Yes, I think you’re correct. The noise/signal ratio tends to be bad in online communities and especially in social media (as with any other topic). I’ve met some lovely (and attractive!) trans people in work life. Never dated one though, as I’ve been “off the market” for years now, but I don’t find the idea any stranger than dating anyone else. If there’s a mutual connection, then that’s all I need. The rest will sort itself out and this, as you rightfully point out, has become stronger and clearer the older I’ve become.

If I found someone attractive, yes of course. I don’t care if you’re straight, gay, bi, trans, whatever - I’m not attracted to sex or the bits between your legs, I’m attracted to person and personality. As long as you’re confident and comfortable being you, I’ll swing anyway you want.

But due to the world we live in, lot of the time the struggle of being them so very much in their identity that they can’t talk about much else and I don’t find that very attractive, in fact quite the opposite.

Enjoy life, friends, the world. You have no real obligations apart from school, you have no real worries. YOLO.

Same techbro hegemony as Meta’s “Facebook AI Friends” they are trying to roll out.

Depends how you define “the Internet”. But if couple of big tier1 carriers null route their BGP, the Internet becomes more or less unusable for large parts, especially now that most of it is synonymous to 5-6 large websites and SaaS providers.

Had you said Teams is the most comprehensive collaboration platform I would have been right there with you.

But Teams is really just a Sharepoint front-end with tacked on voice and text chat. It’s not a messaging platform.

Being para-social at workplace is part of the job. We are primates establishing group dynamics after all. Others monkeys need to know if you fit into their Dunbar’s number or if you’re a shit-tosser.

I tend to give short answers without elaboration. ”Where do you live?” Gets one word reply. ”Where did you grow up?” One word. The rest of the time, be silent and don’t engage. Silence works.

Being introverted is fine, but you might havewto accept that others are not. For them parasocial relationships are as important as being alone is for you.

You can, learn to drive different behaviour for a while. I am very introverted myself, but I don’t present myself as one at work, purely because my work requires me to be outward focused public speaker. This takes a LOT of energy so I also need to find recharge time and ”be myself”, but I do that outside work.

Of course it would be ideal if everyone else was just as introverted as I am, but over the years I’ve come to the conclusion it’s easier to adopt a ”work behaviour” than expect everyone to adapt to my level.

The EU should slap the living daylights out of this company

ChatGPT in its PhD thesis defense: “Oh, I’m sorry for the misinformation, let me try this again…”

I don’t have Threads or follow anyone from there but sounds a bit… complicated?

https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/17/threads-expands-open-social-web-integrations-with-fediverse-feed-user-profile-search/

VC financed social media at the start of its enshittification journey. Started interesting with open protocol but seems it has no ambitions of being open.

Deleted my account 6 months ago and haven’t missed it.

LLMs are a tool. They lack fidelity and frequently generate wrong results but as long as you (human subject matter expert) go through the results they are extremely useful in analysing and summarising large datasets.

But that’s all they are. They don’t create anything new, you can’t use them for learning anything and they certainly don’t ”think”, they just produce nice looking sentences.

Generally, the energy needs and environmental harm they do make their usecases very narrow. But there are some.

As a general tool that pretends to be ”intelligent”, they are completely useless because they’re nothing of the kind.

I think there’s also a fundamental cultural difference in that “govts take”. We don’t normally see taxes as “taking” in that sense, but I fully understand where you’re coming from - it makes sense and seems to work for you guys.

Yeah apparently so. I guess it’s not the top of mind problem Americans have right now.

Over here various pro-consumer watchdog organisations would protest wildly and the merchant would most likely get fined for false advertising. So the whole thing feels a bit alien to me.

Why do consumers accept a system like this? Wouldn’t it be just better for consumers if the shop pricetag represented the exact amount you have to pay at the counter?

Why would I? It’s full of spam.

I never see them. The spam filter removes them. Can’t remember last time I saw a mail like that.

Right after this message from our sponsors!

The current American culture is so bloody obnoxious and tiresome. My brain got exhausted just by reading the headline of the article. It didn’t get any better from there.