I take it you have some better approach than relying on medication when my back pain becomes incapacitating? Cause it’s not fixable, I’ve seen numerous doctors about it over the years, not to mention chiropractors, physical therapists, etc. My choice is to take pain meds when things get bad or to just be incapacitated for the rest of the day whenever it flares up. So if you have a better approach I’m all ears, but just saying ‘drugs are bad mkay?’ isn’t terribly convincing because so far my experience has been that not relying on drugs is all downside.

Oh, yeah, probably. I only used it regularly for like a month or two, 3 pills a day, so it wasn’t so bad for me.

Depends on the back, and the pain, and the meds. No, they don’t fix the underlying issue, but for circumstances where the underlying issue can’t be fixed they make it a lot more tolerable.

Yeah, tramadol is weird because it makes you not care about stuff. Which is kinda good because it makes you not care about pain, but also, ya know, the other stuff too. But it was quite easy for me to come off of honestly; I didn’t shit for a week and that was more than enough to make me stop taking it regularly. Now I take it maybe once or twice a month at the outside.

Because you’re not taking the good pain meds.

I’ve lived with chronic back pain for 20 years, and I have 3 stages of medication I go through (though mine is alignment-related, so muscle relaxers help): aleve (the only OTC painkiller that touches my back pain), tramadol (moderate-strength opioid, can’t take it for long or it causes plumbing problems), and tizanadine (the serious industrial-strength muscle relaxers; knocks me out for 8 hours and usually fixes my back the first time.)

If you’re looking for alternatives, THC helps somewhat with my back pain, but I dunno what’s legal where you are.

To be clear you don’t have to get that technical to read non-Amazon books on your kindle… I’ve owned 2 different kindles over the course of about 15 years and literally never bought an ebook from Amazon. Just gotta know where to get them (libgen) and how to use them (calibre.)

A cheap ereader would be nice, but I’ve kinda had to go the opposite direction; my eyes weren’t great to begin with and have only gotten worse with age, so I need a larger screen. I do very little reading (in general, not of books specifically) on my phone because it’s too small and I have to zoom in and pan around all the time, etc.

I’ve been using duck.ai recently myself and quite like it. My only complaint with it is that the chats have a length limit, so if you’re working on complex projects you can run into those limits pretty quick. I use it for worldbuilding for a novel I’m working on and I have to use chatgpt for thematic stuff because it has a better memory, but otherwise it’s great for quick/small things.

That, I’m afraid, is the nature of technology: it makes everything easier, even the stuff you really wish it didn’t.

Respect them for who they are, and listen to them if they tell you you’re fucking it up, just like you would with anyone else. It’s almost as if trans people are just people. ;)

I’ve heard it said before that the limitation on empire size is about 2 weeks. That is to say, if it takes longer than 2 weeks to get a message from the capital to the frontier it causes instability. So, it’s more about time than absolute physical size.

Out of curiosity, what is it you use it for? I pretty much only use it for SMS, for which it is kinda janky and unstable. Doesn’t always get contact names, doesn’t load everything from conversations, misses messages that I sent or that were sent to me, crashes if I scroll too fast, etc. I have Connect installed just to use SMS (cause I hate typing on my phone keyboard), but I’m honestly not even sure what the base software does.

Bill Wurtz’s excellent history of the entire world, I guess. Also check out his history of Japan.

Enshittificaiton is a uniquely capitalist thing, so…

Yeah, my primary concern is I’m part of a community of ~350 people who games together, and while there’s probably some folks in there who could swing a server, right now discord isn’t costing us anything and does everything we want (chat, voice, streaming, etc). If we were to consider moving we would probably need a reasonably beefy server and some software with all of those features, and right now that just doesn’t seem feasible.

I quite liked Walkaway, but I’ve got kind of an anarchist bent myself, so.

Replace ‘stop remembering things’ with ‘remember fewer things’ at your own leisure if it makes you happy, I’m exaggerating slightly to make a point.

My argument is not that we will stop practising critical thinking altogether, but that we will not need to practise it as often.

And mine is that as far as I know we have no evidence (or at least nothing more than anecdotal evidence at best) for that because society has only gotten more complex, not less, and requires more thought, memory, etc to navigate it. Now instead of remembering which cow was sick last week and which field I’m going to plant tomorrow I have to remember shit like how to navigate a city that’s larger than the range in which most people traveled their entire lives, I have to figure out what this weird error my PC just threw means, I have to calculate the risk-vs-reward of trying to buy a house now or renting for a year to save up for a better down payment and improve my credit, etc. These are just examples, pick your own if you don’t like them.

Less practise always makes you worse at something. I do not need evidence for that as it is obvious.

Now who’s being reductive? I’m not asking for evidence that less practice makes you worse at something, I’m asking for evidence that labor-saving devices result in people doing less labor (mental or otherwise), because I think that’s a lot less obvious.

I have seen how today’s students are using it instead of using their brains

This is a bad example because learning is a different matter. People using it instead of learning will not learn the subject matter as well as those who don’t, obviously. But it’s a lot less obvious in other fields/adult life. Will I be less good at code because I use an LLM to generate some now and then? Probably not, both because I’ve been coding off and on for 30 years, but also because my time instead is spent on tackling the thornier problems that AI can’t do or has difficulty with, managing large projects because AI has a limited memory window, etc.

We teach critical thinking in schools for a reason, because it’s something that does not always come naturally, and these students are getting AI to do the work for them instead of learning how to think.

That’s debatable, though I guess it depends on where you’re from and what the schools are like there. They certainly didn’t teach critical thinking when I was in (US public) school, I had to figure that shit out largely on my own. But that’s beside the point. Shortcutting learning is bad, I agree. Shortcutting work is a lot more nebulous and uncertain in the absence of that evidence I keep asking for.

Yeah I don’t need anywhere near that much. I’m syncing maybe 50-100mb worth of stuff. More might be nice cause I could back up other things too, but… meh.

To be fair that was also my experience with PopOS which is designed to be user-friendly. The answer to questions like ‘how do I take a screenshot of a region and copy it to clipboard without spamming files’ or ‘how do I switch audio devices between speakers and headset’ just tends to be ‘run this long-ass command you would never have figured out on your own’ or ‘Write a shell script full of such commands to do it for you and call it with a shortcut key’. I think this is a linux problem, not a distro problem, because it was the same way when I was using redhat 15 years ago or slackware 30 years ago.

Came here to say this, I’m glad I’m not the only one.

Because some people are just shallow.