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.
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.
This is a dangerous way of thinking. It’s not far off from the logic that Israelis use to justify the killing of children, who they argue are predisposed to become terrorists.
There is nothing intrinsic to IDF soldiers that make them capable of perpetrating a genocide. The vitriol that fuels them is built up over years of sociocultural conditioning, and no-one is immune to that. It’s important that we recognise this if we want to avoid creating a world with more people who think like this.
I’m intrigued by solo TTRPGs. Is there a particular one you can recommend?
Glad you’re still with us!
I remember seeing a post of yours elsewhere where you mentioned about difficulty mustering the energy and mental strength to go out beyond your home (possibly linked to your parents being quite overprotective? I may be remembering wrong). Regardless of the specifics, I think that factors like that can worsen relations between family members. My brother and I don’t get on well when we’re living in the same house, for instance. That’s made worse by my mom being a difficult person to live with.
But I think you’re right also, that there is a significant component of the grass being greener on the other side. I know plenty of people who are only children, who wish they had siblings, and people with siblings who wish they were an only child.
In that case, the finished product would be of pretty mediocre quality, in my case. That’s because most of my projects are things that I actively want to learn, and I tend to be overambitious when setting aims. Despite this though, even when I completely botch it up, I struggle to think of a time where I have regret my endeavour. I like the learning
No. The main reason I do projects is for the learning. Any useful items I produce as part of the process are just happy side effects.
TBF, as someone who frequently wears high socks and stockings as part of my regular attire, I don’t think they’re particularly normal. In order to even be able to see that a person is wearing thigh highs as opposed to tights, it’s necessary to wear a fairly short skirt or shorts, which may not be appropriate in many contexts — and if they’re worn with an outfit where you can’t see that you’re wearing thigh highs, then wearing tights appears to be the more practical options.
Plus I have known a lot of people who wanted to be the kind of person who wore thigh-highs, but became impatient with them frequently rolling down. Wearing a suspender belt is a good solution for this, but it’s surprisingly hard to find ones with clips that are robust enough to be useful and not excessively fiddly — most people I have known who have experience with suspender belts know them only as an inconvenient but sexy piece of lingerie, rather than a pragmatic undergarment (which can also be sexy, but they actually exist to serve a function rather than their entire purpose being the sexiness)
So yeah, I would say that people who wear high socks aren’t normal. But I certainly don’t see that as a bad thing — in fact, seeing someone wearing thigh high socks immediately makes them more attractive to me (as a friend or otherwise)
I own a lot of stockings as part of my regular daily attire (they’re so awesome! They’re like tights, except you don’t have to do the weird tights-dance every time you go for a pee, and if one of them gets a hole, you can just throw away the one stocking instead of the entire pair of tights!). However, if I’m doing programming, I’m probably at home, and in lounge wear.
I always found the “programming socks” quite funny, so one day, I decided I wanted to be even more in on the joke, so I deliberately wore some of my fancy thigh highs when sitting down to write some code. I ended up having a tremendously productive session, and it made the socks feel like magic. It was likely just that I was just having a serendipitous day where my brain decided it wanted to get shit done, but still, the prospect that they had actually helped was pretty humorous to entertain.
Because of this, I wore them again the next time I wanted to have an extended, focussed session of coding. And then the time after that. And again and again until eventually, I had created a self-fulfilling prophecy of programming socks increasing my productivity — I came to associate them with the headspace of productive focus, and so now whenever I wear them while sitting at my desk, my brain goes “oh damn, we programming now — best lock in”.
I am extremely happy to have stumbled into this outcome, because it is both useful and hilarious
It’s a reference to the phenomenon of “programming socks”, which is the meme phenomenon of knee high socks being associated with programmers. I think the association stems from the disproportionately high number of trans women and gender non-conforming men (such as femboys) in programming.
Something that I’m super chuffed with is that a few years back, one of my most cheapskate friends asked me for advice on buying a new laptop. When I presented their options to them, they were reluctant to cheap out and get a mediocre laptop that wouldn’t last them very long, but they also balked at the price of even the midrange laptops (they weren’t keen on spending more than £250 on a laptop, which wasn’t enough to get anything that they’d consider to be decent and worth the effort/cost).
As a long shot offer, I told them that I could always try installing Linux on their laptop if they wanted to wring another couple of years out of their existing laptop. I was a tad surprised when they opted for this, and even more surprised at how well they took to it; I jokingly call them one of my “normie” friends, because they’re one of the people whose perspective I ask for when I’m trying to calibrate for what non-techie people know/think. I only had limited experience with Linux myself at that point, having only played around with things on live USBs before. I had heard that Linux could give new life to slow computers, but I was surprised at just how effectively it did this.
(A small amusing aspect to this anecdote is that when I was installing it, I said that one of the side benefits of running Linux is that it could boost nerd cred amongst folk like me. They laughed and said that they didn’t expect that this would be a thing that would ever end up being relevant. Later that year, they got a girlfriend who saw that my friend was running Linux, and expressed approval, which is quite funny to me)
That’s sad. Regardless of whether it’s one of the reasons for Microsoft’s nosedive, it does make me feel some unexpected sympathy for Satya Nadella. I also feel pity, because most high up CEOs do not seem happy with their lives — Many of them spend an absurd amount of time at work, even if they never seem to actually do much work, and I can’t imagine how hard it must be to weather grief under such conditions. No amount of money can buy you more time with a lost loved one.
It really seems like a hollow existence.
Being anti-capitalist is entirely fair, but I think being opposed to all businesses is a less justifiable position to hold.
Yeah, this really was an excellent answer. I’m impressed by how he used this example to illustrate the wider strategy without it feeling like a weird kind of “we will cut programs like this and then everything will be fine”. It gives the sense that this is being used as an example because it’s simple enough to be at the top of a large pile of potential savings, which will take time and work to dig through.
To put it a different way, his answer abstracts away the right stuff. He doesn’t pretend that everything will be as simple and easy as cutting this one program was.
Often the promised cost savings never materialise, because when the chatbot fucks up, it’s humans who need to clean up the mess.
It’s hard to not think this way when people like Renée Good and Alex Pretti were effectively sentenced to death, with no trial.
I agree that venting can be quite cathartic, and I respect the fact that you make it clear that you are just venting. I think drawing those kinds of boundaries for yourself can help to prevent you from slipping into genuinely believing these things.
Everyone reacts differently, and I’ve known people who don’t find medication helpful, but personally for me, they saved my life. I was going through some real bad depression at the time, but being medicated felt like a big boost to my mental wellbeing. It was much easier to do all the things that they say that depressed people should do to get better, such as personal care, dragging oneself out of the house, and engaging in hobbies.
It wasn’t a miracle fix — and I did need to work at developing new skills to ensure that I wouldn’t forget to eat, or spend an entire day organising my music library rather than anything I’d actually want to spend that much time on. So be cautious about expecting a miracle. Medication didn’t solve any of my ADHD problems, it just transmuted them into easier to manage forms. It was like a ladder dropped into the pit I was in, but climbing that ladder still took a lot of work
Something that feels notable to me in your comment is “will they help me read books again?” “Again” sticks out to me, because if you used to be able to read books but now no longer can, then it might be something in addition to ADHD that’s blocking you — burnout, for example. If you are struggling with burnout, then be careful because if you go into meds with the wrong mindset, you could do yourself more harm. Like, if the meds help you to be more productive at running yourself into the ground, that would not be good. My sympathies if this is indeed where you’re at. Personally, I would find it hard to recover from burnout without being on my meds, because they help me to focus on things that I want to do as well as the things I have to do, so they definitely do help overall. I just need to work hard to be kind to myself, and that’s easier said than done
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.