I really want to link this article here as a counterpoint - why "AI is just a tool" as a stance doesn't quite cut it as far as well-founded opinions go: https://www.frank.computer/...

Klare Sache: Bürgergeld muss runter, und fertig ist der Lack!

/s

The problem I have with self-medication (of ADHD meds or any other substance) is not so much that people are doing it - as you said, it's a rough world out there, and you do what you can to survive and function.

But - "Medical supervision of treatment" is (or should be) not just a couple of empty words. All ADHD meds can have serious side effects and contraindications that you don't necessarily know about beforehand or notice by yourself. Discovering your un-diagnosed heart disease by taking amphetamines without supervision and getting life-threatening arrhythmia can just feel like "I'm getting a bit dizzy for a time after taking the meds, no need for concern, I'll just take it easy" (I know, because I have arrhythmia, and wouldn't know it if I hadn't had an ECG, as I barely notice it happening). Medical supervision should catch that kind of thing, that's what it's for.

You and I don't know who reads this and what kind of conclusion they will draw, and what kind of risk assessment they do beforehand trying it out themselves. Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you have done your full research, and are aware that there is a chance you might harm or, if particularly unlucky, kill yourself doing this (especially if you cannot verify the purity of your medication, it could be cut with anything), and have weighed that against the benefits of being able to do work and function better in everyday life, I have no problem with you self-medicating or talking about doing that.

But if you don't transparently communicate these risks, and how you came to your conclusion that this is the only way for you, it looks to others like an easy way to forgo the harder, non-medical, not-as-effective but also not-as-dangerous ways to treat yourself, implying that everyone can and should do it this way.

And I understand why some communities want to curb that from the get-go. Some rules are written in blood.

Was ich daran so dumm finde ist, dass mich noch nie im Leben irgendein Facharzt ohne Überweisung vom Hausarzt in die Praxis gelassen hat, außer zur expliziten Akutsprechstunde...

Merkwürdige Gegenrealität, aus der solche Vorschläge kommen.

Yes! I was actually aiming for the magpie whose chittering I heard around the area (technically a corvid as well), so this rook coming around was a nice surprise. I'm looking forward to see if it'll turn up again 😊

I love the implication that whimsy - which is basically defined by joyful purposelessness -must be assigned a measurable purpose (such as stress-reduction) to become a viable, option for people, since we now know it is beneficial, and can be used to optimize ourselves...

Eh, immer noch billiger als Auto neu anschaffen und unterhalten, was für mich die Alternative wäre... insofern 🤷

Absolutely, yes. I managed to get "has to be treated in a clinical setting as it's actually exhaustion depression" burnout trying to keep a job in research. And I wondered for the longest time afterwards how on earth I am supposed to earn a living being that way.

It really helped to realize that as long as I can pay for rent, food and other basic needs, I am not actually required to a) stick with anything I do or any path I choose and b) be accountable for my life or "career" to anyone other than myself.

With that in mind, I am now trying to find another way - I read (among other things) the book "How to be everything" by Emilie wapnick, which is basically career advice for people who want/need to do lots of things instead of having one specialist career path. It helps you explore what you actually need in terms of money and free time and variety, and gives you some example ways of how you could structure your life to meet these needs, with pros and cons.

As a result, I now set myself on a track to qualify for a job field which would allow me to meet my modest financial needs by working part time (yes, it's software development), while still being paid during qualification. I'm hopeful I'll always find something interesting to do in that field without requiring that soon-burnt-out need-to-know-everything-about-it-NOW passion for it all the time (which was quite necessary in research to tolerate the shit working conditions, and which I cannot sustain), and allows for ample time and energy to cycle through temporal interests at my leisure.

I can't tell you yet if this idea actually works out for me, but I feel that I've covered all my bases to be sure that it feasibly could (which included an internship to make sure the working conditions aren't shit, as well. Discovered they can be, but aren't everywhere, so I tried to keep where they wouldn't be for the getting paid part). I'm really quite happy to be on the way to finding it out, though. I'm starting in September. Check back in 4 years and I can tell you for sure!

What it looks like when used for drawing!

I've been there, as well. Luckily (or something like that), I'm sufficiently poor to be noticably anxious about spending more than 200 EUR in one go, and with that managed to convince myself that now that I know the parts and their price, I can hold off until I have accumulated half the extra funds by saving (drew up a saving plan and everything as the last step of obsession, and then re-focused on saving).

That was in January. I have stopped tracking my money and actively saving for this by April, and now the new PC build is again just something I wanna do some day, but not right now.

Negotiating with myself to first work towards possible and reasonable, but ultimately unlikely financial circumstances, and then predictably running out of steam, is my go-to strategy for expensive stuff I really want right now, but don't actually require to fulfill a need. Works surprisingly well!

Possibly a stupid question, but are you having a menstruation cycle, and if yes, are you tracking it? I was not able to infer the likelihood by your previous responses...

I'm asking because a certain amount of being high energy before and during ovulation, and more down between ovualtion and menstruation is very common, with some people having more severe bodily symptoms (PMS) in the down phase, and there is also a supercharged version of PMS with mainly depression like symptoms, called PMDD. It's caused by a sensitivity to hormonal changes and can develop at any point in life. The monthly cycling sounds a lot like it.

(Possibly not applicable to you, then please ignore it, but maybe useful info for others).

"A Psalm for the wild-built" von Becky Chambers gibt's jetzt auch übersetzt: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/...

Dringende Empfehlung, sehr toll!

You speak about Cheddar doing stuff with Gouda you have denied yourself doing with Swiss for Gouda's sake, and it's making you vengefully jealous.

My question is - did Cheddar explicitly ask these sacrifices of you, or did you just assume that it would be the right thing to do? edit: nevermind, gotta read better...

I feel like both of you handled some things suboptimally, but this particular aspect sounds like you've been doing this to yourself by assuming instead of communicating.

Generally I don't really understand this situation. Jealousy is not something that just happens to someone and has to be avoided. Jealousy is the flashing warning signal that something is not right (like a relationship that is unstable, or a need that isn't met), and the starting point of a conversation, not the end of it. But there doesn't seem to be a conversation around that in your story. Why not?

While possibly curmudgeonly, I see your point!

I personally am of the opinion that all of earth and especially all life forms should get the mysticism/wonderment treatment (that includes the photosynthesis in a big way!). I just think for a lot of people (me included) it's easier with fungi because they're usually not as neatly explained throughout school, and thus not in the "normal stuff, boring" category.

I hope it's a kind of gateway wonderment for more nature appreciation in general :)

Yes, that's totally the only reason I'm doing it 😁

I've also seen her feed them off of her trash food find in a way that makes me fairly sure that those three smaller ones have been in her nest not too long ago, wide open beaks and everything... only to have one of them grab the whole thing and run off to eat it alone.

She didn't even follow them to get it back. Very "Oh, kids will be kids, and I wasn't that hungry anyway..." energy.

Uuuh, where can I get one of these? Hopefully not just in China?

Thank you!

I've only ever tried ink in one of the transparent water tank ones, which works, but the plastic stains a lot. I'd rather have a cartridge one for ink, but never saw them for sale... until now :)

I don't think that you are really disagreeing with the article - I read it mostly as an invitation to broaden your view on what it means to use AI as it is today, with current benefits and harms, and stop trying to mentally divorce yourself of the consequences of said use by calling it just a tool, as if tools were fundamentally neutral, because they aren't, as you said yourself.

I do have some gripes with your stance though.

Yes, we have local models. But have you ever tried to set up a coding assistant with a local model on consumer-grade hardware? LLMs that are small/performant enough to run on a laptop tend to suck really bad, compared to the cloud-based (data center driven) flagship models. You can barely use them for anything more advanced that "Write me a friendly email to my boss".

That's the whole problem - to approach anything like real "I can use this in production"-usefulness, you do need this gigantic mass of data centres. We are in the beginning stages of having that kind of usefulness, currently, with all its costs. But that doesn't mean we should keep doing it.

It does mean that using gigantic LLMs as an everything machine is an ill-conceived idea, because they are too fucking expensive to run measured by the kind of ressources we have on our planet, and while you can make them more efficient, it always comes at a cost to their usefulness (more hallucinations, less stringent logic in long tasks etc.).

I also want to question this idea of "Well, any bad consequences of LLM usage are just people using it wrong, it's not inherent", especially for "AI psychosis".

Most reports of "AI psychosis" I've read started out as something totally benign - someone had a random, unusual idea and they decided to talk to an LLM about it to get some feedback. You know, to not have any women in their life do emotional labour for them, or something.

And now, the inherent tool design of LLMs becomes important. The fine-tuning on LLMs used as chatbots can be optimized for different things - like giving the impression of being purely informative, or to be responsive to emotional markers in the prompt, or to structure answers in a way that keeps users engaged, to encourage them to burn their token rate limit and purchase more. The latter is something nearly all commercial LLMs do to some degree.

Human psychology is not a secret science. You know what is a lot of fun for many humans, and keeps them engaged? Being told that they're right. And really clever. Have great observations and thoughts, and to offer to develop them further, together. A lot of people enjoy being flattered, even by a machine.

And this is fun, so why not explore further where this chat leads?

And the story goes on - the idea is expanded upon, the LLMs praising responses become grander and grander, the usage becomes longer, the user dives deeper and their divorce from reality becomes bigger, and at some point, no other human shares their reality anymore, and that is what psychosis, at its core, is.

Some snap back out of it in time, others get lost in it.

My point being: yes, maybe these harms result in a misuse of LLMs. But they are absolutely exacerbated by the way current implementations are designed. And then, the actual misuse is to have used an LLM for brain-storming at all, instead of talking to a human, that is fully prepared to tell you that your idea is stupid.

This harm, from my perspective, IS an inherent risk in the current implementation of the technology, and so are others. These systems are being designed that way. The misuses you decry are actively advertised for and are being promoted, because they are also lucrative.

No tool is neutral.

On a personal note: I personally don't like working with LLMs. I noticed that by doing it extensively in the last couple of months, especially for educational and coding purposes. It does something bad with my brain and with my learning and thinking, and it impairs me in the long run - if I do this a lot, I don't think I will be able to do things without an LLM at some point - classic skill decay. I don't want that. Other people might not think so, and rather feel empowered. That's fine to me, but I would encourage everyone to test themselves on that regularly.

And on a political note: The politics around "AI" are, to me, not especially new. It's just end-stage-capitalism, again. It's a finance sector bubble that will hurt us all when it bursts, again. It's the devaluation of human labour, again. It's surveillance and data collection and unjust wealth distribution and disinformation and societal atomization and environmental destruction again, but faster. The type of thing that has been happening before just keeps on happening, more. I do think that that kind of change (mostly in velocity) is something to oppose.

A lot of people say kobo, but since you are in germany, you might want to consider tolino as well. they use kobo hardware with slightly customized software, and since you don't have to import (kobo does not have a market presence for their devices in Germany), they are cheaper.

I went to tolino from kobo because I lost my kobo and wanted to use onleihe, which is not your use case. but if you are considering kobo, in my experience the devices from tolino are very comparable. loading epub on there is easy and works, no DRM-shenanigans, and wakeup to last-read book on opening a magnet folio as well.

one caveat - while UI is identical, I had a slight dip in life quality (problems opening up specific files, longer loading tines), but I think it's mostly because I downgraded on hardware when I went from kobo libra (like tolino vision) to tolino shine (like kobo clara).