I really enjoyed working with imagemagick back in the day. Really did feel like magic to be able to manipulate custom images dynamically.

I used to make little meme generators with imagemagick before those were a thing, wish I had thought to make a job of it.

Makers rediscovering the joy of hobbies is a thing that I'm all in on and here for.

It’s the units that make it seem unintuitive. 12 days is roughly 0.032 years, and 17 minutes is likewise 0.000032 years. It’s relative to how we were taught to view smaller lengths of time. Of course you could argue measuring time by the rotation of heavenly bodies is more intuitive than counting on your fingers for the hours in a day and days in a lunar cycle.

Not to downplay the risk, but I reckon it’s human nature to embrace the benefits and ignore the risks.

I dont mind the benefits or the risks (I believe in AI extinction risk btw), I dont mind them telling that the AI is freeing her to do some work. I just mind the framing "so she can focus on this other work", like that other work wont also be taken by AI later on.

> As our weather grows more extreme, the stakes grow higher.

Never let a good crisis go to waste for marketing, especially if the product you're promoting is contributing to exacerbating it.

Both, in a way. In order to be sure it's the skill reducing token usage, you measure it with and without the skill, and then you do that periodically to account for all the other variables.

Alternatively, you pick a belief based on prior evidence from either approach you mentioned, which is the natural thing that many of us do.

> Add to that videogames, comics/manga, TV shows, etc, and I literally just can’t get bored anymore.

It's a bit strange to me (and I figure I'm just unusual in this respect), but all of those things lead me quickly to boredom these days. It's the brain rottenness of it all that leads me to be bored, and in a way I'm thankful for it. I find that even compared to my childhood, I'm more bored today than I've ever been.

> The real luxury, for any age, in general, is in not having dependencies and needs.

Fewer. Everyone will always have some dependencies and needs.

Personally, I pity anyone who sees a desire to be loved as a weakness. That’s quite literally a lesson taught as a trope about being a good person vs an evil one.

Being loved is not a weakness. But a strong requirement to be loved is a weakness because that means you don't have strength to be happy without being loved.

And that perspective presumes that being loved isn’t a fundamental human need.

Eating is not a weakness. But a strong requirement to eat is a weakness because you don't have the strength to be happy without eating.

I would actually argue that eating is a weakness, that every single human (and animals in general) just happen to share.

At some level you are defined by your weaknesses enough that they can't really be called weaknesses.

Definitely, but it would be silly to say not needing to eat is a luxury. Not starving, perhaps.

Isn't that true? Not being able to live without eating is, in fact, a weakness, just a very common one.

Love is extremely common. It is not particularly much of a weakness because there are plenty of people who will love you. Now, finding that person, or those people, depending on exactly what it means, that could be hard. There are also a lot of people who will abuse your need for love, and so you do have to be careful.

This is actually a sad comment. How did you ever come to believe that wanting to feel loved, which is a fundamental desire (if not "need") for the vast majority of human beings, could ever be construed as a weakness resulting from a lack of "strength"?

To steel-man their argument, I think what they are trying to describe is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxious-preoccupied_attachment vs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_attachment

But your steel-man actually proves my point: people who have insecure attachment commonly develop such an attachment style as a result of their childhood relationships with their caregivers.

It has absolutely nothing to do with being "strong" versus "weak".

Under your steel-man, someone who is anxious-avoidant could appear very independent and therefore "strong" even though they are struggling inside.

How then about monks or priests? I wouldn't clasify them as all of them being sad or having a fundamental need to be loved. Also loved can have different meaning - mostly people think about family and partners. There is also community.

Charitably interpreted, GP is already loved and takes it for granted while arguing about a straw man. Or perhaps GP is specifically talking about someone who has trouble loving themself without a romantic partner.

A rock feels no pain.

And an island never cries.

A rock never feels anything. That's the price, and it's a very steep one.

I’d be interested to see the data for that claim, since I would imagine a strong correlation between glp use and lower body fat.

I’m sure you can just look up the studies, but note that GLP1s are widely prescribed to people without weight issues —— weight loss itself was originally an off-target effect. I have friends who run marathons who are on semaglutide.

Because they need to medically or it helps athletically ?

Because they need it medically.

This video by a medical doctor cites many studies showing that GLP-1 health benefits go beyond weight loss (see video description for link to papers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKPaVhpomks

I read the introduction as referring to the effects on those regions that gave up their status as members of the empire, rather than what you’re saying.

Of course, but the article writes as though the US just left these places to their own devices, even though they constantly meddled in these countries after the fact, and meddled in many more countries across the world. It's not like these countries were fully sovereign after the fact. The US backed dictators in every single one of the countries discussed: Marcos, Noriega, Batista, the Duvaliers (and of courses many others in different countries).

The author fails to understand that decolonization can be a pretext for continuing exploitation of foreign territories while abandoning the nominal moral obligation to develop them. In the counterfactual where the US maintained control of these countries, they would not have been developed to first-world standards, they would have just been exploited overtly.

> n the counterfactual where the US maintained control of these countries, they would not have been developed to first-world standards, they would have just been exploited overtly.

Since you state this so confidently, surely there's an example in our current timeline where it happened this way, right?

The article seems to regard some of these places as failures without examining _why_ things might be the way they are. Would life for Cubans have been better under American rule? Perhaps, but its not like life under Cuban rule was given much of a chance…

Like how is there a section on Cuba that does not mention the American embargo on Cuba for the past 50 years? How can we take this analysis seriously?