I don’t understand why you’re being downvoted. Current “AI” based on LLM’s have no capacity for understanding of the knowledge they contain (hence all the “hallucinations”), and thus possess no meaningful intelligence. To call it intelligent is purely marketing.

In my hyper religious, Southern Baptist upbringing, I often heard Christians say that Christianity is not a religion. The mental gymnastics employed to explain this position were varied. Most often it was “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship [with God]”, or something along the lines of “Christianity isn’t a religion because it’s true”.

“Religion” in general was thus deemed a bad thing, because it was a term used to encapsulate all the other (and thus false) faith-belief-philosophy systems that were used by Satan to lead the world away from God. It bears noting that Catholicism and other major denominations always all fell under that umbrella of “other”.

It’s a toss up between

1. R telling me she was on birth control, I guess thinking it’d keep me around if we had a kid, then when our kid was age 4 she said she had cancer and disappeared for several months. Turns out she never had cancer and just said that so I wouldn’t think poorly of her for abandoning her child to run off with a guy in another state. …Her child that she was barely present for anyway.
2. D getting me to empty my 401k to buy a house as an investment property for “our” retirement, only for her to keep it in the divorce. I could have pushed for it to be sold and gotten at least some of my money back, but she would have put up such a fight that I’d have spent in attorney’s fees as much as I would have won from the sale, so it wasn’t worth the fight to me, and she knew that.

What’d I learn from these? Not a whole lot, it turned out: my next relationship wasn’t much better. But at least I figured out to end that one before it got TOO too deep.

Sounds like it could be interesting to try snow biking. Doesn’t often snow here, and when it does it rarely sticks. Maybe 1-3 actual accumulations per year, so my gravel bike is suitable practically all the time. It’s just the cold that makes it unpleasant to me - layering when it’s 50F is fine, in the 40s F is doable if it’s sunny. Anything below that is just miserably uncomfortable to me because of cold wind to the face and the need to adjust layers as I warm up and cool down.

Got hired at the same time as another guy. Don’t recall why, but I was in my boss’s office when he decided it was time to assign us offices despite us being in training and not needing them for another few weeks, so he grabs his admin assistant and off we go to verify which offices were open / available. I got the one with a window.

I definitely feel better overall when I ride my bike regularly. My mood is better, I have more energy, and I sleep better. I got into it around the time I separated from my ex-wife, and I think it’s a significant part of what kept me from falling into a serious depression when I got divorced.

I hate running. I hate swimming. I hate lifting weights, or anything in a gym. Hiking is nice, with the right company. But I enjoy biking around my neighborhood and along the city greenways. I was wanting to be more active, healthier, etc. but couldn’t find anything I actually would stick with until I found an activity I actually enjoyed. Lately I’ve been feeling pretty down, getting uncomfortably close to a major depressive episode, but riding my bike for a while always makes me feel a bit better, at least while I’m doing it. I think not biking, due to it being winter, is indirectly part of why I’ve been down - I just haven’t been doing much that is enjoyable while dealing with a lot of stress including some major life changes.

Fwiw, I’m a psychiatric nurse. I’ve read the science news articles that say exercise is better than anything and the ones that say it doesn’t do much. I’ve also read some of the actual research/journal articles. The reality is that we’re not really certain how much difference it actually makes, but it probably depends on a variety of factors that vary from person to person and based on the type of exercise. We do know that people who are physically healthier also tend to feel better mentally. What I have seen personally, and experienced myself, is that exercise helps with mood, but it’s not a cure-all, and it’s not instant, and it makes a difference if it’s something you enjoy doing independently of it’s health benefits. Exercising outdoors, particularly in green spaces, probably also helps.

As an aside, and having nothing to do with your thoughts or arguments, I’d like to take a moment to communicate that the common talking points of “it’s a plant” and “it’s natural” regarding marijuana should come with massive asterisks, for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that cocaine and heroin come from plants too. And that there are synthetic THC-related products which aren’t generally distinguished from the actual plant products in such discussions. There are also highly concentrated THC products, such as oils, which are pretty inarguably incomparable to using the plant as it occurs in nature.

So, we can nitpick about maybe banning concentrates and delta-8 and whatnot and maybe only legalize the plant in it’s natural form, right? Well, that brings us to another point: modern marijuana strains have been bred to have a THC content dozens of times higher than what occurs in nature, as well as a dramatically lower relative ratio of CBD (CBD counteracts some of the bad of the THC, by my limited understanding, but that’s outside the scope of this discussion), so calling it “natural” now is more than a bit misleading. It IS a plant, but so are poppies (from which we derive opium/heroin), coca (doesn’t even need processing to get the cocaine), and belladonna (deadly nightshade, from which we derive digoxin), and, well, nobody here is arguing that those are safe to consume on the basis of their being or deriving from plants.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.