The entire system is alien to me, with the districts and the electoral college and (…)

It’s so – Simple – Here.

WELL

At least presidential choice is simple here, the legislative houses are their own beast.

But yeah here it’s just: Each (properly registered, though registration can be done through the internet) adult person gets one vote, if a candidate gets 50%+1 they are in, if none manage to get that there is a run-off round with the top 2 or 3 candidates.

Over there it’s like people from certain states have their votes be worth more than people from other states, and then there’s the whole “winning the district” thing and the whole idea of red/blue/swing states. So much complexity.

Adding to what everyone else has said.

… You know what helped me learn how to write (which I now do for a living)? Yes, talking in comment sections – But specifically.

I spent a lot of time in fandom forums.

Why does this matter?

Well.

TV Show fandoms are very low-stakes, you know? If you’re learning to swim you start at the kiddy pool, not the olympic one. So you can participate in discussions, make up headcanons, and learn how to express your ideas… And if you do get picked apart or something, even if you actually, genuinely, fucked up and were straight up wrong. It’s… Y’know. It’s just a TV show. So you can, in fact, let it go.

It’s different from when you’re talking about something serious, something important. If you’re writing about something technical and you mess up, you can end up spreading misinformation. On a political discussion, being clear on what you mean is important because the stuff being talked about matters. Not so for a fandom.

Oh and – Re-read what you wrote, and use that edit button if you catch something you missed.

I make a point to just not open any thread that mentions US Politics.

Clairvoyance and kids shouldn’t mix

There’s that whole “children of Dune” book that tells us why.

When it’s not under threat of being crushed by an angry moon, Clock Town is a very nice place.

Lindblum from Final Fantasy 9 (roman numerals are for goobers)

I adore the concept of a Castle Town where the castle is so big it sorta consumes the entire town. And the whole steam-punk techno-fantasy vibe of the city is extremely pretty.

If you specifically mean LLM/GenAI:

• Some of my friends enjoy fucking around with those character AIs. I never got the appeal, even as an RP nerd, RPing is a social activity to me, and computers aren’t people
• I have seen funny memes be made with Image Generators – And tbqh as long as you’re not pretending that being an AI prompter makes you an “artist”, by all means go crazy with generating AI images for your furry porn/DnD campaign/whatever
• https://goblin.tools/ is a cool little thing for people as intensely autistic as I am, and it runs off AI stuff.
• Voice Recognition/Dictation technology powered by AI is a lot better than its pre-AI sibling. I’ve been giving it a shot lately. It helps my arthritis-ridden hands.

If you mean anything that utilizes machine learning (“AI” is a buzzword), then “AI” technology has been used to help scientists and doctors do their jobs better since the mid 90s

I wish it was socially acceptable to call people lazy for certain computer-related woes.

I often have to “rescue” my mother because her computer ‘broke’. – What is actually happening is that windows is doing the usual Windows thing of nagging you about updates/microsoft edge/whatever. It’s a matter of reading what it’s saying, but she just… Doesn’t read the message or look for the button. This woman has a PhD. Like. She isn’t stupid. She’s incredibly smart, actually. But she just doesn’t want to learn.

Like, the computer itself can tell you a lot of stuff. You just need to read and click around. But when it’s a computer screen it’s like some people develop selective blindness. I legitimately wonder if people who are 60+ have some eyesight thing going on where content displayed on a screen and specifically on a screen is unreadable to them. Because if anything is in a different place or it does something unexpected, they just lock up like a deer in the headlights instead of like. Reading what is on screen.

Mate

The fake ass AIs we have are straining the power grids of the entire world

AGI literally cannot hurt humanity because a minor brownout would kill it in its cradle.

You mean the thinly veiled eugenics manifesto?

People are commenting ‘fates worse than death’ and ‘being made into a labrat by the 1%’, but really, if you have infinite time to just do stuff and you can’t be killed – And you don’t somehow squirrel your way into a position of power then what are you even doing with your time and immortality, oomfie?

The loneliness part is also questionable. I know OP said it’s overly done, but I also think it’s just wrong. If you’re an adult you’ve had people in your life die before. It sucks. You miss them. But then you move on. And you meet other people. You’ll still go “:(” when you think about the person and such… But life goes on.

And that’s just life. It doesn’t get any worse if you extend it longer – If anything it gets better. You might have lost your beloved today, but you have another dozen lifetimes to heal your wounds and meet someone else and fall in love again and (…)

So here’s some lower-stakes, frustrating inconveniences of being immortal:

• Your favourite fashion? It’s not just out of fashion. It’s so out of fashion it is now considered ‘historical costuming’. You can no longer find any articles like it at all. Because the only people even trying to recreate the techniques are costuming nerds and theater people who always exaggerate stuff
• You got a song stuck in your head. It is either from before recording was invented, or any recordings of it that existed are too old to be reliably listenable. You have a song stuck in your head.
• You used to really enjoy a job you did. That entire career path is now obsolete. As per the first paragraph of my post, if you’re immortal you have probably snuck your way into the upper echelons of society at some point during your infinite time… But like. You’re bored. You loved being a Court Jester, now there are no Court Jesters.
• Actually tedium just in general. Sooner or later you’ll run out of new things to try, because you’ll have done everything that even remotely caught your eye already. So what the fuck will you do with your time? You’ll eventually just get depressed and not do anything.

There’s a book I heard about where the main character is immortal. Nevertheless at one point he pisses off some mafia dudes, and they nail him inside a barrel full of urine and throw him in the sea.

The thing is

“The law says it has to happen” doesn’t mean it happens.

And the weaker labour protections are in your country, the more bosses can walk all over their employees.

In the US, with their so-called “at-will” employment system, you can be fired at any time for any reason, and if you need the job to like, live, you won’t even bring up your legal rights.

Mind you even on countries where polling happens exclusively on Sunday (like mine!) there are other subtle ways The Poors ^tm are kept from enfranchisement. “Voting happens on a work day” is just one of the ways it happens in one of our world’s oligarchies.

It really depends on how much you need that job to like

Not be homeless

And how hard it was to get the job in the first place.

You can make your legal rights count if you have options.

If you don’t, you let your boss walk all over you and thank them for it.

Because they don’t want the workers voting.

If you “can’t go to the ballot because you need to work” you are a plebeian, and so they have a way of excluding you while technically not excluding you.

A lot of modern oligarchy is powered by these technicalities. Technically everyone has a “right to” participate in the system, but the whole apparatus is rigged in such a way that in material reality only the same nobility caste that has called the shots since the bronze fucking age gets to call the shots.

Nyancat progress bar

Or push it to a file, just in general. That way if something goes tits up you can still check it later.

Dictators generally like to push a “hard man” image and don’t like anything that might make them look “soft”

Back when my country was a dictatorship (thanks for that, America) there was a photo of our president playing football with some kids that got banned because he looked too nice in it.

I feel like Microsoft fully intends to remove the TPM 2.0 requirement in the nearish future

Otherwise it wouldn’t be so easy to disable when writing an iso to a USB drive.

Looking at it from a capitalistic point of view, they gain nothing by keeping people from installing their OS on the long term, the lock out was just for the short-term gains they got out of OEMs selling new computers for Windows 11 and such.

Which distro

Puts a smile in my face how my old tech appreciation thread sorta became a technology connections fandom thread by consequence.

It good