The bathrooms outside the lobby in my work building take this automatic crap a step further, with automatic soap machines. It’s hit or miss if any given one will have soap at all. (Thankfully, we have another sink inside my work itself that employees can use, but guests are fucked.)

Then when they do dispense soap, it’s the foam shit. So it looks like the sink just spit into my hands. Lovely.

Even if the vehicle traffic didn’t meet some imaginary quota, that says nothing of the pedestrian traffic. Just another signal of our car-centric society.

I know a 5 year old that came in proudly telling everyone, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a dwarf!” He then held his hand lower than his current height and said, “I’ll be this tall!” He’s short, sure, but he’s not in the little person height range.

I think somewhere between him talking about dwarf planets, and his short height, somebody probably said it as a joke and he took it seriously.

Or as slang for a tab of LSD

Sure, I’ll bite. My parents recently bought a new house. Every bedroom ceiling fan has a pattern etched into the plaster above it. This one’s my favorite.

Your stomach microbiome is plants

Which is why I spend a solid 3 hours a day facing the sun with my mouth held wide open. Gotta let my tummy plants photosynthesize somehow.

Yep. I left Reddit during the initial API crisis. I’ve left jobs because of my principles, even without backup jobs ready. There are tons of places I won’t shop (including Amazon), and it makes finding things I need difficult sometimes. I’ve also been vegan for over 20 years.

My mom’s the opposite. I grew up seeing her hypocrisy, and it upset me. She’d outright tell me, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Such a rich lesson for a young mind! I realized that a lot of people become hypocrites by repeating what others say without critical thought, and it turned me into a skeptic. So many people jump on the emotional bandwagon (see any hot button political topic for reference), but then later after hearing someone else confidently spout an opinion on it, they will stand with the opposite conclusion. If they’d stopped and thought the first time they heard about it, before opening their mouths about it, they wouldn’t come off hypocritical later on. But the distressing part is less that they changed their opinion, but that they still haven’t put any critical thought into why they hold it - it’s all just repeating others’ words. Which is why if a topic is brand new to me, I will refuse to take a side in it until I research it and come to my own conclusions. There are enough parrots repeating propaganda thoughtlessly, we have to be very careful with whom we trust.

My principles uphold the person I am. I came to them on my own, often going against the tide I grew up in. To me, the hardest part about having principles isn’t upholding them, but in dealing with those that can’t believe you actually have them. So many people seem to float on seemingly without a real sense of self, swayed more by those around them than by any sort of inner compass. I can’t fathom being like that, and those people apparently can’t fathom being like me.

All the more reason Lemmy is such a good place to be. We might not all hold the same principles, but at least many of us seem to have them.

I’d also like to note the seeming overlap of Lemmy’s populace with neurodivergence, which can coincide with, well, being a principled weirdo like me. ;)

2016 was an interesting year for me. I had an odd week of coincidences that appeared like a hypomanic episode that never happened before and never repeated again. The biggest one being that I was dating a guy who had just told me that his lifelong dream was to meet his favorite band. That week, I won a radio contest that got us tickets to a concert with a meet-and-greet at a tiny venue with that same band.

The episode prompted me to finally see a psych for the depression I’d been dealing with for most of my life. It started me on anti-depressants, which have massively improved my quality of life.

But the biggest thing was that the episode included a day of absolute clarity. I was driving and thinking, as I’m prone to do, when out of the blue everything just made sense. I could see in my head how everything was connected to everything else, and it was intense. But I’m a skeptic, and I needed to know that I was still grounded in reality, so I pulled over into a parking lot and called a friend. I asked him to help me make sure I was still making sense and I wasn’t going off the deep end. He’s a deeply rational guy, known to recognize bullshit, and yet as I talked on and on about the many puzzle pieces that now seemed to fit together, he remarked that yes, I was still making sense.

Key to it was the feeling that it was a sort of enlightenment, the same kind that religious folks might feel after years of meditation, or that some people experience through psychedelic drugs. There was a strong sense that I was not alone in that sensation, that many others had felt it before and that when they did, they had the same epiphany that we were connected directly. The sense of peace was incredible. I don’t believe in a god and that moment did not change that, but I did come away with a new respect for those who take their faith seriously and sincerely (that is, not like the christians in the US that use it to spread hate, but rather like the monks who give up everything to pursue their spiritual journeys.) I could feel the immensity of the universe, and see in my mind’s eye an infinite web that brought everything together. I could mentally travel that web from point to point, seeing all different perspectives at the same time. It was wild, and hasn’t happened again since.

Despite it being so brief, the few hours I spent in that state have impacted me to this day. Some things that used to bother me didn’t annoy me anymore. Finding patience became much easier. It also became easier to understand and connect to people.

One more weird thing that started that week and never stopped - I developed the uncanny ability to spot four-leaf clovers. I can’t count how many I’ve discovered in the ten years since, but if there’s a four-leafer in a patch that I walk by and all I do is scan it in my periphery, I will stop, reach down, and either point it out or pluck it to give to whoever I’m with. It’s like they jump out to me. It’s fun having a strange talent that makes people happy.

Thank you. I have a kid I work with that looooves space. To him, dwarf planets and regular planets are equally interesting. When we watch space videos that point out Pluto in some way, he’s just confused. Like a video about the 8 planets ending in a frowning Pluto.

The kid: “Why is Pluto sad?”

Me: “Well, bud, some grown ups are silly. They grew up thinking of Pluto as a planet and they don’t like that its status changed.”

But to him, Pluto has no reason to be “sad.” It’s got Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris to be friends with! But nobody makes a big deal over them (if they even are aware of their existence at all. This boy has single-handedly educated many of my coworkers about them.)

Point is, grown ups - let it go! Scientific reclassification doesn’t mean Pluto was ejected from the solar system or something. It’s still there and it’s still loved. It just plays with different friends now.

When I was very young, before I was able to read, I would see images in my mind associated with spoken words. Sometimes they were the literal thing that was being said, but other times the images were more abstract.

With Snickers, I pictured “sneakers.” But it was for more than the sound being similar - I thought the pattern on the bottom of the candy bar resembled the pattern on the bottom of shoes. So it all made sense in little-me’s brain.

That’s the case for me. The last game I’ve “completed” was a game where I can play through multiple different scenarios (Surviving Mars.) I have completed about half the mystery scenarios, and I love being able to replay it and have it be new all over again.

I know compliments we’ve received aren’t necessarily the answer, but it’s hard to think of anything that could top when a former coworker had a baby and told me, "I hope she grows up to be just like you."

Me waking up on a Satuday:

It’s interesting to me how Red Bull/Monster fans describe their experiences with the other brand. I say that as a Monster fan that literally gagged the first time I had a Red Bull.

But similar to your concession about the White Monster flavor, I would give props to the Red/Blue editions of Red Bull. When I gave them a try, I was prepared to have a similar reaction as I did with the original, but I was pleasantly surprised.

It’s good to find common ground. :)

Is there a way to filter YT searches for that?

I saw that part first and immediately thought, “Wow, yes, it must be annoying for ads for jewelry to be embedded in your work.” Then I saw the sleep apnea garbage. Until reading the additional info, I was ready to ask, “Which ad?” The way it’s worded sounds like sponsored content.

Also, all the people using ad blockers must also be blocking each other’s comments. Because hot damn, there’s a lot of people saying the same thing. I think OP gets the message, y’all.

I don’t know how common it is today, but I know when I was growing up there was a ton of pressure on us to know what we wanted to do forever by the time we were in high school. It was so bad that I went into a depressive shut-down, with weeks of barely eating or talking to anyone. Adults would try to reassure me with, “Nobody knows what they want to do by your age,” yet simultaneously I was told, “You need to go to college so you don’t flip burgers forever.” College comes along with needing to declare a major, which means deciding what you want to focus on despite being so young. So I don’t need to know, but I do need to know? Very, very confusing.

The school system has been failing for a long time. I saw the writing on the wall in the early 00s and wanted nothing to do with a system that seemed to be more about extracting money and wasting time than anything else. Thankfully, like you, I love learning! I never stopped picking up skills and challenging my mind, and in a world of emergent AI it’s become more important than ever to keep exercising one’s brain.

In the end, I’d say you’re probably less alone than you feel. A lot of people who seem confident about what they plan to do are either doing what they’re told, or taking on a “fake it til you make it” mentality. Check back on them in ten years and see how many of them actually stuck to their plan - it will be surprising. A lot changes in one’s 20s. Friends drift apart (physically and psychologically) as they begin their independent journey through life.

I get the impression that I don’t need to tell you not to fall for social media where people only show their best selves, but it bears noting. Comparing one’s self to others is a surefire way to make one feel bad about themselves, and social media exacerbates that trend. As you see friends going on and doing things, try to remember the old phrase, “The grass is always greener on the other side.” Some of them are hiding their struggles, and may secretly envy you and your decisions, even if they don’t tell you so.

Anyway, just keep up learning topics that interest you. The idea of a “dream job” is propaganda, and by admitting it doesn’t exist for you, you help show it for the bullshit idea it is. Not everyone dreams of working. Not everyone should dream of working. There’s nothing wrong with finding a job that supports you (which I do recommend, as you really never know what can happen) while finding meaning and fulfillment from things that don’t make you money.

Funny, I’m the exact opposite. My feet need to be covered when I sleep. The rest of me, not so much. When I lived in a van in Florida, sometimes it was too hot for a full blanket. I’d just take a towel, throw it over my feet, and sleep like that. Perfect comfort.

That’s so bad for a child’s development. A computer can’t guide a kid’s hand to practice fine motor skills. It can’t impart social skills to help kids interact with each other. It can’t help kids revolve conflicts with each other, or handle behaviors that require a human touch. Imagine a couple kids fighting because they can’t share - what’s a computer gonna do? A kid can just ignore its instructions. What’s to stop a kid from physically attacking a robo-nanny or whatever fresh hell gets developed in this field?

I work with kids with difficult behaviors. There are ethical boundaries we need to be aware of. Will a robo-nanny be imparted with those rules? How accountable would it be if it did something ethically questionable? What will it be trained on - actual knowledge of children’s psychology (in which case, using a robot at all should be discounted right off, as children thrive on human interaction)? Or will it be trained on what parents/teachers have already been doing, which would inevitably result in being trained on outdated techniques that don’t follow updates in science? If a robot thinks spanking, isolation, or withholding food is okay, that’d be extremely troubling. There’s so much that could go wrong, and knowing this tech isn’t being designed with ethics in mind makes this whole endeavor terrifying.

Are parents going to be comfortable with their kids being alone in a room without an adult? A group of kids could simply band together to lock the robot in a closet or something and let chaos reign. They could figure out how to power it down, or throw things at it until it stops functioning. A kid having a tantrum can be a powerful force, potentially injuring other children in the act, and I highly doubt a robot alone could handle that situation effectively. Where I work it can take a team of adults with blocking pads, and coordination with even more adults to clear other students from the area. Sometimes those other kids are playing games and don’t want to leave, and it takes a trusted adult to convince them that yeah, no, we need to move now. Which brings us to the relationship the teachers have with the students, and how it is crucial to gaining what’s called “instructional control,” which basically means, “this kid will listen to your instructions.” Can a robot foster that? Do we want a robot to be able to foster that? I don’t like the idea of kids personifying machines to that extent, and we’re quickly learning how damaging (literally, it can cause brain damage) that can be for young minds.

I could go on and on, but suffice to say this whole topic is an ethical clusterfuck.

It’s the computer equivalent of, “That’s it, I’m calling your parents” and picking up a phone.