My problem is time and being in the right headspace. Between family, work, and a plethora of other hobbies that get neglected, not to mention often crippling anxiety, it is astoundingly difficult for me to work up posts on my project blog simply because I am either too busy or not where I need to be mentally to write due to general and pervasive exhaustion. I have been trying to kickstart a space where I can talk about my projects and repairs/restorations for years, but never quite found the secret to balancing life and writing.
I have the Bangle.js V2 and can confirm, it is a slimmer and slicker overall design, feeling more like a Fitbit Versa. Honestly, it's been a boredom breaker since it's relatively easy to dump new code on to it. My only complaint is the vibrating motor is almost too weak for me to feel when sleep, and as such, is not a reliable silent alarm, so I swap back to my OG Pebble at night.
People with a lot of money can "fight," at least in terms of throwing everything medical science has to offer at it. I suspect that's where the narrative originated, then took on the mythos that it was somehow sheer will.
Meanwhile, the rest of us ride on pure luck as we watch cancer destroy our loved ones. They gave my dad a month with a glial blastoma. He lasted about 6, most of which the dad I knew was not present for. Tbfh, I feel like he would have rather gone quick, not enduring the twisted shit we watched him go through.
Anthropomorphizing nature is an easy trap to fall into largely because the electric hams in our skulls is programmed to reach conclusions as quickly as possible for the sake of evaluating our reality, and we tend to put a lot of trust in that. Applying human traits to a non-human entity is just one of the many shortcuts we take to reach said conclusions.
While what you quoted is not incorrect, and worth pointing out, the analogy stands. In AA, you only get the chip if you abstain from drinking. The chip (a little coin) is an all-or-nothing deal.
In AA, we do get people attending who just want to control their drinking. They're usually sent by the courts (in the US, at least) due to some misdemeanor they commited while drunk, as though those of us battling ourselves are supposed to teach some 20-something how to be responsible adult because their parents failed them. Sometimes one of those court-sent people finds out they have a real problem, and end up sticking around. However, for the most part, the rest are there for a few weeks because they have to be, we sign their slips, and never see them again. We don't give out chips for that.
The common thread between the two is calling consumerism an "experience." This isn't a theme park. The server, retail worker, or whomever is not an actor in a costume there for the amusement of the customer. They work for their employer, carrying duties that allow that employer's business to profit, and therefor, should be paid by the employer.
And yes, this is a distictly American issue, and needs to be abolished. In the US, I worked as a bartender for $2.65 an hour in 2005. Basically, my employer payed me nothing, since that was just covering taxes, and each customer that ordered a drink from me was my main source of income. It irks me to my core when people wave this off as some normalized "part of the experience" and not a problem of greed that requires correction.
They aren't, and I wish we'd stop regurgitating this idea because restaurants use it as a justification to get out of paying servers proper wages. The person at the checkout at my local grocer is just as much "part of the experience" when I buy groceries, but their employer pays for them to be there, as opposed to expecting me to do so. This gaslighting of consumerism as an experience is damaging, and allows the greedy to foist the cost of doing business onto the customer more and more.
I mean, humans do that. We are remarkably contradictory when expressing ourselves, generally speaking, often without realizing it because we'll change our thinking in the moment to fit the current narrative or circumstance. LLMs just put that on blast.
I'm going to sit on that particular hill and see what happens. Even if DoNotPay's AI is not ready to do the job, the idea that AI could one day argue the law by focusing on logic and precedent instead of circumstance and interpretation is exceedingly threatening to a lawyer's career. No offense intended to the lawyers out there, of course. Were I in your shoes, I'd feel a bit fidgity over this, too.
This is fun, really appreciate the share. My son is heading to Rome to study as he wraps up culinary school, and he loves food history. I'm always looking for things to learn about with him.
This is a remarkably good take that just didn't dawn on me until I read your comment. Even if ChatGPT had a lesser quality than the current iteration, the fact that they had a way for anyone to easily interact with it really was a homerun, snd can be for any software, really.
It should be pointed out that, for some of us, talking to someone and hoping for change is the only option. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't have that much PTO, and taking 3 weeks of unpaid leave would financially destroy me. Trust me, I wish it were different, and a lot of people in my position either have to suffer through the burnout, or often end up changing jobs to try to deal with it.
I'm in the process of starting a webspace where I can both blog and write short fiction. So many people have tried to push me toward Substack instead of building my own space, but like you, Substack just looks too ephemeral for my taste. It feels like the hot new platform that everyone talks about migrating to, might try it for a month or two, then goes back to whatever they were doing before. Maybe I am wrong?
This seems like a remarkable oversite on BofA's part. I'm with a comparitively tiny US credit union, and even their app demands a pin code to return to it if I switch to another app mid-session.
> but I haven't opened a computer magazine and said...
I feel this. In my opinion, we have not had a computing magazine worth opening in two decades, at least in the US. I know we can find news and articles relevant to our interests with unparallelled ease on today's Internet, but a huge part of me misses going to a bookseller and picking up that month's selection of nerd rags.
I have always had trouble pinpointing exactly what it is I miss about the magazines of old. Sometimes I feel that it had more to do with how I fit into that world at the time, being a curious teen who loved tinkering with tech, and the future was wide open. Othertimes I think it had to do with the mags being my window to that world, since I had nobody to guide me.