You’re comparing apples to oranges.

That’s a good point

Saw a toddler with a phone in hand today, maybe a year. Couldn’t walk yet, but had no trouble scrolling.

8 years are 2 election cycles. Much can happen in that time.

Definitely needed.

You literally find the lyrics on Google.

It’s pretty good, handcrafted encounters. It’s named “Additional Enemies - More Encounters and Fights”

It’s called “Additional Enemies - More Encounters and Fights”. The fights fit pretty well IMO.

More fights would also be fun. I’m using a mod that adds some.

I’m in Japan, playing the Steam version. No censorship there.

Writing is way more than creating outlines or checking the plot for problems. It’s more than even writing a first draft. In fact, it starts with the first round of edits, when characters awake and find their voices etc.

People who think writing with AI is just pushing buttons underestimate the complexity of the process, and using AI for things you’d usually use other writers’ feedback or betas or developmental editors for is just an evolution of tools, the same way we don’t scratch on stone tablets anymore today.

Baldurs Gate 3

I’d think it’s more that there’s now more media fighting your attention. When I was a kid (GenX here), we had a handful of TV channels and books. Books was what I went with.

Nowadays, I get home from work and watch something on YouTube before bed. I still read, but my standards have risen, and a trashy space opera won’t do it anymore for me. It has to be a great one now, and there are fewer of them. So, naturally, YouTube gets a bigger share of my time. Or games, when I have time to play on the weekends. My comfort game used to be Civilization, and currently I’m hooked on Baldurs Gate.

When I first heard about the API shutdown, I immediately overwrote all my comments and posts with randomly generated nonsense, then kept reading till RIF ceased to exist. Before I deleted the account, I ran a mass-deletion tool. Hopefully that prevented them from restoring the original content I contributed for free. Been on Lemmy ever since.

What exactly is the “truth” in that zero effort meme?

Not everyone is an English native.

I only have four or five extensions and YouTube videos lag. It’s Firefox. I’ll still not switch to anything else, but I could imagine a clean Chrome without anything added and zero bookmarks purely as video platform.

purpose

Okay, so what you’re saying is that you think friction creates a sense of purpose. That might be true. People in Mexico are probably more happy about little things and enjoy them more, because that’s what they have. Less freedom of choice paradox to contend with, and less free time to sink into depression (I believe in “the olden times”, people were just too tired from fighting to survive to sit down and have an existential crisis). That sounds like a valid idea and is supporting your point.

The question is, how can we combine my (borrowed from the Culture series) idea of a post scarcity society with your idea of a psychological need for friction? Do you think it’s impossible to simulate the same feeling of need for something to result in the same strain that then causes happiness?

What do you mean when you say we need a purpose?

We are biologically designed to reproduce. So our current purpose is to survive until we’re grown to sexual maturity, reproduce, then raise our offspring to a stage where they’re able to survive on their own. Then, we either do it again, if we’re still young enough, or die and make room for the next generation. That seems like a very depressing purpose to me, but this is how evolution works.

I think that we now have the intellectual capacity to transcendent this cycle. We’ve been for a while, and we formed societies, developed technology. Our first models were small tribes, very much hippie-like little communities, that suffered from attrition by tribe warfare and rule of the strongest, where reproduction was controlled by “the fittest”. Then we developed monarchic systems that provided a much more stable life for everyone, but ran on servitude (slavery) of peasants. We experimented with systems like communism, that then lead to terror by the ruling class (can still see that in China today), and landed on a somewhat democracy-adjacent system of capitalism that we’re running today, and that’s not sustainable, because we’re destroying our planet.

What’s next, and what purpose for the individual do you have in mind?

Yeah, I’m an Indie, I do self publishing without advertising. I’m spending more than I make.

The problem with putting your stuff online is, the pages that specialize in that and have it all set up and ready to go are mostly fanfiction and romance, so you won’t get a lot of reads there, either.

I guess I could just upload my books on GDrive and put download links on my website. Haven’t thought about that deeply yet. But I do write books, not blog posts or diary entries, and I like to have them in a neat package with proper presentation, in a format ebook reader apps can display painlessly. Nobody wants to read 70-100k word novels on a website ;)