I had a black and white laser printer for a decade for printing mailing labels in a home business. The thing died from incompatibility long before I even had to change the toner cartridge.

The even smarter solution is do whatever it takes and make any and every sacrifice in order to redesign your entire life to NEVER need to use an inkjet printer in any capacity.

I spent three days cooking and cleaning and socializing and then spent today angry and despairing without any idea why.

There’s no faster, easily recognizable way to depict “radicalization” than clown makeup, even if you don’t know the movies or Joker lore, it makes a strong point. I don’t know what iconic signifier you could draw from Fight Club that would make readers go “Aahh she’s fed up, even the people you least expect have a breaking point.”

Yah the more I use AI the more I can detect the absolute bullshit people on both sides spew.

It’s the most amazingly complicated averaging machine we’ve ever invented. It will take the most interesting source materials, the most unique ideas of other people, the most creative materials, and it will find a way to find the safest, most average common qualities between those things. This isn’t a model problem or input problem, it’s fundamental to how generative AI works.

It helps with searching for things online, it helps create guide plans for taking on new tasks like learning some new skill. It’s far better at teaching how to do something like coding than it is left to just code on its own and you copy and paste. It can certainly do that, but you spend so much time correcting it and fixing it that you do far better learning the code yourself and how it works.

Same with art, the people who are using it to best effect are themselves already artists and they use AI to thumbnail compositions or rough layouts, color tests and such, and then just do the work themselves but faster because they already know roughly what direction they’re going.

But using it to write your scripts, to copy/paste code, to generate works of art… it’s literally just giving you other people’s ideas mashed together and unseasoned.

You probably should have your emergency flash drive on your house keys with the big red label “ANIMAL EROTICA FOR EMERGENCIES” because that’s just an amateur mistake.

But there are several other very important differences between human beings and animals that you should know about.

I frequent a wildlife site called e621 that explains and demonstrates these differences. There’s so much you can learn about the natural world!

This is valuable effort that could be used to get people who are not active to be active

This is not a zero-sum game, you can do fucking both. If you’re too fragile, that’s fine. Don’t. But I will not stand for people on the left saying it’s useless to reach people they don’t agree with, especially since we have minds and brains on our side (usually.)

Not only does this work, I am standing testament to it working. I’m sorry if you’ve had bad experiences but I promise you in real-life conversations you can change people. Like I changed. Like I have changed people. You can’t sit there angrily saying someone is dead-wrong for promoting a proven strategy for reaching people. If there were more people trying to do this, we would be in better shape broadly, but please, if you don’t have it in you, just don’t stand in the way of those who are trying. What are you even hoping to accomplish here other than trying to get recognized for having bad experiences?

You have now shot down TWO of my ideas without offering an alternative towards a better future and better things we can do as individuals.

Shrek 5: The Voyage to Save Donkey

Well then I guess our only solution is genocide/mass murder.

We have the same basic axioms, it’s just that for some people having an “enemy” makes it easier for them to cope with problems in their own life.

It’s true they thrive in fear, but it’s reductive. We can do a better job changing people and getting better outcomes if we stop being reductive and start being the smarter person who understands how the country’s strongest political capital functions and start getting them pointed towards our actual enemies.

this weird jumble of beliefs that often clash with each-other

Honestly, this is most of the US right now. Maybe much of the world broadly. The information/media age has not been kind to people with simple views and simple minds.

But yes, the huge challenge, and it is a real challenge, is setting aside that need to correct so, so many things that are going to be wrong or utterly batshit and just listen like you’re an alien visiting Earth and you have no idea how anything works so you’re getting it all from this first person you meet.

its a world view with more basis on how they feel inside their own heads than whats hitting them in the face in real life.

Absolutely correct, which is why it’s challenging to engage but also, if you just accept that they live in a world of narratives and feel-stories, you can engage with them on that level, you can make a narrative out of how much they’re paying for childcare, a story of how hard it’s going to be to get a job when wealthy assholes turn over everyone’s [unprotected labor] to AI. You can make a narrative about the rich assholes who are sneaking their tax money out the back door and distracting people with social “identity politics.” You can spin your own conspiracy story, with them at the center of a grand plot.

Except this grand plot is how rich oligarchs are covering up sex crimes and tax evasion among the world’s most elite… wait, that is exactly Q-anon isn’t it? Well that’s why Q-anon worked. It started to almost move people towards realizing they’re being played. Keep that up. Just ground it in reality.

Again, the idea of asking them questions is to get them out of stories about other people in other places. FOX and friends does this on purpose, they spin stories about far-away problems for simple minds to latch onto. Change the story. Make it about them and their home and their savings and their healthcare and their retirement. Bring them back to a present story and peel back their feelings about it.

it’s still worth trying to understand how they see the world.

I am screaming from the rooftops that we need to do this. We need to stop avoiding confrontation and start getting all up in each other’s business again. Leaving people to stew in their atomized world-views is why we have flat earthers and nazis marching around.

The thing is, they’re all just as insecure and scared as you. It’s just like a dog though, in that a dog who’s scared will bark at strangers and bare their fangs. Your racist uncle will say “libtard woke etc etc” and beat his chest and talk about guns and freedom.

But he also wants to not be scared. He also wants to be understood and accepted. He’s just too fucking dumb to get there the same way you did.

You listen. You ask questions. You JUST ask questions, and not because you’re leading towards a huge “GOTCHA” because gotcha’s don’t actually work. They’re self-serving and only make division worse and make your target double down on their insular, atomized world-view.

Instead, you do everything you can to build a personality and history profile of the person by asking them questions about their life, about their fears, about what’s changed in their life, and about what their political leaders have done to help them. Do not get sidetracked, do not get baited. They LOVE to bait you with tangental nonsense, they learned it from FOX. Just repeat yourself “Okay that’s fine, trans people are indeed trying to steal the statue of liberty to send it back to France, but I want to know Jed, what are you going to do if grocery prices don’t go down? What are you going to do if aunt Gertie’s operation isn’t covered?”

A lot of the time, just this act of isolating and highlighting where the biggest concerns are, where the heart of the fear is, that can break people by itself. I have heard it so many times. “I dunno man, I just don’t know… maybe they are all just scummy politicians, I just don’t know who else to believe in.” This is your victory, this is what it sounds like. Not concessions, not regret, not anger or steamed silence. But genuine feelings about something.

This is the way that people like Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani focus on issues and change people. It’s focus on one thing, and attacking that one thing and not the person. I know a lot of progressives have a hard time with this because there’s SO MUCH SHIT we want to fix and address, but you have to learn to lower yourself a few pegs and just tackle one thing at a time.

The stars used to tell the company if you thought the video quality was good.

The stars now tell the company how to tailor a version of reality specifically to what you want to see and feel.

My years are ticking by. I feel this comic hard.

A thousand dollars seems fantastically reasonable for a well-engineered home-gaming machine that can play current gen PC games at high quality. I spend that much every several years on upgrading or building a new PC.

My complaint is not the price, I think the price is fair. Let’s talk wages.

No need to look it up, fact-check or confirm this or verify context. It was posted with a picture of the man so it must be true.

I bet some early humans did trip balls and come up with new ideas and new ways to use rocks and sticks and abstraction.

But the reality is, our brains expanded because there was no other competition for resources or territory anywhere that could match other tribes of humans. We had eons of bloodshed, of violence and barbarism that favored those who could outthink their opponents and predict what other humans would do.

All of our mental strength comes from predictive capability. Our brains are not recording/calculating devices, they are simulators. All of our thoughts, all of our memories, are just simulations being run over and over and trying to connect with other associations and input. Understanding this is really important too, because when you realize this and really internalize it, you can break free from those countless millennia of survival instinct and calm your brain and not ruminate or dwell on problems, which is just your brain running simulations of your worst experiences and worst predicted outcomes over and over.

Your brain runs simulations to explain how you feel. It doesn’t have to even make sense, it just takes a feeling or sensation you have like sadness or anxiety, and it starts attaching stories to it in order to survive. It does this automatically, but you can train it to stop, you can live in a moment and let the feeling pass through you. It can give you back hours, days or years of your life.