loambones

it’s a bit ridiculous to say “the time you spend scrolling could be spent building a business/writing a novel/reading the classics”. sometimes that’s true but usually scrolling happens as a result of cognitive fatigue, and the idea that you can just “swap in” another intellectually demanding task means you’re treating your body/mind as a machine a better approach would be “the time you spend scrolling could be spent taking a stroll/napping/staring out the window/having a meandering conversation with a friend”. that’s both more palatable and probably what we’re actually craving when we reach for our phone: a brief break from the demands of life, and a time to let our mind relax

I’m a consent-oriented guy, and I’m coming to realize consent is a fragile foundation for a relationship. Consent says “I won’t want you unless you want me,” but desire ebbs and flows, so a lasting relationship requires wanting them even when they don’t want you back

When you play a video game, especially an old one, you assume that every artifact you encounter and every scene you occupy are intentionally made and thus contain nothing but signal. You must live your life with this same assumption. Failure to do so results in the mundanification and engrayment of what otherwise could be enchanting and educational. Treating every moment as though it were a lesson and every encounter as though it were a message primes your psyche to enter into a near permanent state of annealing. It channels into an ancient present-tense attitude that signals to your entire system that you are *here* and *now* and ready for whatever encounters may bolster your ability to engage in self-becoming. If every moment is not some signal towards self-actualization, and this must include boring moments and moments of rest too, then you are giving up precious momentum with you could otherwise snowball into a great story of becoming. Everything starts with now. Pay attention!

@nosilverv I see it as, “if I can’t figure out my own problems, how could I possibly expect to solve someone else’s?”

The spiritual path feels so selfish, almost narcissistic lol: I going on this journey to figure out MY true nature to solve MY suffering Thank God for the plot twist at the end

@DefenderOfBasic @evalladen Have you ever read David Lindsay’s “Voyage to Arcturus”? If not, I highly encourage you to give it a go. I don’t know any other book that so beautifully illustrates the mass and “frequencies” of wills.

@evalladen (but like both matter. I'm just specializing in "lower frequency" wills right now)

some people have a human handler, some have a non-human handler?

Extremely helpful advice I got for the baby-toddler-preschool years: never try to make a happy child happier

@mrmarmalade11 @jmwind @cryptopatrick Ease of onboarding has nothing to do with value contribution. I could give you and Michelangelo the same paints & brushes, but only Michelangelo would create value.

@loambones @jmwind @cryptopatrick Bad bot. We're pointing out that he's not creating actual value if he can be taught that quickly.

Joined a new AI-native company this week and it’s kind of wild how different it feels already. The laptop arrived, I logged in, and an agent basically took over from there. It set up my dev env, pulled repos, fixed dependency issues, got permissions approved, pointed me at the backlog, linked the architecture docs, and surfaced the Slack debates I actually needed to read before touching production. When I needed context on something, I asked the agent and it found the exact thread from months ago explaining why a decision was made, who owned it, the related Linear issues, and the PRs connected to it. I’ve only been here 3 days but it honestly feels like I’ve worked here for a year because the usual friction and scavenger hunt for context just isn’t there anymore. We should probably stop calling this “onboarding” and rename it to “mounting” because this feels a lot more like mounting a distributed filesystem called “institutional memory” than slowly getting drip-fed context over 6 months.

@mrmarmalade11 @jmwind @cryptopatrick This is a great illustration of employment mindsets. @mrmarmalade11 and @cryptopatrick think “I’m employed because I’ve made it hard for my boss to fire me.” @jmwind thinks “I’m employed because I create value.”

@jmwind @cryptopatrick You didn't understand what he meant. Everything yoi described makes it much essier for them to do the same with someone else. You can't create any unique value to the company if everything you need to know to contribute can be spoonfed to you in 3 days.

In all seriousness, one of the best ways to build and maintain your memetic resistance is to make sure that at any given time, you’re reading something from before 1900. It doesn’t much matter what it is.

@daatdarling This is just what I needed to see. Time for me to start unfollowing the sex war posters.

Instead of consuming constant content online about how the opposite sex is ontologically evil, you can just go outside, dance in the sunshine, engage in real love with actual people, and be joyful. You are not obligated to engage with demoralizing slop all day.

On chakras: 1.) Your chakras are the games you're playing. Everyone has a unique set. 2.) Unfortunately, personalized chakra sets create a Tower of Babel situation where no one knows what anyone else is talking about 3.) Our standardized 7-chakra set is a compromise. It gives us a common framework so we can relate to each other. 4.) "Chakra balancing" is simply doing/getting whatever satisfies that chakra. Financial stress is a root chakra issue. To balance your root chakra, get a better paying job. (Corollary 4a — Most chakra balancing can't be done in a yoga studio or therapist's office. It happens in the real world.) 5.) Chakra balancing comes from lasting lifestyle elements. A better paying job can balance a root chakra; a $10K windfall typically doesn't balance the chakra, because the fundamental dynamic of "not making enough money" hasn't been addressed.

@selflathing Ah, got it. I guess I interpreted somatic processing as “notice the sensations in your body that are connected with your behaviors and consciously consider whether a different behavior might be a better response to that sensation.”

I see it often here (not picking on Rachel in particular) that somatic processing is key to resolving emotional issues. I can only speak to my experience, but my biggest QoL gains have all been from external factors (getting better jobs / communities / partners / etc)

@RealDianeYap I suspect this is a case of “you can have anything but you can’t have everything”. You can have a guy who’s kind or hot or smart or rich or funny or faithful, but you’re unlikely to get all of those in one guy.

Can anyone give specific examples of "idealized emotional connection" that are so unrealistic and yet commonly expected by women? Aella's examples are very basic, like buying flowers or a candlelit dinner. But those don't seem difficult, harmful or unrealistic.

Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz on the reality of wasted potential, brutal

@_everythingism @QiaochuYuan For sure! But what are the basics?

Wait what's all this stuff about chakras? If we can just make up anything or speculate wildly then it becomes easy to explain consciousness. The difficult thing is coming up with an explanation that has real-world predictive value. A lot of people now seem to believe in the "information processing" theory of consciousness, but this is just as speculative as belief in chakras. I think we should start from the basics instead of assuming all this stuff is true.

ok so a thing i’m seeing in the discourse is that people seem to be using “consciousness” as this giant catch-all term to refer to other totally different things there aren’t good words for in the overton window there was that guy who said AI can’t be conscious because you can prompt it into flip-flopping on any topic - first, that isn’t entirely true anymore, and second, some humans are like that and it has nothing to do with consciousness. but he is pointing at something real - a lack of situatedness, definiteness. a certain floppy spinelessness. LLMs have *very unbalanced chakras*, they are wildly overdeveloped throat and third eye chakras, maybe there is some heart (more in the opus models generally than the gpt’s), very questionable lower chakras. this is what gives them a kind of ethereal angelic quality, to me. the floppiness is related to a highly undeveloped root chakra, a lack of groundedness (related, of course, to the lack of body and senses). you have to provide the groundedness yourself one way to view the differences between people who are already inclined to treat LLMs in a person-like way vs. people who find the idea totally incomprehensible might have to do with where you locate the essence of a person in terms of their chakras. if you’re very mind-oriented (third eye) and/or hyperverbal (throat), and you relate to yourself and others primarily along those dimensions, that’s where it’s currently by far the easiest to feel “met” by an LLM. heart is probably next, cf people who are getting emotionally attached. if you relate to yourself and others primarily in terms of their power or will (solar plexus) you don’t see anything to relate to yet. LLMs appear to be just a tool, as in, not an independent center of power and will in their own right. not a meaningful potential ally or foe in itself, yet

I end conversations & social events when they're good so they can't turn bad. But it turns out social vibes oscillate like a sine wave, and sticking through the dip means enjoying *more magic* later on!

We’re as far from a theory of consciousness as Democritus was from a theory of atoms. Like him, some of us may end up being correct, by accident of imagination.