I’m really glad you made this comment, because otherwise I was going to have to be the one to make this comment, and I wouldn’t have explained things nearly as well as you did.

You have my sword!

• Sincerely, Me, a natural scientist

Years ago, I read that a great tip for compliments is to stick to stuff that people have chosen. So things like dyed hair, jackets with patches on, badges, band t-shirts, or indeed hair accessories.

It’s certainly possible to successfully compliment people on things they can’t change, like body features, but it takes more skill and can be risky if you don’t know the person. I spent a long while practicing giving compliments on the safer things that I mentioned, as a sort of ‘grinding social XP’ challenge, but I ended up really enjoying it

Piggybacking off this to add more lightbulb jokes.

The best joke I’ve ever heard was delivered by a German friend with an incredible deadpan delivery

How many Germans does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

!“One. We are a very efficient people”!<

Another one!

How many emos does it take to change a lightbulb?

!None. They all just sit in the dark crying.!<

(I should clarify that I find this one funny because when I first heard it, it very much applied to me. I felt mildly attacked, but not in a hurtful way)

Piggybacking off your comment to leave a pirate joke of my own.

“What’s a pirate’s favourite letter?”

(Ideally, the audience will reply “Arrr!” this this. It works best if you prime them for this by doing a bad pirate impression earlier in the conversation, or tell a joke such as “What’s a pirate’s favourite animal? An aardevark!”)

“You might think so, but a pirate’s true love be the C (sea)”

Bonus joke! What’s a pirate’s least favourite letter?

!Dear Sir or Madam, your IP address has been recorded downloading infringing copyrighted material on…!<

Movie dialogue tries to be verisimilitudinous, rather than realistic.

I’m mostly making this comment because “verisimilitudinous” is an excellent word that I love getting the opportunity to use.

I really like the book "Means and Ends by the historian, Zoe Baker. She also has a YouTube channel where I have learned a lot about anarchism, but I especially like the book. It’s one that I bought a physical copy of purely because after reading it digitally, I knew it was a book that would be great for lending to friends.

The book only covers the period between 1868 and 1939, but this was a key period for the development of Anarchism, and I found it useful for understanding how Anarchism has developed as a school of thought or ideology. Anarchism has an especially high level of disagreement amongst anarchists on what Anarchism actually is, and that is inherent to Anarchism, I reckon. Baker grounds her analysis in the history really effectively and it really helped me to understand the wider conversation that was taking place in this period, which helped me to understand Anarchism as it is understood today. It’s a super accessible read, and I found Baker’s style to be quite fun to read also.

The datasets they are trained on do in fact include CSAM. These datasets are so huge that it easily slips through the cracks. It’s usually removed whenever it’s found, but I don’t know how this actually affects the AI models that have already been trained on that data — to my knowledge, it’s not possible to selectively “untrain” models, and they would need to be retrained from scratch. Plus I occasionally see it crop up in the news about how new CSAM keeps being found in the training data.

It’s one of the many, many problems with generative AI

Thanks for sharing this. This bolstered my spirit.

I liked the bit where it discusses how, regardless of the effectiveness of whistles in deterring ICE, they have proven to be helpful in regular people feeling less alone.

Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them

(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.

Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”

I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)

That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”

Pole dancing actually requires an incredible level of athleticism, and as such, is a pretty fun way to get in shape. Some people who install a stripper pole in their home will no doubt be the kind of people you describe, but that’s not the only kind of person who might install a pole at home.

I know a couple of people who do pole dancing as a sport and have a pole installed in their home. They’re both people who seem like archetypical examples of people who have their shit together. For these people, installing a pole in their home is analogous to a weightlifter purchasing a squat rack so they can lift at home — basically just a way to practice without having to travel.

I’m not trying to suggest that your caution is unwarranted — if I were the person in the OP, I would feel pretty anxious about knocking on their door about the problem, because it’d feel like a bit of a coin-flip: are they going to be the kind of person who has a full fledged liquor bar in their kitchen, or someone who engages pole-sport as a productive way to stay fit? Because one of those people would likely be much less easy to work through issues with.

I guess my goal in writing this is to convince you that there are at least some people who install a pole in their home who are nothing like the archetype you’re envisioning. I’m not suggesting that they are the majority — I have no idea what the relative prevalence of these different archetypes are. However, they do exist.

Did anything improve after that?

I feel like the target audience is “temporarily embarrassed [billionaires]”^[1]

That is, people who are not billionaires, but like to imagine themselves as having the ability to become one.

[1] the original quote that this is from uses “millionaires” but years of the upwards flow of wealth meant the quote needed some updating.

I have a friend who uses snuff tobacco, and occasionally she’ll add some cocaine to it — she calls it “spicy snuff”

The idea of copyright is to protect the financial rights of creatives, thus incentivising people to make more stuff, right?

Well even before AI, it wasn’t doing its job very well on that front. The only ones with the power and money to be able to leverage copyright to protect their rights are those who are already so powerful that they don’t need those protections — big music labels and the like. Individual creatives were already being fucked over by the system long before AI.

If you haven’t read the article, I’d encourage you to give it a try. Or perhaps this one, which goes into depth on the intrinsic tensions within copyright law.

An extended story that I recently read (or rather, listened to) was “There is no Antiemetics Division”, by qntm. The channel J&V SCP archives have an excellent audiobook-style reading of it, if that’s your thing. It’s not especially scary (though it does have its moments), but stumbling across it really reignited my enjoyment of SCP.

Taking nudes is really difficult. I’ve never taken nudes per se, but recently I was trying to take some photos that included my body, whilst wearing some sexy clothing. That shit takes some skill.

One tip that I discovered is that using your phone’s regular camera rather than your front facing camera makes a big difference. To get this right, you ideally need to use a mirror so that you can see what’s on your screen as you’re getting the angles right. I found that positioning my phone higher and pointing it slightly downwards was best. Finding a way to securely position my phone to make this work was a bitch.

If you’re using your backward facing camera, then you’ll probably need to set your phone to take the image on a timer. Alternatively some smart watches can be used to trigger the photograph without you having to get up from your sexy pose to press the button on your phone (which risks knocking your phone out of position). Alternatively, once you’ve found the right angle and pose, you can try taking a video of you posing and then extracting frames from that video later.

The experience left me with a greater level of respect for people who take good nudes.

I’m younger than you (born 1995), but I share some of your feelings. The internet today is so different from how I remember it as a kid. I am immensely grateful that I got to experience some of that period of rapid change.

The fact that you, a human, asked this question, and got a variety of human replies is why I would say no.

I know that the dead internet theory doesn’t say that all internet activity is bots, but certainly the internet that I experience, there is abundant humanity.

However, I am a nerd who inhabits quite niche spaces, so my experience is far from the typical. Having the knowledge and stubbornness to find spaces like this puts me in a kind of bubble, where it’s hard for me to gauge whether we’re actually at the point of “dead internet”.

In all likelihood, my answer is “no”, because I need it to be. I love the internet. I grew up online, and as a very lonely child, the internet was a key part of my identity formation. As an adult, the internet is how I access community and learning. As grim as things are, I think I’m a utopian at heart.

Like I say, I realise that my online experience is far from what most people experience, and I do find it sad that most people probably do experience a much deader internet than I do. But the reason why I’m here, putting time and care into comments like this is because this is one of the ways that I am trying to keep the internet alive. “Dead” is a binary, which suggests the battle is already over. I believe the internet is dying, for sure, but I can’t reconcile the notion of a dead internet with all the vibrant communities of people who are making stuff they care about, in defiance of the slop economy.