit-home-alone friends.