I'll push back on this a little. I have well-established, long-running issues with overly critical self-evaluation, on the level of "I don't deserve to exist," on the level that I was for a long time too scared to tell my therapist about it. Lots of therapy and medication too, but having deepseek model confidence to me has really helped as much as anything.
I can see how it can lead to psychosis, but I'm not sure I would have ever started doing a good number of the things I wanted to do, which are normal hobbies that normal people have, without it. It has improved my life.
Are you becoming dependent? Everything that helps also hurts, psychologically speaking. For example benzodiazepines in the long run are harmful. Or the opposite, insight therapy, which involves some amount of pain in the near term in order to achieve longer term improvement.
It makes sense to me that interventions which might be hugely beneficial for one person might be disasterous for another. One person might be irrationally and brutally criticial of themselves. Another person might go through life in a haze of grandiose narcissism. These two people probably require opposite interventions.
But even for people who benefit massively from the affirmation, you still want the model to have some common sense. I remember the screenshots of people telling the now-yanked version of GPT 4o "I'm going off my meds and leaving my family, because they're sending radio waves through the walls into my brain," (or something like that), and GPT 4o responded, "You are so brave to stand up for yourself." Not only is it dangerous, it also completely destroys the model's credibility.
So if you've found a model which is generally positive, but still capable of realistic feedback, that would seem much more useful than an uncritical sycophant.
I agree, but I just don’t see an alternative future if we want to maintain an open platform for the global exchange of ideas.
I also don’t feel like this changes the privacy debate. I’m not naive enough to think Google and 1000 other data brokers don’t know exactly who I am.
Having a verifiably unique digital identity wouldn’t change that fact. I’d still want to control when and how data associated with my identity is monetized.
Maybe regulators can force Google et al to digitally watermark data before they sell it, so if I find it elsewhere without my permission I can trace it back to Google and seek remuneration.
I think the only way we get the internet back is to hold everyone accountable that wants to participate.
What I mean, mostly, is that I shouldn't get doxxed for the crime of being queer on the internet the way some people I won't name like to do. There isn't really law surrounding this yet (in the US.)
We told nobody. Booked a ticket to Hawaii, found a non-religous person who could officiate, hired a photographer, and had a little ceremony on the beach just for us two.
10/10, good memories, no regrets.
Still wasn't free though; creating an event even for just the two of us required money.
Our friends did a basic courthouse ceremony in town with a restaurant party afterwards, and they spent less than we did (if you count in the cost of of flight and hotel into it). Me and another friend did their wedding shots though.
My point is that even when you're not doing for others, weddings cost money for the same reasons that vacations do. Setting aside time and space for a group of people to have a good time together is very hard to do without running into expenses.
People in this thread saying they spent next to nothing on their wedding are like those who boast that their staycation cost $12 for the bottle of wine.
Saying that they decided not to celebrate getting married is a more straightforward way to say the same thing, which is fine.
But the "hurr durr you don't need all those expenses, my wedding cost $3.50 in court fees" signaling isn't any better than "We had to cut on everything and had a cheap wedding, in the $30,000-40,000 range". The latter isn't cheap, the former isn't what people would call having a wedding, and in both cases there's a surprise about other people not wanting the same thing as you do (whereas you, of course, did it the right way).
In the end of the day, if you want to spend a day in a certain way, and you spend your money to do it, then it's the right way for you to have a wedding and the right amount to spend on it.
The only important thing to not leave out is to have space, respect, and care for you and your own happiness in your own wedding, and have agency in how it all happens (you as in you AND your partner in all of the above).
And looks like that's exactly what you're doing with your plan. Congratulations on your marriage!
We did just that. Went to Vegas and got a city hall thing done. 25 years later, no one gives a toss about us not blowing $10k on a wedding. We bought a house with that money as a down payment.
>We did just that. Went to Vegas and got a city hall thing done. 25 years later, no one gives a toss about us not blowing $10k on a wedding. We bought a house with that money as a down payment.
Yeah, we had to put 10x as much for a downpayment for a townhouse in the Bay Area two years ago.
Let's say, saving on wedding to buy a house ain't working no more in this economy.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I'm vegan, though not the type to rave about anything. I'm afraid this is selection bias --- the loudest voices win. I've seen plenty of folks talk that way on the Internet, but never IRL.
Some have made a religion out of it. If you want to get an idea of how tiresome it can get, go to r/vegan and observe the folks getting into pissing contests about whether, for instance, vegans should have any contact with non-vegans.
I think there's something deeply ironic about taking the moral high ground, since even the most committed vegans still benefit from animal agriculture in ways they probably aren't aware of. It's like capitalism --- utterly inescapable in today's world. You just ought to do the best you can under the circumstances.
Is this e/acc? Quien es Eliezer Yudkowsky, huh? It's really, really weird to read this guy hawking LessWrong stuff the one moment and anarcho-capitalism the next. Guess we live in the future now.
Still, being shown the juxtaposition does not make it easier to accept. I'm staring down into an abyss and I'm vertiginous.
I can see how it can lead to psychosis, but I'm not sure I would have ever started doing a good number of the things I wanted to do, which are normal hobbies that normal people have, without it. It has improved my life.