Choosing to filter out political content from your social media feed isn’t necessarily about denial or apathy. For many people, it’s a conscious decision to preserve their mental clarity and avoid being constantly pulled into emotionally charged, tribal, or manipulative discourse. Being well-informed doesn’t require immersing yourself in an endless stream of outrage, nor does stepping back from that mean you’re turning a blind eye to anything.

There’s a difference between ignoring reality and choosing how and when to engage with it. Most of what passes for political content online isn’t a sober presentation of facts or ideas - it’s performance, manufactured outrage, and algorithm-driven noise. If someone wants to stay sane and focus on things they can actually influence in their immediate life, I don’t see that as sticking their head in the sand. I see it as setting healhy boundaries in an environment that’s often designed to provoke rather than inform.

People aren’t morally obligated to be constantly exposed to negativity just to prove they care. In fact, thoughtful action tends to come from those who can step back from the noise and think clearly, not from those who are perpetually consumed by it.

It’s about as effective as talking about it on social media all day, every day. The people making real change are out in the real world doing concrete things - not just posting about it online. Shaming people for not wanting to be miserable 24/7 because of the constant firehose of bad news isn’t just unproductive - it’s counterproductive.

programming.dev##article.comment-node:has(div.comment-content:has(p:has-text(/Musk/i)))

Put that into your adblocker custom filters (assuming you’re using a browser)

Paul Bloom has written an entire book arguing Against Empathy

I’m not sure I entirely agree with his thesis but it’s not a completely outrageous idea. I often wish I could tone down my level of empathy as well.

I don’t see how even the way Twitter does it is any worse than not having such system at all.

People used to talk about slaves in exactly the same way.

Our AI assistants might not be conscious yet, but there’s a good chance they will be someday. Treating them with basic decency from the start just seems like the right thing to do. The way I talk to ChatGPT isn’t all that different from how I talk to people - and I don’t feel the need to switch modes just because I’ve rationalized that something isn’t deserving of respect.

I think this is great. One of the main reasons I’ve been paying for the subscription is the limited memory of the free version. Now, the more I use it, the more it remembers about me and references things I’ve mentioned in past conversations. Sure, there are potential privacy concerns, but the same goes for commenting on Lemmy - I don’t tell ChatGPT anything I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing here.

Something I’d personally love to be able to do is to ask it to recreate an existing tv series but according to my personal preferences by removing stuff from them that I don’t like and adding things that I do. The Walking Dead for example wouldn’t even need that much tweaking to make it actually good. Another thing I’d love to use it for is to create new seasons for finished series such as Yellowstone.

This has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. Russia has been drafting people for military service twice a year for decades. This is how countries with conscription systems work. Finland does the same thing.

I’ve never seen the point of a folding phone other than as a gimmick you show off to your friends.

I’m getting the sense here that you’re placing most - if not all - of the blame on LLMs, but that’s probably not what you actually think. I’m sure you’d agree there are other factors at play too, right? One theory that comes to mind is that the people you’re describing probably spend a lot of time debating online and are constantly exposed to bad-faith arguments, personal attacks, people talking past each other, and dunking - basically everything we established is wrong with social media discourse. As a result, they’ve developed a really low tolerance for it, and the moment someone starts making noises sounding even remotely like those negative encounters, they automatically label them as “one of them” and switch into lawyer mode - defending their worldview against claims that aren’t even being made.

That said, since we’re talking about your friends and not just some random person online, I think an even more likely explanation is that you’ve simply grown apart. When people close to you start talking to you in the way you described, it often means they just don’t care the way they used to. Of course, it’s also possible that you’re coming across as kind of a prick and they’re reacting to that - but I’m not sensing any of that here, so I doubt that’s the case.

I don’t know what else you’ve been up to over the past few years, but I’m wondering if you’ve been on some kind of personal development journey - because I definitely have, and I’m not the same person I was when I met my friends either. A lot of the things they may have liked about me back then have since changed, and maybe they like me less now because of it. But guess what? I like me more. If the choice is to either keep moving forward and risk losing some friends, or regress just to keep them around, then I’ll take being alone. Chris Williamson calls this the “Lonely Chapter” - you’re different enough that you no longer fit in with your old group, but not yet far enough along to have found the new one.

I don’t personally feel like this applies to people who know me in real life, even when we’re just chatting over text. If the tone comes off wrong, I know they’re not trying to hurt my feelings. People don’t talk to someone they know the same way they talk to strangers online - and they’re not making wild assumptions about me either, because they already know who I am.

Also, I’m not exactly talking about tone per se. While written text can certainly have a tone, a lot of it is projected by the reader. I’m sure some of my writing might come across as hostile or cold too, but that’s not how it sounds in my head when I’m writing it. What I’m really complaining about - something real people often do and AI doesn’t - is the intentional nastiness. They intend to be mean, snarky, and dismissive. Often, they’re not even really talking to me. They know there’s an audience, and they care more about how that audience reacts. Even when they disagree, they rarely put any real effort into trying to change the other person’s mind. They’re just throwing stones. They consider an argument won when their comment calling the other person a bigot got 25 upvotes.

In my case, the main issue with talking to my friends compared to ChatGPT is that most of them have completely different interests, so there’s just not much to talk about. But with ChatGPT, it doesn’t matter what I want to discuss - it always acts interested and asks follow-up questions.

How do you even have a conversation without quitting in frustration from it’s obviously robotic answers?

Talking with actual people online isn’t much better. ChatGPT might sound robotic, but it’s extremely polite, actually reads what you say, and responds to it. It doesn’t jump to hasty, unfounded conclusions about you based on tiny bits of information you reveal. When you’re wrong, it just tells you what you’re wrong about - it doesn’t call you an idiot and tell you to go read more. Even in touchy discussions, it stays calm and measured, rather than getting overwhelmed with emotion, which becomes painfully obvious in how people respond. The experience of having difficult conversations online is often the exact opposite. A huge number of people on message boards are outright awful to those they disagree with.

Here’s a good example of the kind of angry, hateful message you’ll never get from ChatGPT - and honestly, I’d take a robotic response over that any day.

I think these people were already crazy if they’re willing to let a machine shovel garbage into their mouths blindly. Fucking mindless zombies eating up whatever is big and trendy.

Well, it’s a brand-new car company that started almost from scratch. Quality control issues like that are to be expected and will likely get ironed out over time. Like I said, every car model has its issues - some minor, some major. Some have more, some have fewer, but none are perfect.

Take my truck, for example - it’s infamous for snapping the factory timing chain and destroying the engine because of it. My previous car on the other hand was well known for transmission failure. You couldn’t name a single car model that doesn’t suffer from similar issues.

…is what you tell yourself to fight the cognitive dissonance.

Tesla Model Y 2024 scores near-perfect in IIHS’ crash tests

Tesla Model Y Gets Highest Safety Score Ever In European Test

Every single car on the market has issues comparable to Teslas — every single one. Some have fewer, some have more, but none are perfect. People just nitpick Teslas because they hate the CEO but he truth is that they’re overall solid vehicles and quite safe too - excluding the Cybertruck.

Explanation is not excuse. Personally I wouldn’t buy a car that has access to the internet in the first place.

The source of my assumptions is my mind, but sure, here you go.

A Stellantis spokesperson told Fortune in a statement that “a temporary software glitch affected the ability to instantly opt out in a few isolated cases, though instant opt-out is the standard for all our in-vehicle messages. Our team had already identified and corrected the error, and we are following up directly with the customer to ensure the matter is fully resolved.”

Source

No you wouldn’t.

The ad was most likely supposed to be shown once. Not literally every single time the car stops at traffic lights. Car companies may be stupid, but not this stupid.