Best Of

I think the argument that since social media algorithms manipulate what gets seen that makes them an editor and a publisher and responsible for what gets seen on their platforms is right. They hide behind the fact that the posts are user generated content to get away with the enragification of the world.

I check in to read pretty often @Jeroen, always good to "see" familiar folks still here!

😂 I'm just finding Facebook frustrating today. I am pretty careful about my friends list, which is limited to family and people I know well. It's hard to have lgbtq loved ones, including one of our kids, and seeing family defend someone as a "good person" who did nothing but harm that community. But at the same time, I don't condone what happened to Kirk and it makes me equally sad to see the amount of hate flung at the shooter's family right now. The world just feels hard a lot these days, and FB seems to exacerbate that. So I come here for some levity and sanity

Most people are firmly entrenched in their label-identity and work really hard to defend it, no matter which "side" they might be on. The same people are almost all "guilty" of the same behaviors that they accuse their supposed enemy of. People do so little introspection into their own minds, hearts, and behaviors that they just enjoy accusing someone else of doing something while they do it themselves...and they truly don't see it because they are so entrenched in the importance of their assumed identity labels that they feel justified in defending those labels no matter how hateful they have to be to do it.

I live in MN where our democratic state legislators were attacked and killed in June. People who I know actually said things like "That's what you get for being a liberal." And now when someone says the same thing about Charlie Kirk, they say "You are a horrible person, NO ONE should die for their political beliefs." And they absolutely refuse to see how they are exactly the same thing. And there is no hope to point it out to them, even if you screenshot it side-by-side they do mental gymnastics to convince themselves they are not the same.

What frustrates me the most right now is that our politicians and political activists (on all sides) seem to believe it is ok to say whatever you need to "stick it to" the other person, but that they believe themselves to just be playing a game, that words don't matter, that they are just campaigning and that's how it works. They don't accept that their words have consequences, that they contribute to devaluing people and creating desperation and desperation always breeds violence. Then they say, "Political violence should not exist, people shouldn't die for their beliefs!" As if the games they play during fiery speeches don't have very real world impacts on people's lives.

The older and more curmudgeony I get, the more I think social media is the worst thing to happen to humanity. It allows people to immediately share the diarrhea of their thoughts (most of which do not deserve the power of a voice) and cement it as real. Then they are shown algorithms that reinforce the collective mind diarrhea. The amount of hate hiding in people's minds is astounding.

I am endlessly grateful for my meditation practice and my time spent in Nature, which, as Mary Oliver said, "they save me, and daily."

I guess you could say I consider myself a radical Buddhist, not “radical” in a violent sense, but radical in that I challenge systems of oppression through peaceful protest, boycotts, and pickets, which on a personal level are part and parcel of my Dharma practice

I have heard, you should be concerned with achieving for yourself the ending of suffering before you try to help others.

Thus have I heard : practice itself is the expression of enlightenment, not a means to attain it. In striving to alleviate the suffering of others, we practise enlightenment itself, in its pure and natural form.

@Jeroen said:
I’d say there are two ways AI can develop. One is the limitations of LLMs end up being exposed and the AI hype bubble does burst. The second is LLMs will prove to be a stepping stone to reasoning models, and we will have artificial general intelligence in a few more years. Which of the two it will be is really difficult to predict, you’d need to look in detail at the work being done on reasoning models at OpenAI, Deepmind and other firms at the cutting edge.

This my feeling too, I listened to an interview of Cal Newport today and he promoted a relatively more rosey picture. Saying that despite large efforts at increased compute thrown at AI the gains haven't been so great. So at least in the short term AGI isn't as likely, but that also means we may be facing an economic bubble that is about to burst, similar to the early .com bubble.