heavy gaming of the AI

I’m actually saying kind of the opposite, that these things are basically uncontrolled power-suits for whatever is knocking around in the back of your mind. It’s a thought and feeling amplifier. It takes almost no effort for the thing to start building a personality profile of you, but not for any kind of objective analysis, but in order to more efficiently amplify and latch onto whatever issues ideas or feelings you already have.

A lot of people really, really loved this effect from ChatGTP and the recent exodus from OpenAI is partially because of their capitulation to government, but just as much to do with their recent “upgrades” locking the latest model into very safe and political-neutral, deescalating language instead of doing that magic-feeling wild escapism that a lot people who don’t know how the thing works, crave.

Yah it’s not the AI’s fault, but people are woefully unaware of just how things work and what it is exactly that you’re talking to when you chat with these models. A lot of the reason people don’t know how LLM’s work broadly is also because the people who make the LLM’s don’t really know how they work.

Most people spend zero time examining how they think, so an outside voice is just going to trample all over their agency.

An LLM is JUST a narrative machine, it takes whatever you put into it, and it ties together connections and stories and fictions and associations of all kinds to build a narrative. Our brains do this also, but we have a level of awareness that we can question the stories our brains tell us. An LLM does not think, it’s just weaving stories. It has no concept of what’s real or not, it doesn’t know the difference between a human being and all the data and writing about people. It’s all literally the same to an LLM.

And whatever you engage with in the LLM it will reinforce and enhance, even the most subtle tones and terms, it treats everything you feed it, even your punctuation and moods, as a prompt to find a connection or narrative for.

If you’re already emotionally and mentally compromised, this can be disastrous if you can’t really think straight.

These devices are designed to take whatever you put into them and amplify them back to you from an outside perspective, using a vast database of information and fiction and references to make connections with other things.

It’s the ultimate paranoia/depression distiller. If you only feed it your pain and fears, it will only focus on those things and build narratives around it, because that’s how they work, they just take your prompts (“i’m sad”) and they do what a depressed or paranoid mind already does, but hyper-efficiently: it draws connections and writes stories around it.

People who don’t understand how their own minds work sure aren’t going to understand how artificial minds work, and they will end up creating these reinforcement loops in their own heads and in the LLM, and get utterly lost down deep holes of spiraling delusion and misery.

YOU need to understand this too, so you don’t doubt that this is a very common thing, it’s happening so much that it’s becoming an entire social phenomenon.

We are barely getting started.

They want to completely blur the line between reality and a corporate-shaped world tuned to every possible consumer’s personal mental and emotional states. People who die along the way because they can’t handle a machine that amplifies their emotions, delusions and fears are just a “cost of doing business.”

Impossible! Everyone knows Jesus is a white man who lives in a cloud above Arkansas or Kansas, he wants us to bomb the shit out of brown people, our pastors say so.

People who will win: defense contractors, evangelical christians with investments in Israel, oil companies that can pull the “make money” lever at whim, saudi princes and everyone who is going to shore up around the capitalist might of US/Israel’s war machine.

People who will lose: anyone who needs insulin, food or childcare.

The hardest message you will ever try to get someone to digest, particularly cis men, is that appearances are secondary in dating and relationships.

I have been using examples of how our minds reinterpret visual appearances and how subjective our whole world is for decades, and still most guys who are overexposed to dating forums and men’s communities will absolutely rage at the idea that it’s not their physique or jawline that will make someone attracted to them, but how they make someone else feel.

And right now, people I talk to in younger generations are pretty honest when they tell me that they have no idea how to make someone feel good around them, that the very idea terrifies them, and it varies from abject rejection of the notion to responses that it feels like “manipulation” to make someone comfortable around you… so is it any wonder people are basically giving up all over the world, and new relationships and sexual encounters are basically flatlining everywhere.

Instead framing flirtation as a (metaphorical) playful whisper of interest. It should be like a scent you wear: light, discretionarily used, inviting, and yourself.

This is so true, and exactly like cologne or perfumes, a lot of people, guys especially, do NOT get it and really overdo it and then wonder why it’s so hard to meet people and date.

What you’re describing is a kind of subtle and nuanced interplay that people explore with each other when they feel good and have minds that are somewhat on the same wavelength.

I think we have a huge problem in the modern world with a lot of guys, particularly neurodivergent, who have a much harder time not approaching social lives and relationships from a mechanistic, procedural perspective and speaking as someone neurodivergent myself, I totally get it, but it takes work to overcome this kind of thinking and “let go” enough to enjoy the process and treat it more like a lazy, flowing river, than a switchboard with dials and levers to pull.

This is why the Andrew Tates and Redpillers and so, so many of their adjacent “movements” caught on like wildfire in a growing population of guys with less social interaction as they spent more time online instead of learning outside with trial and error. The promise of a manual, an instruction book that lays out steps.

And it’s been devastating to our communities, our cultures and our social bonds as a species.

100% this, you shouldn’t even have expectations, the term “flirting” shouldn’t be in your mental language, you should approach socializing in a different way instead of labeling interactions.

“That person is nice, fun and attractive, I want to say something that will make them feel good, because they deserve it” is a far better approach than “What magic flirt-words can I say that will make them horny for me.”

(People can tell the difference too.)

There are both genuine burnt-out doomers out there, and there are astroturfers and bots that feed on their cynicism and boost it, making even more doomers. It’s a self-sustaining cycle that spreads rapidly and serves all the purposes of those who don’t want us to vote.

There absolutely is going to be election interference, there always is, and it always takes the form of social messaging in the US. Where people make a mistake is assuming it’s going to be one or two large-scale attacks on democracy, when in reality it’s thousands and thousands of micro-attacks, everything from capitalizing on male sexual insecurity all the way through to instilling doubt in science, through to feeding cynicism and doubt about our process with rumors and predictions. There are whole farms of these people and bots out there just spreading through every conversation-space on the internet.

You can’t change the minds of millions of people, but you can make millions of people confused or unsure what’s actually happening. It works just as well to make people vote wrong or not vote at all, but people don’t view the little things as the actual threat, people are still looking for large conspiracies, which are less realistic and harder to maintain by an administration made largely of utter morons.

I love how we’re both getting ineffectual, impotent downvotes just for talking about it. There are a lot of people who have all their emotions attached to the idea that nothing can be done, because it prevents them from feeling accountability.

When people vaguepost like that, 99% of the time they hold really abhorrent or unpopular opinions about something but are too chickenshit to just say what they feel because they can’t handle trying to defend themselves.

This is really bad and why we need to call out vagueposting because it’s just another tile in the great wall of societal atomization. There is a whole industry out there forming for parents who have been excluded from their children’s lives and empowering the parents into feeling like they’re the victims, despite the objective reality that your children’s behavior is a direct reflection of you’re doing as a parent.

Every comment you made in this post has basically been agism wrapped in a cultural mask. I get you’re mad at your parents but you’re also going to be old someday whether you like it or not.

The best advice I’ve gotten and given about flirting, is to not think about flirting, don’t think about the relationship game, don’t think about outcomes or consequences, instead focus on being just a little more bold than you’re normally comfortable with.

Don’t even try it if you’re not already getting more comfortable chatting and hanging out with people. Flirting is just friendliness with confidence. You have to walk before you can run. It also helps to have at least one person you trust enough to tell you where you’re being weird or how you’re coming off to new people.

Jasmine Crockett make the same mistakes as Kamala Harris in her campaign.

Also, the zionism.

Hey “There will be no midterms, there will be no elections, the DNC has this rigged along with the GOP” team, where you at? You still planning on sitting all this out in “protest?”

Yah because young people are absolutely killing it in the field of being social, forming communities and starting families and friend groups.

While I get the sentiment about comradery and connection through the focused goals, intense time investment and hardships that military training gives you… I think I’m going to recommend people find ways to connect that don’t lead to potentially murdering Iranians or getting murdered by drones in the wreckage of Tehran or wherever we decide to “freedom” next.

You do need to make an effort, though, instead of excuses.

This really needs to be said more often, I don’t know what’s going on out there but I see this “I can’t make friends” sentiment all over the internet, but out in physical space people aren’t just going to “click” with you, you have to put in effort, use judgement if you’re putting in the right effort for the right company, and you have to decide what you’re setting aside to invest in this goal.

“I don’t have time to do ____” surely applies to a lot of people and situations, but in my time coaching I always had to tell people that you don’t get good at something without making the time to actually work towards it, and making that time is always going to be a you problem. You have to decide if that 2 hours you spend “unwinding” after work is really doing you more good than hanging out somewhere and socializing or even just trying new things.

I get being tired, we’re all fucking tired. But it doesn’t fix itself, all you can really do is force your body and brain to adapt to new kinds of stimulus and activity, which it will readily, you just can’t have both… you can’t spend all your spare time gaming or scrolling and expect you’re going to also be able to instantly shift gears if someone calls you up to go have dinner or play airsoft or go hiking or something.

a specific timeline

If by that you mean, prehistory’s Q-anon scraping together vague gestures towards barely discernable timelines and a massive knob polishing for the people of Israel, then yah.

“After the number of the days in which ye searched the land, even forty days, each day for a year, shall ye bear your iniquities, even forty years…”

From this they decided that this was a “key” for translating the other vague messages that deal with timelines. It was entirely assembled and patched together in the imagination of men who needed hobbies.

This is a weird vulnerability in the human condition that our minds developed faster than our actual innate sense of reason and logic. We are the same species we were 5000 years ago, and the same species we were 100,000 years ago, just with more fancy tools around us. Still searching for meaning in abstraction, still trying to find some personal validation in a cold, uncaring and basically random universe.

They WANT the world to be wiped out in Armageddon, they don’t actually believe in death, they think if nukes turn the world to ash and cinders that Jesus will come save them and it will be fulfilling prophecy.

A lot of people really don’t get this, that evangelical christianity is a fucking death cult, this is why they’ve wanted Israel to literally blow up the entire middle east and spark WW3 for decades now, because to them it would mean prophecy is being fulfilled. And these people work in the highest levels of our government right now.

I grew up in a family of Christian apocalypse preppers, they wanted Israel to take control of Palestine and the entire middle east for their entire lives until they drank themselves to death.