Literally nothing in it is AI. It’s not even an AI writing style. Where are the dashes? Where is the quirky rhetoric like “It’s not a (one thing), it’s a (other thing).” AI has a style, it’s not this. Just because I’m verbose doesn’t mean I’m an AI.

So I get what you are saying…

A few possibilities:

1. Covid and the pandemic fundamentally changed how people interact and relate

I know this is strange, but pre-covid, people grew up in a world in which dating and to some extent working required a social life. People met at bars, through friends, at parties, doing common activities. Then dating Apps and hookup Apps came along, but bars still existed, social scenes still existed, people still had parties.

Work also had to be a physical social thing: you needed to show up, there was a more social aspect to interacting with people, and people were more likely to socialize outside of work. Some remote work happened, but not a lot.

Then covid happened. All of work changed so that the infrastructure existed for most people to work without needing to be in person. No one could party, no one could go to bars, no one could do things. There also used to be a large social stigma to staying at home. If you were at home on a Friday, you were a loser, uncool, not invited to things, and it bothered people, and felt like social exclusion.

With covid, everyone stayed at home. There was no social exclusion by being at home. People worked at home. And suddenly, being social in person was so much less important. You could get a job by applying online and it didn’t require a social network quite the same way, or that network could be online. You could meet someone, date, and procreate online without needing a social network at all. The main thing that mattered, in order to procreate, was whether someone had a stable job and was employable.

Even post-covid, I feel like we’ve had a shift. There are still parties, there are still clubs, there are still bars. They are less required or needed part of society. Not only that, we’ve gone into more of an era of have and have nots, and some people desperate, some people scamming others, and so there are more risks in going out of meeting someone who is problematic. It’s why people prefer driverless robotaxis over regular lyfts and ubers, even when it costs more: it’s not that the driver interaction is bad, it’s that social interactions entail risk and if you are employed and can date using Apps, or have a partner, it’s sometimes simple to avoid that.

Technology is now much more addictive. So many people, myself included, think it’s emotionally healthy to go out and be around people. In the same way I know broccoli is better than candy, I know that people are better than the Internet. But when I am stressed, when I’m annoyed, when life is frustrating, what do I want? I want the Internet and candy, not hanging out and meeting new people.

possibility 2

2. People have become much more classist as inequality has increasingly risen, partly because perception of being in a lower class carries risk. When the class itself it what causes wealth to increase, people become hyper-aware of perceptions.

It’s possible your friends make more money now and see themselves as better because of their careers and specifically are less responsive because of that. Should that matter in a friendship? No, but does it? Sadly, many people are extraordinarily superficial and cruel and evil. Almost all of us (that use Lemmy) use devices that contain rare earth minerals mined by the ultra-ultra poor who are essentially there in a forced labor situation because no one else will hire them and if they don’t mine rare earth minerals they will die. The conditions are brutal and evil, there could even be actual slavery involved in some cases, and the supply chain is confusing enough that no one knows which devices involve slavery. That’s evil. We are all evil. To those people, we’re the monsters… and they aren’t wrong.

So given that most people are selfish and evil and just care about their own interest, it should not be surprising that these people, if their wealth has increased, don’t care about you anymore. Much like people don’t stop using devices despite slavery involved in the supply chains because fundamentally people choose evil when it’s easier most of the time, you shouldn’t expect people making more money to want to stay in contact with you, because sadly, the only thing that matters in our corrupt evil society is money, apparently.

possibility 3

3. People are so exhausted from work that they just don’t have time.

Working 40 hours a week is hard as hell. It used to be for most men they worked 40 hours, but also had a full-time assistant at home who cooked, cleaned, shopped, and did other things.

Now if someone wants a family, often both people are working, and more people are single. Wages have not kept up with inflation, so that means if you are single, you often can’t afford a cleaner, a personal shopper, meals being delivered, etc.

The result is chronic exhaustion. Working Mon-Friday, being tired as hell trying to be more and more efficient, because companies have demanded more efficiency to avoid being fired without paying more, and then on your off time, you either scroll Internet to try to decompress, Saturday you just sleep nearly all day and finally have a moment to be exhausted and miserable, and Sunday you catch up on cleaning, shopping, and worry about money, and then Monday the hell starts all over again.

Your friends may be dealing with that, the whole barely treading water thing, and it’s awful.

possibility 4

4. post covid issues, long covid

A lot of people who got covid developed health issues, and some aren’t obvious. Some are things like, you don’t quite have full on long covid, but you are just more tired all the time. You don’t have chronic fatigue, but your health isn’t as good. It just impacts people. People with such issues aren’t quite disabled, but they aren’t totally functional either. And I bet there are a ton more people like this than say so, because it’s not easy to talk about, there aren’t government benefits for being chronically tired after getting covid if you need to work and it’s not totally debilitating, etc.

I think it’s more likely Possibility 1 and 2. People are going out and partying less (no data to support this, just from going out myself and seeing bars and clubs with fewer people) and people are more classist and drop people who have less money these day. I wouldn’t block these people, but don’t spend any more time on them. Go completely no contact on your end. If they reach out, great, if not, who cares. They will likely not reach out and it will feel like giving up a soda you really like and you’ll get cravings to reach out, but don’t. A month of no contact later, you’ll realize it’s best to not interact with them anymore. The second month will be easier, and by the third you won’t miss them much at all. Force yourself to be uncomfortable and then you’ll be more likely to use meetup.com, go out to bars, do things where you are more likely to interact with new people who will be worth the time.

How is labeling a bug report that is based on user ignorance a lack of empathy? It’s just sometimes factual that users are still learning and make mistakes, and I say this as a low skill FOSS user and enthusiast.

She may have spared herself a large amount of pain and agony and made a rational choice by dying. Many people with borderline personality disorder struggle for decades in misery and then end things decades later. The limited pleasure in those decades may not be worth the immense pain many feel. Perhaps she was highly rational and made an autonomous decision to terminate her suffering.

The problem isn’t open information, the problem is they actively concealed information from her and didn’t list possible treatments, leading her to be shocked when she read it. Psychiatrists need to be open with patients and not hide things in records hoping they aren’t discovered by patients. She could have been discharged with something listing rule-out diagnosis and treatments for each one.

Psychiatrists also overly emphasize a dogma of brains being unable to change because it’s more profitable to have lifetime patients, and this shapes how patients think about their possibilities. If an expert says you’re always going to be broken, very few will challenge that.

Use duckduckgo.com to search “restaurants near me”

Unless they use a complex system to look up geolocation for all queries and forward an approximate version of that to Bing, then Bing is getting IP addresses and search terms.

If you do searches on DDG, which is powered by Bing, you get responses that are relevant to your IP-based location, which means something about your IP is being passed to Bing aka Microsoft. That’s how.

It’s DDG

It’s duckduckgo. Search duckduckgo.com with the term “restaurants near me.” You’ll often get responses that are close to your IP location.

That couldn’t happen unless DDG passes your IP address on to Bing. It’s possible they censor part of the IP and only pass part of it to Bing, but probably not.

(Go ahead! Try it!)

Since Bing sells to data brokers, data brokers know your IP is linked to a search for rambutan, even without fingerprinting your browser.

I’m not calling duckduckgo.com a honeypot… I’m also not calling it not a honeypot. But it knows too much for something supposedly private.

Any closed source firefox extension that has access to the browser display could be parsing the texts and selling it and your IP and other identifiers to data brokers. It’s part of how these extensions are profitable.

Cloudflare also does highly advanced fingerprinting and has a script called cloudflare insights, so it seems likely that any cloudflare activity is generating marketing data.

It’s true and terrifying.

We have an extremely intelligent Nazi on his way to controlling a robot army.

Musk is clearly a Nazi.

First, there’s the Nazi salute. There’s no reason to do that unless you are a Nazi.

Second, Nazis called Hitler my Furer, and he’s rewriting it this way specifically for this reason. It is an honorific title and he’s showing honor to Hitler.

Third, Musk deflects from accusations he’s a Nazi (“that’s a crazy thing to say”) but he never responds by saying “What Hitler did was horrible and I’m not a Nazi and detest their ideology” which is what someone would say if not a Nazi.

The scary thing about this is Musk will soon control a large robot army. At that point, he could appoint white supremacists to lead the robot army and pick up where Hitler left off. This is a real threat for Jewish people as well as other minorities.

Really? How do I tell the right people?

It’s completely written by AI, but ChatGPT makes a good point.

The fact that naive people look at this is a “crazy conspiracy” is exactly how they can trick you. You’re too arrogant to believe you can be tricked, can be deceived, can be wrong. They have tricked America and then tricked them again into believing criticizing them is inherent craziness.

This is a really cool idea. Any work in the direction of more linux phone technology is always good. There are some linux phones out there already, and these devices have had some problems which is why there hasn’t been more adoption. If there is a way to do this with RISC and have decent battery life, that would be really exciting. Have you tried installing Phosh on it?

The newest, and most exciting, option right now is flx1s (https://furilabs.com/flx1s-update-2/).

One of the biggest problems is that, to my knowledge, there is no standard linux mobile App standard or, if there is, it’s not often used. There is a group working on this issue right now (https://www.fierce-network.com/wireless/mobile-linux-standards-group-formed).

For example, if I am using mobian or something similar and download thunar using sudo apt install thunar, then if I run thunar, it will run, but certain menus won’t display easily. In phosh, any sub-menu boxes will also pop up as a smaller pop-up box and to close it, you have to scroll through Apps to find the pop-up box and then close it. Generally I may be able to see the file structure on the left in Thunar but have a hard time seeing what’s on the right.

There are also things that can happen in which default panels (like the side panel) take up so much room that you can’t see what’s going on. For instance, if you try running gimp in phosh, you can barely see the image panel by default.

There are some Apps designated as mobile-friendly but even these sometimes don’t display correctly. Perhaps there should be a way to make it harder for Apps to be installed that don’t meet mobile standards and have weird menu glitches, such as making it harder to download Apps from repositories that are not mobile.

I’d really like to be able to run something like “flatpak-mobile install librewolf” and just get something that at least had a file with it to tell phosh how to display menus in the best way, if not a slightly altered librewolf.

Many people who used phosh would say “well just use waydroid” but the problem is that with play integrity api, many of those Apps won’t work.

In order for banking Apps and other Apps to run on linux and people to develop software, there really needs to be more adoption of mobile linux.

And yes, battery life was atrociously bad and completely unusable on the linux mobile devices I tested, which were a few years ago. It also got way too hot when just not doing anything, which was terrible. (In other words, if I took the device with me to Starbucks and got a coffee, it might get way too hot in my pocket; if I took it out and used the Internet for 20 minutes, the battery could die, and even if it didn’t, if I were waiting for a call during that time there was a good chance I wouldn’t get it. After getting back home, it would be totally dead and need a full recharge.)

Right now also, the main competitor to linux phones is Graphene OS with FOSS Apps and Graphene OS has better security features if someone is worried about their phone being stolen or seized. Data security is important to me and Graphene OS has a rate-limiting throttle to the password entry that even cellebrite can’t easily bypass and a function to auto-reboot. If the political situation in my country deteriorated even more, and arbitrary arrests started to happen more often, I would much rather be arrested with a Graphene phone than a typical linux mobile phone. Mobile linux for certain distros such as Mobian still offers robust encryption in before first unlock (bfu) if the password can withstand brute force attempts, but since there’s no hardware rate-limiter, the password has to be much more complex. Also, most people who use their phone frequently are not in BFU mode.

Graphene OS also requires a Pixel which does not have hardware switches and so a person must trust that there’s no exploit allowing certain components to be turned on or off which can be concerning when there is no way to definitively measure what the cellular modem is transmitting. Call me paranoid, but given what I know about how easy it is for someone smart to exploit computers, I actually don’t want a cell phone microphone to have power when I am talking about sensitive things or inputting passwords into computer systems and I do not want a camera that is built into the lcd part of the glass screen and can’t be easily covered because of the need to swipe up nor turned off without a switch, even if the cell phone has an incredible operating system that is very secure. Graphene, unlike most mobile linux distributions, is mostly very usable with no battery life issues, no weird display problems where Apps don’t display correctly and menus don’t work correctly, and no random reliability problems, mostly. I understand not wanting to rely on anything involving Android, however, given Google’s recent aggressive anti-privacy stances.

I’m excited about FuriPhone (https://furilabs.com/) and Purism’s Librem 5v2.

The thing that I believe would help Mobile Linux most right now is people having conferences and getting to know each other and discussing standards, specifically on user experience, linux mobile app standards, battery life, and reliability.

There are so many smart people in mobile linux and eventually it will get great but right now there are major problems with the user experience because of how Apps are displayed and battery life as well as things like reliability.

So any way to gather people to discuss the mobile linux user experience and to come up with standards to reduce these issues would help, or even to help list all the different problems so that they can just be enumerated and acknowledged and worked on would help.

Another way that would help is to have a mobile linux security group or conference to discuss things like standards for making mobile linux more secure from brute-force attacks if stolen or seized after being unlocked.

It’s important to realize that many of these people are free masons and they vote as a block.

So when you see the retiring Democrats agreeing to fuck over the poor, and the remaining Democrats not, and wonder how it could happen, the answer is likely that the orders come from the Masonic Lodge.

If a senator ranks at a certain level, and is outranked by other Masons, and the Masons make a decision, that senator is going to do as the Masons say because their wealth, power, and position come from the Masons and the Masons keep tabs on their families, supposedly to help them out if things are needed, such as when a Mason passes.

See something in politics that makes absolutely no sense? The answer is almost always Free Masons.

The idea that politicians are completely democratically elected is questionable. I would bet Gavin Newsom is a free mason and has already essentially been selected President, unfortunately, and will be pushed on the public through a combination of campaign donations and media coverage, ensuring that other candidates who could be better are eclipsed.

The problem now is that the clear desires of regular folks who vote for either Democrats or Republicans are not aligning with what is best for Masons… which is how you get bizarre outcomes like this in which politicians make decisions that the entire country hates and you would expect the Democrats to stick it to the Republicans but instead they are just rolling over for no apparent reason.

Then again, the Masons previously gave America a choice, a black women who would be fair to the lower and middle classes, or some rich guy who would take away programs from poor white America (and everyone), and white America voted to choose racism. Perhaps we all deserve this?