If you place the climate crisis into the context of every other potential crisis then yeah, the world is weighing up nuclear proliferation against climate change, both of which are potential extinction risks but not all that likely in the short term.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.
We just got sent a document that amounted to "please set up a CNAME for us", but was multiple pages long and had detailed instructions on how to do various troubleshooting tasks before, during, and after creating the CNAME, mixed in so that it was impossible to tell what the actual request was.
Had all the classic LLM signs. Underuse of commas. No longer sentences. No other punctuation except full stops and em dashes. Just sudden negation at the end of three barely related concepts.
I'm so unbelievably sick of reading this slop. For the love of God, it's more work to turn bullet points into an unreadable multipage document, so just send me the bullet points. I don't want to communicate with a gigantic vector representing the average person's literacy anymore.
>We just got sent a document that amounted to "please set up a CNAME for us", but was multiple pages long and had detailed instructions on how to do various troubleshooting tasks before, during, and after creating the CNAME, mixed in so that it was impossible to tell what the actual request was.
I noticed shit like that pre-AI, but at least then it was written by a person and conceivably useful info, even if redundant and not always necessary. I can't imagine how bad it's going to get with all the AI slop now.
Realistically the labels are going to be much closer for staples like long-grain Jasmine rice or olive oil, if they're measured by weight.
It's just not that easy to change the nutritional content of a kilogram of a known cultivar of dry rice when it's passed all the standard checks for moisture content, protein content, etc.
The problem with the word meditation is that, if this counts as meditation, then I meditate every time I take a long train trip or go for a walk.
That might actually be true! But there are people who claim they cry, or experience infinite bliss, or that meditation gave them long lasting mental health problems and is dangerous. When I've emptied my mind and let the trees and houses fly past on train trips, I've neither cried nor experienced infinite bliss nor broken down mentally.
Meditation, like exercise, can be a lot of things.
Choosing a brief walk can be exercise, or a brisk walk that's a little longer - maybe doing some forms of housework can be exercise. But exercise can also be running marathons, swimming laps, playing street hockey, dancing in your kitchen, skateboarding or messing around on the monkey bars. Those would all make you feel your body in various ways, both during and after the fact.
I do think your empty mind train rides can be meditation. The fact that much more intense or demanding forms of practice exists does not invalidate that.
(To belabour the metaphor a bit, regarding potential dangers - if somebody has a knee injury, some forms of exercise will be safer for them than others. Take care of yourself!)
If someone wrote about how taking a twenty minute walk in nature made them more productive, I don't think anyone would reply 'I swear every day I see a "new" fad targeted at fixing one's mood and every time they're doing so much mental gymnastics to not use the word "exercise."'
Who cares if they're doing exercise or not? The person who takes walks presumably knows it's a form of exercise. They're not talking about the other forms, they may not be able to do Crossfit or go skiing, and they might not feel confident expressing opinions about the entirety of all exercise, but they definitely know that walking works for them.
I do somewhat see the value in promoting specific, accessible meditative practices without necessarily using the word meditation for it, simply because it can be needlessly intimidating and put some people off because they come carrying a number of assumptions.
Maybe that same principle does also apply to exercise - some people will do it by accident and have a good time, but still balk at idea of doing capital E Exercise as a distinct activity in itself. Sometimes it really is just a mindset thing.
This is terrifying even if you're not vegan. There are moral questions raised by animal products that people should think about. I am worried by people who eat cheese without understanding bobby calves or rennet.
Some people have thought about it and are just deflecting, of course, but not everyone.
I do a lot of damage to other species and humans now and in the future with the energy use caused by my large detached single family home and various leisure travels and imported toys.
The two paths I see would be giving up a lot, including my family since I doubt my wife would go along with it, and live a much less consumptive lifestyle, starting with less space. In the meantime, billions of people in China/India/Brazil/Nigeria are waiting to increase their consumption.
Or I stick my head in the sand and continue ignoring the problem and living the one life I have, and let nature take whatever course it will.
To be fair, what would an interesting and valuable human observation of an AI even look like? Either you know it's a machine doing random stuff, or you think it's like some kind of superintelligent lava lamp that wants you to throw Molotov cocktails.
> It's not just that AI is becoming a little better; the humans are getting worse, too. They're meeting in the mediocre middle.
IMHO, AI will exceed human capability by degrading human capability. It won't really exceed a 2020 person, but a 2030 or 2040 person will be less capable due to AI dependence.
Not only did calculators not make the average person great at higher level math when they no longer had to do manual arithmetic, but it made them less capable in everyday situations when some basic mental arithmetic would still be helpful. The invention of calculators doesn't mean that people go to the trouble of pulling them out at the grocery store to keep from getting ripped off.
> Not only did calculators not make the average person great at higher level math when they no longer had to do manual arithmetic
It's even worse than that: calculators can actually make higher level math more difficult (at least for me). I never developed strong manual arithmetic skills because I was a huge pro-calculator partisan in elementary school. When I got to college I really struggled with calculus, because manipulating equations requires arithmetic and that meant I had extra mental workload to operate the calculator.
I have never practiced Buddhism and it is still indescribably blissful to sit in a clearing in a forest, provided you aren't sitting on the wrong kind of anthill.
If that's a rhetorical question then it's meant to have an effect on the reader, but I can't for the life of me understand what you were trying to say. Losing a phone is almost the same "problem" as losing your wallet, and solving it takes maybe half a day.
What I mean is, it never ceases to surprise me when the situation described in the article is portrayed as inescapable. A good life without all that horror is possible—without having to move into the woods or carry a folding shovel with you every time you go to the bathroom.
Edit: I just realized that your question was specifically about losing a smartphone. I’m not sure if “half a day” is a universal estimate. I can easily imagine that many people would completely lose access to their digital lives because they only realize the implications after the fact. I think I’d need at least half a day just to figure out how to unlock the scooter again after losing my smartphone. I have absolutely no desire to deal with that.
Except a phone does a lot more than a wallet. For many people it replaces their wallet, and their phone, their car keys and many other things. Therefore the impact of losing it is greater.
It is taken out more, so you are more likely to lose it. I often see people with their phones out on a table in a cafe, or even on a flight while they are asleep.
I think it would be more effort to replace a phone than a wallet. You need to buy a new phone and restore it. With a wallet you might need to make a few phone calls but you can manage more easily until it arrives.
I agree that this means few decision makers believe climate change will literally end human life, or end industrialised society, in the near term. I disagree that any problem should be ignored unless it's existential.
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