Larger orgs probably have their own website, and could put it there and/or make an RSS feed. That’s old tech, and probably not as popular because it can’t be monetized like twitter/facebook/etc.

There’s also email, which is typically free. It’s less fancy, but it’s also very open. You don’t get good discoverability, though. Some bands I like send out newsletters and that’s how I keep up with them.

Lastly, the fediverse exists. It has some of the problems of social media, but at least it’s not owned by a handful of rich assholes.

I don’t use reddit aside from reading search results. I never post and never explicitly seek it out.

I deleted Twitter years ago. I never used Facebook or Instagram or tiktok. That shit’s bad for you.

It’s annoying that some places will make announcements only on shitty platforms. None of my friends are this “hardcore” , so sometimes I find out about stuff like a concert or protest or whatever because one of them sees it on Instagram

CrossCode has such charm. The puzzles are good, but I find myself tired after playing it in a way other games don’t give me. I should finish it.

Shadowrun for Genesis was amazing! Ahead of its time. The way it semi randomly generated jobs for you to do was pretty unique. Like Bethesda radiant quests, but decades earlier and better. I really enjoyed rising up from the weakest street runner to someone with enough reputation to skip the line at the expensive club.

The leveling system was also pretty advanced for Genesis.

Also the cyberspace hacking was wacky and fun.

Yeah it bothers me when the community for a game is like “{skill} is TRASH never use it” and when you do some digging you find it’s like 2% less damage per second. Or it doesn’t work well in NG+7. Some people are really obsessive about this stuff.

One of the reasons I prefer playing on PC over other platforms is there’s usually fan made mods / cheats. Like, yeah, I could do something really tedious for four hours, or I could get a mod to skip it. This is my leisure activity, not an exam.

I try to be mindful that too much cheating can water down the experience. Like, if I was playing BG3 and just set everyone to max level from the start, I would probably have less fun, personally. But if someone just wants to do the story and have fun with exploding barrels? Not for me to judge.

(I do draw the line at multiplayer. Cheating against other people is rude as heck. )

Yeah. Often when I talk to people who say they “don’t have time” I wonder where their time is going. Often to watching TV. Sometimes podcasts. Social media is a big time suck.

But like if you have time to watch all of the office again this year, you had time to play video games.

A friend of mine realized they were just losing hours a day to Instagram. Delete that, and you have time for better hobbies. Play a game. Read a book.

Having children seems like a bigger factor. The only couple I know that has kids still has time. One spends it on DND, and other on TV and simple phone games.

Single use plastic should he illegal for most things. Yes, it might be inconvenient to have to carry your own thermos or whatever, but filling the ocean with plastic is worse than inconvenient

Just remember that good relationships never end in breakups.

lol what. I’ve had several relationships that were good, and then we broke up. We’re still friends, but it became apparent that we were no longer good for each other as partners. People grow and change. That doesn’t invalidate the time we spent together.

You have a lot of life ahead of you. The feelings will fade. Don’t wallow. You’ll be fine.

When I was a youth I had a lot of big feelings about relationships and crushes and friends. The feelings were real. They certainly took up a lot of space in my head, but they weren’t really proportionate to what was happening. Everything felt big because it was new to me. I barely talk to anyone from that time in my life anymore. I live in a new city with new friends.

You’ll be fine.

Apologies for the direct question, but how old are you?

In a couple months you’ll find someone or something new and exciting, and laugh at how this felt like the end of the world. Just make sure you don’t wallow in a pit of depression. Go out into the world. Do your hobbies. Find new hobbies.

Also, consider using more line breaks for readability.

I’m ~40, so I don’t date or spend much time with people in their 20s.

I have seen the occasional profile demanding a certain height, but I just skip on it immediately.

I wonder if it correlates with other attributes? I’m also very left wing so I don’t interact with conservatives much, for example. Maybe “I need a tall man and I’ll say it out loud” happens more there?

Not to my face. But as someone else said, it’s rare for you to be told the rejection reason (for early dating). There are a lot of reasons for this, but part of it is people kind of suck at taking rejection. And on top of that, a significant portion of men are dangerous.

No one wants to risk the man flipping out, spewing cruelty, or worse. A gentler letdown seems safer.

Do you think they realize that they made her look fun (smiling) and him look awful (scowling, wearing a school child backpack, bad haircut) ?

The bar is set REALLY low

There’s a saying “the bar for men is in hell”

I thought it meant there was a drinking establishment for men in hell. They go and drink with the devil, and that’s where they get all their bad ideas. They’re doing shots and the devil’s like “say she’s fat”, and the guy is like “good advice bro”.

Turns out the saying just means the bar is super low. So low you don’t even have to jump. It’s so low, it’s deeper than the depths of the earth and in the fires of hell that burn below.

But yeah, so many men are so horrible, it’s shockingly easy to rise above them.

Oh yeah. Cars are bad on like every metric.

Socially they isolate people. You don’t interact with anyone when you’re driving except to get angry. The micro interactions you have on the train matter. Seeing people that aren’t just like you, also annoyed that the train is delayed, or just having a nice time with their kids, matters. More than makes up for when other people are annoying.

Economically they hurt. It’s much harder to just pop into an interesting looking shop when you’re cruising along at 40mph. All the space dedicated to parking could be used for other stuff- housing, commerce, communal space, whatever.

They make spaces less safe. Other than the direct impact (no pun intended) of people getting hit by cars, or crashing into stuff, a space that has steady foot traffic is generally safer. If everyone was in their car instead, you’d probably be alone on foot with no one to help if something happened.

They’re bad for the environment. Air pollution, micro plastics, whatever.

Drunk driving is way more dangerous than drunk “riding the train”.

The more non-car options are built out, the better it will be for people who need to drive for whatever reason.

Cars culture is trash and if we ever escape from it, it’s going to take years.

I wonder if it’s exceeded the max length and caused a poorly handled error

Do the needs stay satisfied, or is it going to be like 2 years later we have billionaires and starvation again?

Many people have found that using LLMs for coding is a net negative. You end up with sloppy, vulnerable, code that you don’t understand. I’m not sure if there have been any rigorous studies about it yet, but it seems very plausible. LLMs are prone to hallucinating, so you’re going to get it telling you to import libraries that don’t exist, or use parts of the standard library that don’t exist.

It also opens up a whole new security threat vector of squatting. If LLMs routinely try to install a library from pypi that doesn’t exist, you can create that library and have it do whatever you want. Vibe coders will then run it, and that’s game over for them.

So yeah, you could “rigorously check” it but a. all of us are lazy and aren’t going to do that routinely (like, have you used snapshot tests?), b. it’s going to anchor you around whatever it produced, making it harder to think about other approaches, and c. it’s often slower overall than just doing a good job from the start.

I imagine there are similar problems with analyzing large amounts of text. It doesn’t really understand anything. To verify it’s correct, you would have to read the whole thing yourself anyway.

There are probably specialized use cases that are good- I’m told AI is useful for like protein folding and cancer detection- but that still has experts (I hope) looking at the results.

To your point, I think people are trying to use these LLMs for things with definite answers, too. Like if I go to google and type in “largest state in the US” it uses AI. This is not a good use case.

That’s really not the same thing at all.

For one, no one knows what the weather will be like tomorrow. We have sophisticated models that do their best. We know the capital of New Jersey. We don’t need a guessing machine to tell us that.