A long time ago.

These days, I keep both audio and vibration turned off. If somebody needs to reach me they will want to message and then wait until I check.

Thailand. Private pay.

Take a ride share car to the private hospital.

Greeted by concierge when I walk in. She asks why I’m here and then directs me to another desk on another floor.

Entering the next room feels a bit like a hotel lobby. There are big sofas and comfortable lighting. It feels cozy even though it’s a large space. There’s a Starbucks. Another concierge approaches me. I explain why I’m here and I’m sat down and handed an iPad where I can fill in some medical background. They have my record from a previous visit so it’s quick. I confirm that I will pay with a credit card instead of using any insurance.

In about 10 minutes I’m brought to a room where a nurse catches my weight and blood pressure. Then I’m brought to the patient exam room.

A few minutes later the doctor comes in and performs his examination. He makes his diagnosis types some notes into his computer. He asks me to come back for a follow-up in one week and pick up my prescription on the way out.

Leaving the exam room, another nurse catches me to hand me the diagnosis paperwork and points me to the pharmacy.

I walk to the pharmacy and hand them my paperwork. They collect my payment for the whole visit and ask me to wait until my name is called to pick up the prescription.

About 10 minutes later the prescription is ready and I’m out the door with a small bag of drugs and about $125 out of my wallet.

The service is comprehensive and everything is available in one building. For this country it’s a bit expensive but you feel like you’re very well taken care of and it’s instant.

UBI is probably a good idea but it’s coming too slowly for anyone to rely on. Even if UBI is fully implemented, I suspect it will be life sustaining but not a life fulfilling. So humanity still needs to find purpose.

It’s hard to imagine a scenario where someone cannot be trained to do something new. Isn’t that a core feature of humans?

Next, how shall we define value? I argue that humans can always create some kind of value that machines cannot, even if only because a human is involved.

We still value actual art over AI generated art. We value uniqueness and rarity. We value the faults that are inherent from things that are natural and organic.

Tons of the jobs people did a hundred years ago in developed countries are now gone or have been streamlined down to require fewer people. Yet there are more people on earth now than there ever have been before and arguably worldwide hunger is at its lowest point. So somehow we have figured out how to survive despite vast amounts of automation already. It seems unlikely that our new “AI” tools are going to somehow dramatically disrupt this balance.

I think Gary Ridgway, the green river killer from the Seattle area, famouslygot out of questioning because he seemed honest and unintelligent. The cops didn’t think it could possibly be him.

All these minorities may share a common problem yet it’s unlikely they have the same vision for the solution.

That’s actually pretty cool. That thing might be forgot about and then found again 10,000 years from now

Is that car in some kind of orbit, or did we just send it?

Yes. Nobody wants to be first because they and the next xx% will be the sacrifice.

Always liked the melody to this 王七七Wang QiQi song:

https://youtu.be/8VzNV0YDhuA

Still miss RiF and what reddit used to be.

For much of reddit’s best years, RiF was my top app.

Was about to make this point as well but you nailed it. I don’t want to bring the pet home because I KNOW I will love it.

Whoops, 18.1 just released breaking changes

Most social media is the wrong format for long-term discussion. Whatever you post, it will soon be replaced by something newer.

Consumers just want that quick dopamine hit every time they open the app.

There are still quite a few phpBB-style bulletin boards out there with threads that survive for years. I think that’s the social media you’re looking for.

The whole lemmynsfw instance. Don’t need that distraction here.

Text filters - any keywords for news topics that I’ve had enough of (mostly reoccurring political topics)

Weird meme shit from some strange community (or something that is just not my generation) - block the whole community.

A poster who’s engaging in bad faith - blocked, never to be heard from again.

I also set my mobile client (Connect) to mark posts that I’ve scrolled by as read, and to only show unread posts.

I filter by All / Top 6 hours

My experience on Lemmy is getting better and better, and I feel no need to doom scroll here.

Kinda sad the state of craigslist these days.

In its heyday you could get anything you wanted immediately.

5 guys to help you move to a new apartment in 1 hr from now, check

5 guys to plow your wife, check

5 guys to plow you too, check.

Also you could sell your old cassette tape collection for $2 negotiated down to $1 when the buyer showed up.

If only it were still easy to participate in society without doing business with some of the bigger ones

I wonder what would keep you in history’s mind longer: eating the whole Mona Lisa or eating half the Mona Lisa.

True, I tried to qualify it with just about or on the way.

From the perspective of my desk, my core business apps have AI auto suggest in key fields (software IDEs, ad buying tools, marketing content preparation such as Canva). My Whatsapp and Facebook messenger apps now have an “Ask meta AI” feature front and center. Making a post on Instagram, it asks if I want AI assistance to write the caption.

I use an app to track my sleeping rhythm and it has an AI sleep analysis feature built in. The photo gallery on my phone includes AI photo editing like background removal, editing things out (or in).

That’s what I mean when I say it’s in just about everything, at least relative to where we were just a short bit of time ago.

You’re definitely right that it’s not literally in everything.

What do you consider having “taken off”?

It’s been integrated with just about everything or is in the works. A lot of people still don’t like it, but that’s not an unusual phase of tech adoption.

From where I sit I’m seeing it everywhere I look compared to last year or the year before where pretty much only the early adopters were actually using it.

Love to see so much support here in asklemmy. This community is really great.

I went through divorce at the age of 27 and is one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced. It is a lot like a death. Obviously not of a person but a dream and perhaps an identity. It’s the type of thing that can feel like a personal failure and really leave you feeling hopeless and in despair.

In the first months I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that the feelings will just go away or even lose their potency, and they can be extremely powerful. Perhaps they just become muted more and more as time passes and you fill your life with other people and activities. Hell, to this day (now I’m 45) I still think about her occasionally and wish it could have been a different outcome, but so much of my life since that time never could have occurred had I stuck with her. In other words I’ve come to learn that while I’m grateful for the good times we had, I’m also grateful that it ended and I too could move on.

The most important thing you have to do now is find out who you are as a single man - and as a human - by nurturing and taking care of this new found sense of loneliness. Find your new identity. I think you really have to lean into the pain you’re feeling and express it deliberately. Let it move and let it get out of you.

It especially helps to fill your time with activities you love that also nurture you. Maybe that’s being outdoors, maybe that’s gaming, whatever it is you know it better than anybody.

We really need healthy people around to support us during this kind of time and it’s a shame that the people you thought would be there aren’t. Maybe they can still be your buddies but now you know they’re not the type to really have your back when the shit hits the fan. But those kind of people are out there and now it’s your mission to go figure out where they are.