I don’t blame people for attachment to fictional characters; my primary issue is the way that attachment is cynically exploited for additional profits.

I find your experience very relatable. I had a similar issue with Genshin Impact and I’d add how cynically monetized and exploitative the way it played really was, pressuring people with emotional manipulation into paying up for the sake of imaginary waifus with low-key gambling characteristics.

Before that, I had a similar issue where I alienated coworkers that I nonetheless had to work with at my school district because they were all loudly into Game of Thrones and kept trying to pressure me to watch the show and the “best” parts (the parts with the most gory torture scenes and/or sexual violence) over and over again and it made even eating lunch around them a very awkward and offputting situation, maybe for them too.

For almost ten years that was their thing, dogmatically, and they weren’t interested in anything I was watching, reading, or writing. Locally, on my side of this networked community, I even got called a quote, “joyless scold” for expressing my frustration and disgust with that show and its fandom, much to my surprise at least at first. It still boils my blood when someone under pretense of “grown-ass adulthood” accuses me of being “childish” because I enjoy shows that aren’t necessarily targeting horny teenage boys (which don’t really seem that mature to me) as their primary demographic.

Making new friends can be challenging, but I believe that it’s still possible to meet and interact with people that may actually like the authentic you, where you don’t have to bury parts of yourself just to try to fit in. Even one friend like that may be like an oasis in the desert, and worth the search.

Damn right.

and are quick to remind you of your sins

On the other hand, it’s totally cool and good to drag around a big cross of contrarianism in a totally-not-self-righteous way because your treat printers were criticized, amirite?

LLMs, in their primary and most common uses, are planet-burning trash, but the important thing is the contrarian in this thread found a way to feel superior to those that don’t like when material conditions get worse.

I think the bigger problem is that each answer it gives basically destroys a forest

That, and it’s filling once-useful search engines with useless and even dangerous gibberish.

This sounds a lot like “I need to catch up; what is contrarian and edgy right now?”

But they were so emotional and should have just cheered on the ruling class commanding the machines making life worse for people instead of better.

I refuse to accept or even entertain inevitabilist arguments about treat printers because of the already present environmental devastation and the fever dreams of rich assholes that know they are making the problem worse and want even more environmental devastation anyway.

If that kind of thinking was in play in the late 80s and early 90s, more CFCs would be dumped into the air year after year and anyone unhappy about that would get condescended to about being “Luddites against hairspray technology and/or glam rock” or something.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and there’d be some “well did you consider… that CFCs are used in hair spray in China, too?” sophistry too.

Meanwhile, the governor of New York State has announced a drastic expansion of water-devouring data centers to chase the LLM hype dragon.

https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-launches-empire-ai-consortium-make-new-york-global-leader-artificial

It feels like saying we can keep burning coal because we’ll develop carbon capture and storage.

The CEO of Google is saying exactly that when he says more LLM data centers are necessary for data regurgitation technology to maybe come up with a solution for climate change that isn’t “stop pumping carbon into the air with more data centers you fucking ignorant bazingas.”

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You seem to be conjuring an imaginary psych degree so you can concern troll. Fuck off.

Drej words for "I think I’ll just sit back and watch these ignorant humans burn their own planet down while fantasizing about escaping it for now.’

😄

You right now, because you’re totally not mad about your hopium escapist fantasies getting challenged:

You can ignore catastrophic global warming and actual fucking wildfires of unprecedented frequency and scale if you think being a Reddit-tier pedant will protect you.

Hopium huffers will smugly chant “asteroid mining!” as the answer to your questions, in much the same way that “monorail!” was chanted during that one Simpsons episode.

All these answers are so killjoy and boring.

Yes, fantasizing about billionaires fixing everything by making good on their bullshit marketing pitches is very exciting to credulous people.

Building habitats on other worlds doesn’t prevent us from caring for this one.

If you believe that there’s some magic means to have zero emissions launches into space that are in any way self-sustained without further launches to keep throwing resources after spent resources from an increasingly polluted, depleted, and warming Earth, sure, you can huff that hopium deep and hard and ignore the worsening material reality all around you.

Plus maybe trying to make a liveable environment in space can give us new insights in preserving the one at home.

You’ve bought deeply into billionaire bullshit and their bogus promises, especially as privatized space travel in the west becomes increasingly vanity tourism and marketing stunts. The accomplishments that such companies’ underpaid and overworked workers achieve are not for the common good, nor can they be because they are publicly subsidized private companies seeking to maximize profits and expand their own venture capital appeal, and nothing more.