Everyone gets defensive when they feel criticized though.

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And how much time do you actually spend sitting down and brain storming and trying to think through each gift? Or does the obligation just come up in passing and you immediately go, ‘huh don’t know what they want, I’ll just ask them’, and stop trying?

You might think you know what they want and be totally wrong.

I’d rather see somewhat put in thought and effort and be wrong, then ask me to put in thought and effort and be right.

Asking never hurts. They can give you a list of options or say “whatever”, but you don’t have to be a baby about it.

You’re literally putting all the gift giving work on them by asking them to think of a gift that they might like, that someone else isn’t likely to get them, and that would be in an appropriate price range for you.

If it’s a one-off like ‘hey, I’m really racking my brain this year and struggling coming up with a gift for you, got any ideas I can use as a jumping off point?’ then it’s one thing, if you’re doing it for everyone, every year, then you’re just throwing money at relationships, trying to give gifts without actually putting in the thought or effort that counts.

Telling people what you want for your birthday feels weird though.

It feels like either we should be close enough that you can think about my hobbies, interests, and life and come up with something that fits, or we’re not close and you get me something fun and generic and it’s nice because I didn’t expect anything from you.

But the middle ground of being like 'its your birthday and I’m willing to spend an amount of money that I won’t really notice on you, but put in no mental effort whatsoever and in fact ask you to put in the mental effort of thinking of an appropriate gift" feels less like gift giving and more like making someone else do all the work so you can check a box.

And your point is wrong because you keep boiling it down to simple black and white.

The Nobel prize is not purely political and is not devoid of merit.

The world is not full of binary systems. It’s made of multi variable systems where multiple influences can be true at the same time.

If you want to make a point about why accurately predicting the structure of hundreds of thousands of proteins doesn’t deserve the Nobel in chemistry then I’m all ears. Please tell us all exactly why you think their prize was political and not meritocratic, and why predicting protein structures automatically is not important?

Because if you can’t answer that very specific question, then you weren’t making a point relevant to the conversation, you were making a snide generalization to hear yourself speak.

Thank you for finally spewing out the point you wanted to make from the jump. It’s irrelevant in the context of the original discussion, but you got to hear yourself talk.

Lmao, it’s binary cause you say it’s binary.

Bro grow up. The world is not black and white. Literally not a single award on the planet is meritocratic if you insist on dealing in absolutes. Every award is awarded by some committee and there is some room left for human judgement, which leaves room for human bias, which makes it not perfectly meritocratic.

If you want to go an unhinged rant that no one wants to listen to then email the nobel association directly, don’t waste federated server time.

Lol if you rigidly define things binarily in a way that doesn’t reflect real world systems, then sure they’re binary.

This is false, it’s not a binary system. The prize is both.

Use this thing called empathy and try and imagine how a non-tech nerd thinks. If you lack the capability of empathy, then you’re never going to get a satisfying answer.v

You cant make anyone do anything, you can entice them over.

To do that they need to be simple and easy to use, what you’re describing is already more complicated than downloading signal or WhatsApp, signing up, and starting.

For start, search xmpp on the app store and notice how the first result is a paid app that costs $8 and isn’t clear whether or not it will connect you to your friends.

We’re all just different parts of the universe looking back at itself in different ways.

A lot of us sing like Michael Bolton.

You can’t understand why? Are you incapable of evaluating a user experience?

People over use blocking like crazy.

I constantly see people blocking others just for making a point they disagree with. Rather than actually think through the logic and reasoning of what the other person is saying they go ‘oh I have no counter point to that, that must mean that you’re arguing in bad faith, blocked’.

The internet is already an inherent filter bubble, you don’t need to accelerate that. Most people would benefit from spending more time deeply considering that they might be wrong in ways they can’t fully comprehend, then they would blocking people who fervently disagree with them.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/protein-structure-and-design-software-gets-the-chemistry-nobel/

I don’t have to dream, DeepMind literally won the Nobel prize last year. My best friend did his PhD in protein crystallography and it took him 6 years to predict the structure of a single protein underlying legionnaires disease. He’s now at MIT and just watched DeepMind predict hundreds of thousands of them in a year.

If you vet your news sources by only listening to ones that are anti-AI then you’re going to miss the actual exciting advancements lurking beneath the oceans of tech bro hype.

AI is not just LLMs, and it’s already revolutionized biotechnical engineering through things like alpha fold. Like I said, “AI”, as in neural network algorithms of which LLMs are just one example, are literally solving entirely new classes of problems that we simply could not solve before.

We can support the current population, it’s just not profitable or popular to do so.

If your solution ignores the nature of human psychology it’s not a solution, it’s a quixotic quest.

Our current standard of living is mostly predicated on offshoring the suffering and waste to the global South, but even that could be comfortably leveled off if we weren’t living under Capitalism.

Yes, and as their standard of living rises to meet ours, the whole human output becomes increasingly unsustainable.

We don’t need large AI farms, we need empathy. The techbros will not save us.

There is a more plausible path for neural networks to be involved in climate change solutions then their is for you to replace capitalism.