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We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

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Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#251

Post by galangalalgol »

doug_durham wrote: post #206
CooCooCaCha wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of what you described is a scam. Time and again, I’ve found the people who are critical of dieting aren’t doing it right… Which is hard for me to wrap my head around since weight loss boils down to one factor, caloric restriction. You burn more calories than you eat and you lose weight. It’s that simple. All these tricks people use like glp-1 inhibitors and keto all serve the same goal of caloric restriction. GL…

My experience aligns with yours. Words like "discipline" come off as moralistic. I know very disciplined people who struggle to lose weight. As someone who lost 40 lbs through long term fixation on calorie counting and exercise, I find it confusing. However when I look in the mirror and consider what I do to maintain my weight I realize that I'm the outlier. It is unrealistic to expect others to adopt my odd lifestyl…

The one time in my adult life I was in my healthy weight range. I got there that way. The maintenance consumed all my waking thoughts and energy. I decided that slightly overweight with a life was better. Staying just slightly overweight is easy for me with a few hours a week of exercise and excluding foods that I find addicting entirely. For me that is baked goods, grains, nuts, and dairy. So the staples of the western diet.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#252

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #237
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This idea of pretending that your only option is $15 cocktails really makes this argument look lame. Not to mention that the federal minimum wage is basically irrelevant in most places - where I live starting entry level pay at McDonald's is $17/hr. Cocktails were expensive when I was young, too. We just hardly ever drank them. We went to the liquor store and bought the cheapest shit we could that probably had a 50/5…

I worked at McDonald's in the 1980s. Started at $3.25/hr never made more than about $5/hr before I moved on. Cocktails at a bar were about the same price relative to that as they are now. We drank the cheapest swill beer they had on draft. It was about being there with your friends, not drinking some froo-froo cocktails.

My take on this: life is actually a lot harder for young people than when we were kids. There is less opportunity for upwardly mobile advancement, and social media has essentially wrecked people's brains (adults included). I complained that I think it's sad that a lot of young people don't just see "going over to friends' houses to hang out" as a primary option - it just doesn't occur to a lot of young people, but in many respects a lot of them never learned this skill as kids. Tons of studies have shown kids have a lot less "unstructured play" time than they used to.

But then given that stuff is actually harder, I think blaming "stuff is just too expensive" is simply easier. Otherwise it forces you to confront the fact that a lot of this stuff is in your control.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#253

Post by monktastic1 »

yunwal wrote: post #205
monktastic1 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so neatly into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.

What are you going to do when you retire by 40 and all your friends (and s/o) are still working? I don’t really understand the appeal.

Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#254

Post by mtalantikite »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #184
xtracto wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a 44 yo Xenial, not too old, not young. That is, I'm part of the "walkman generation" . It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance. Society nowadays is pretty ugly. Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.

Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and…

A friend of mine had passes to Rage Against the Machine with Run the Jewels at MSG a couple years ago and brought me. A few songs into the RATM set I realized there weren't that many young people in the stadium, because there wasn't a sea of phones recording everything for social media. Just tens of thousands of people pretty locked in to the moment. A younger act and all you see are thousands of screens glowing.

I've always felt that we (older millennials) sort of hit a sweet spot technology wise. We pretty naturally straddled that analog to digital world.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#255

Post by Workaccount2 »

doug_durham wrote: post #196
Workaccount2 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing weight is done in the kitchen, not the gym. In fact exercise makes you crazy hungry, which sabotages tons of people's weight loss efforts. It's better to lose weight, learn how your body and calories work, and then start implementing gym work.

I can't imaging losing weight consistently without exercise. Diet is most important. However even for the most obsessed of us counting calories is difficult to get right all of the time. Muscle mass consumes calories and exercise creates a deficit. Both provide margin that help account for calorie counting mistakes. I find that exercise forms a virtuous cycle in dieting. If I go on a 500 calorie bike ride that's 500…

That's not quite what I am saying. You need to learn about calories and build a proper intuition about them before really getting into exercising. Otherwise you end up easily out eating what you burn.

I have known way too many people who regularly exercise but still cannot lose weight. The problem they have is that thry burn 500 calories exercising, and then go unknowingly eat 900 calories because they exercised.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#256

Post by SoftTalker »

newsclues wrote: post #244
johnfn wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't buy this explanation. There are plenty of things you can do together that don't cost very much - or anything at all. You can go take a hike. You can go to the park and hang out, or play a board game. You can go to a court and play pickleball. Heck, go to the library! All these things are free and many people do them.

The library has become a place for drugs addicts and homeless people who use the free computers to look at porn. It’s no longer a nice or safe place to go.

This is true where I live also. This feral subset of the homeless are ruining every nice public space that we used to have. Libraries, parks, trails. Patience and tolerance is wearing thin; everything that is tried to help them is just abused and shit on (often literally). More and more people are starting to say no, we don't want to tolerate this behavior here, if that's how you want to live then do it somewhere else.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#257

Post by dv_dt »

stdvit wrote: post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

Though it's popularized to blame social media and phones, economics should not be overlooked. Pay for young generations is lagging and restaurants and bar prices are super high. Public spaces for informal gatherings has shrunk - eg fewer malls

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#258

Post by giantrobot »

meindnoch wrote: post #141
daymanstep wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along. In what way is dieting a scam? You literally just eat less, and you will lose weight as long as you're on a calorie deficit.

Americans believe diet and exercise "doesn't work". The reasons are twofold: on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile, and being fat is just a fact of life, like being tall or short. They want people to believe that being fat is a disability, or even an attribute of diversity that we ought to accept and celebrate. O…

> on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile

I think it's much more about people not really understanding how their bodies work. Losing the first few pounds on a diet is easy because it's water weight you drop as soon as you stop constantly eating sugar (soda, snacks, etc). Actually losing fat is much harder because it requires actual caloric reduction in your diet.

Many people starting diets have no idea how their body will lose weight and get disheartened when the second ten pound loss is way harder and takes longer than the first ten pounds. People will justify all sorts of things when they're desperate and disillusioned.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#259

Post by bee_rider »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #184
xtracto wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a 44 yo Xenial, not too old, not young. That is, I'm part of the "walkman generation" . It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance. Society nowadays is pretty ugly. Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.

Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and…

Is LARP dying out? I mean it was always a bit niche and nerdy, but is it on a down-swing?

I was actually thinking the other day, I haven’t hit anybody with a boffer in a while, might need to get back to it.

Re: We may not like what we become if A.I. solves loneliness

#260

Post by dec0dedab0de »

stdvit wrote: post #97

> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many…

I think this is an ai response
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