AI for me as well. I’ve played with it a little and it’s kinda fun. Every company is pushing AI now including in areas where it doesn’t make any sense or is many years away from being useful. I’m also seeing a lot of developers being assigned to use AI without any directions on what to use it for.

I’m far enough along in my career I don’t need to worry about being replaced by AI. If it’s ever good enough to take my job I’ll be happily retired writing software for fun and living my life without AI. I just don’t have any interest.

I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.

The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.

The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.

I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.

Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.

If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.

I pump Large Growth and call it a day.

Of course, but the people who are constantly talking about “Stocks” and “The Market” are usually constantly trading, wheeling, dealing, doing all sorts of shit and then trying to brag about how smart they are cause they’re “hustling” while… barely keeping up with or not keeping up at all with those broad index funds you already mentioned.

Saving accounts are just a great resource for banks. Their returns are always less than inflation so you’re basically always losing money with them.

Yep, S&P 500 or Russel 2000 is all you really need.

Oh. My. God. Can fucking apps learn that when I say “block” I fucking mean it? Don’t show me fucking anything about baseball, soccer, tennis, basketball, and especially not American football. I AM NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE.

Also, I have to block a large fraction of my social feeds at certain times of the year because all they talk about are sports.

I’ll never understand letting the outcome of a game make or break my mood in the following days.

I don’t mind playing sports even if I suck at them, but watching them? Uggghhh.

I spent >10 years of my youth playing a sport competitively. I don’t think I ever watched a professional game to completion. Unlike pretty much all my teammates, I just could not have cared less.

Play the sport myself? Fun, sure! Watch someone else play? Uh, why?

I think it’s great that people enjoy watching sports. I dunno why but it just bored the hell out of me.

I too do not understand social media. The best I get is it’s about people shouting into a void and hoping someone else heard you to interact with it, by repeating it, liking it, or shouting back at you.

Hashtags are the only way to organize these posts and you need to add them or no one else will hear your shouts into the void.

Interestingly, I think people like you and me use Lemmy because one of the same underlying reasons as social media people:

Either:

1. Endless amounts of stuff that speaks to your interest. (With us it’s stuff like technology. On Social media, people are “interested” in what others are up to.

2. Getting likes/dislikes. Even though likes aren’t important on Lemmy, I notice in my usage that I do subconsciously get the same dopamine hits jf a post gets liked a lot, just like Social Media does. It’s less aggressive on Lemmy because you don’t get alerts for it, but it does factor in on engagement.

3. Engaging in conversations/discussions with other people.

4. Sharing things you find interesting yourself

The content might be different, but the underlying principles are really close. Social Media is actually really close to how forums work at it’s core.

But I know this is an unpopular opinion. And no, I wouldn’t call Lemmy Social Media per se. But the line is more blurry than I’d like to admit if I look at my time spent with Lemmy and how I spend it.

Star Wars fans that murder people for disrespecting Yoda.

It’s a sickness.

I do give a shit. I just don’t think that stupid popup is worth it. I can’t believe site creators decided that was the way to go instead of just not collecting bullshit analytics. Instead they hope through dark patterns users will just click the shiny button because they’re annoyed. Actually… I guess it’s working…

What about chocolate chip cookies?

I think that the idea that the EU might have had behind the cookie popup mandate wasn’t to actually provide any useful information or options on a per-site basis, but to make users more aware of the amount of tracking occurring.

On an individual website standpoint, I agree with you – the cookie popup law is obnoxious, and does a poor job of solving a technical problem that is better solved by just not retaining cookies. In fact, not retaining cookies – a better approach – exacerbates the cookie popups, because it ensures that a site cannot track you to remember whether it has already shown the cookie popup, so makes it do so all the time. I’m just saying that I’m not sure that providing a user a way to avoid tracking on an individual website is actually the goal.

On a related note, though…generally-speaking, I don’t care much about EU regulation insofar as it doesn’t affect me. People in the EU can do what they want, and if they want to place restrictions that affect people in the EU, fine, whatever. I start to have a problem, though, when websites present cookie popups to me. I’m not in the EU.

Do you shit with the door open in public toilets? You have nothing to hide after all and don’t require privacy there.

You can get a plugin for Firefox that will do that for you.

Not to mention horribly flat eq. No dynamic integrity whatsoever.

So, I am not a vinyl fan, and do not own any. And I agree that the “quality argument” about vinyl being analog and thus being higher fidelity is pretty senseless. But a couple of points:

Vinyl avoided the loudness war

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

The loudness war (or loudness race) is a trend of increasing audio levels in recorded music, which reduces audio fidelity and—according to many critics—listener enjoyment. Increasing loudness was first reported as early as the 1940s, with respect to mastering practices for 7-inch singles.

Modern recordings that use extreme dynamic range compression and other measures to increase loudness therefore can sacrifice sound quality to loudness. The competitive escalation of loudness has led music fans and members of the musical press to refer to the affected albums as “victims of the loudness war”.

Because of the limitations of the vinyl format, the ability to manipulate loudness was also limited. Attempts to achieve extreme loudness could render the medium unplayable. Digital media such as CDs remove these restrictions and as a result, increasing loudness levels have been a more severe issue in the CD era.

I’d guess that audio recorded with the expectation that it would be played on vinyl is probably optimized for that format

Same idea for old headphones or amplifiers or whatever. I don’t know specifics.

LCD and LED displays, in 2024, are pretty much across-the-board better than CRTs in 1990. But a lot of old video game emulators try to reproduce artifacts that resulted from low display fidelity of CRTs. Scanlines. Blurriness. Blooming. Curvature of display. Even a bit of color fringing or the like. That’s because the game was designed to be played on the system in question (or one closely approximating it). The art very frequently looks better, less jagged.

I have magnificent MIDI soundfonts that can make any MIDI audio played on my computer sound vastly more realistic than it does on old, 1990s computer synth hardware or on something like a Super Nintendo. But the music can sound much worse, because the artists were designing the soundtrack with an eye to making it sound pleasant on hardware that had the characteristics of the time.

Album art

Vinyl records were not very space efficient. But that meant that artists had a huge amount of space to create album artwork compared to CDs.

That’s not something that I’m personally into, but some people really are.

Now, all the above being said, I don’t own vinyl or a turntable and have no interest in ever getting one. But there are some arguments that I can understand for why people may prefer them.

Ugh, yep, I’m far from alone in saying I’d really rather not have any

Add getting married to that for me. I enjoy not being legally bound to another human

I think constantly bringing it up to people all the time is more of a disservice.

The trans community is tiny, I’m an almost 50 year old trans woman transitioned over 20 years ago. The reason we have the rights we do is because it’s “brought up all the time”. When I transitioned, it was rarely brought up, this was because most people were scared of the social and economic consequences of doing so. This is all changing because we talk about it rather than be quiet and let people keep us down. I’d imagine even you might have more negative views of trans people if the only exposure you had was from talk shows promoting us as freaks, this is how it was before.

Other than that, your attitude is fine, not everyone needs to be interested.

I think the silent majority feels like this.

“Eh, not my cup of tea, but you do you”

I realized far too late that most mainstream media is about maximizing views and not telling those stories that worth telling as you said. They start with an interesting idea for a story and if it gets popular it just drags on to get the most amount of eyeballs for as long as possible only for it to end long after it should have with an unsatisfying ending.

And don’t get me started on injecting soap opera esque character drama just to keep the lowest common denominator inerested (looking at you For All Mankind)

The French word for “entertainment” is “divertissement” and you don’t need to know French to get what it is: a diversion from things that matter.

Same, I never saw a MCU movies for instance

If you mean on the Threadiverse in particular, one of the larger home instances, lemmy.blahaj.zone, is aimed at the trans crowd, was one of the older active instances that I recall.

Found the bigot

Sums them up quite nicely. To include, a lot of them have a poor grasp in how the business is handled in the industry. They just think that whatever game that only like, 15 people remember will make “loads of money” if it only got a remaster. Like come on, we’ve seen mini-consoles released, we’ve seen what gets decided to be remade. It is all based on what the IP originally brought to the company in the first place.

Gamers have been awfully spoiled in the past 14 years that only gamers 20 or more years ago would have loved to dine into. So many sales. So many opportunities. So much choice.

But no, let’s throw all of that away because of a minor inconvenience or pretending to care about some game that they wouldn’t have liked anyways but pretend to now like because of some political issue.

Scandalous! Where can I hear more about this ABC, DEF, JKL love triangle?

Celebrities and sports.

I understand doing sports, but watching others is as exciting as watching paint dry to me. Not to mention combining both as in cheering for a team of people I don’t know. I don’t get it.

Are you Bill Hicks?

Sounds like you need to find a less popular beach

Actually swimming in the ocean is a pretty unique experience, but it does kind of require you to be a strong swimmer.