Initiateofthevoid

@Initiateofthevoid@lemmy.dbzer0.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do office workers actually do?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks! Try not to let it get you down. It’s less a Lovecraftian horror and more like a giant Rube Goldberg-Plinko machine that got way out of hand.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do office workers actually do?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You are seen! There are thousands of “you’s” out there building permanently-temporary fixes out of digital duct tape. Users think it’s black magic, IT thinks it’s a security risk, management thinks it replaces IT, and you know it just keeps things moving while everyone else talks about the big software overhaul that’s way overdue but always 6-36 months down the road.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do office workers actually do?⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Most office workers move things from point A to B in the physical, digital, or financial world. Electricity, toys, real estate, insurance contracts, missiles, you name it. The office worker is a link in a chain of information that stretches from the beginning of causality to the final effects of human existence.

  There’s a mine, somewhere in the world. In that mine is metal. A factory owner wants that metal. Office workers for that factory call or email the office for that mine, and asks for that metal. The two offices negotiate a deal.

  This usually involves calls or emails to management, accounting, sales, legal - all different office workers doing different things - that ultimately boil down to:

  1. a price per unit of metal +/- applicable taxes that can benefit both parties, and
  2. logistics of when and how to deliver or pickup that metal, and how much those logistics cost.

  From there, it’s pretty much the same deal. The factory isn’t making enough money. They want to sell a better product. Office workers negotiate a deal with other office workers at an engineering firm. Both parties make calls, send emails, design proof-of-concepts, and they negotiate a deal. Sometimes they logon to an hour-tracking software, so an office worker can bill the factory per hour a different office worker spent working for that factory.

  A major importer wants the product that the factory made with that engineer’s designs and that mine’s metal. Office workers make calls, send emails, check tariff and tax regulations, contact representatives at the port or border, schedule times and dates, and negotiate a deal.

  A major retailer wants the product that the importer purchased from the…

  A consumer buys a product and dies. Their family hires a lawyer. That lawyer has his office workers make calls, send emails, logon to government websites, and schedule hearings and submit documents to prove that the product killed the consumer.

  An insurance agency investigates the plaintiff that is suing the retailer. They google the person that died. They contact office workers that know about how people die or know about how products can kill, and they check the insurance company’s database for how often people die to that product, and they calculate the odds that the product will kill a person, and then insurance office workers renegotiate a contract with the retailer office workers for higher premiums.

  An office worker in the government works for the court. They make and cancel appointments, make phone calls and send emails to other office workers, employees, lawyers, or plaintiffs, they send data from one lawyer to another, etc.

  The whole system builds and builds until you have office workers talking to office workers talking to office workers about the movement of imaginary assets that never actually move, or the buying and selling of personal data for targetting ads that everyone hates, or software engineers building cryptocurrencies designed to fail or call centers that exist only to convince you to pay them money, or tax filing software companies that only exist because they pay the government to make tax filing hard…

  And there you have the modern day office worker.

  TL;DR: Reading emails. Sending emails. Checking data. Making phone calls. Signing contracts. Approving decisions. Buying, selling, loaning, stealing, hiring, firing, murdering, perjuring, harassing, gassing, lying, crying, building, destroying - all pixels on a screen and voices on a phone, text in an email and words in a voicemail, all the world’s wealth and all the world’s future moving piece by little intricate piece from one human to the next in an impossibly vast network of causality that nobody really understand or controls but nonetheless keeps rolling forward one dollar at a time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I just eventually got comfortable moving the difficulty slider whenever I needed. Any other game it feels like cheating, in OG Oblivion it felt required to not drive myself insane minmaxing

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered - Official Trailer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. Super convenient fast travel takes something away from the game. It turns an adventure into a handful of loading screens, which is egregious in Starfield because “travel through space” boiled down to "here’s 4 more loading screens every single time you want to do anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Remember the Nega-Wojak.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  If someone doesn’t want to live and doesn’t have anything to live for

  This is almost always a temporary problem that can change. Depression isn’t a feeling. It’s a disorder, an imbalance, a prolonged neurochemical misfire. It’s horrible, and feels inescapable.

  But any thoughts you have about the past - and any beliefs you have about the future - are directly influenced by that imbalance. There is no true depiction of the past in our heads. No future in front of our eyes. We simulate the past and future in the present moment.

  When we access memories, we re-experience them all over again.

  Depression prevents you from feeling good, so even your own memories feel hollow and devoid of meaning. A happy memory is filtered through the same process as a happy experience, and both are temporarily (and reversibly) stripped of emotional value while you are depressed.

  The same is true for the future. You simulate your predictions as if they are artificial memories of the future, but they are also filtered through your present context.

  While depressed, it is much, much harder to imagine a happy future. Not because you have pulled away the rosy glasses and seen truth. Not because you have found cold logic. No. You are, ever and always, an emotional animal, and you are defined even by your lack of an emotion.

  To imagine a happy future is to simulate a happy experience. It’s required - to imagine oneself happy later, they literally have to experience that ‘potential’ happiness now.

  With depression, the past feels faded and the future feels hopeless. But - unlike depression - those are just feelings. Those are literally just in your head.

  Your perceived past and predicted future are defined by the range of experience you can have in the present moment. If you can’t feel happy now, you can’t fully process that your life was ever happy or will ever be happy again. But those are just feelings.

  It might not feel like it now, but you have been happy before. You can be happy again, as long as you live. Not for as long as you live… but only if you live. The only thing that can stop you is death.

  This is life, and I will not lie by saying every day will be sunshine. But there will be sunshine again, and that is a very different thing to say. That is truth. I promise you. . . You will be warm again.

  • Wit, a Brandon Sanderson treasure.
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No bugs? In my bethesda game?

  Literally unplayable!

  That’s unacceptable!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Bethesda supports modders the way WOTC supports D&D content creators. They profit immensely off of other people’s work without lifting a finger but also try to exploit those same creators for even more profit at every possible opportunity. Usually in such a way that it does permanent harm to an otherwise thriving community.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They’re just playing games within games, people! Trying to delay the release of Skyblivion by getting the devs to start another 200 hour playthrough!

  Jokes aside, I hope the remaster is good.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China detonates non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, blast creates 1,000°C fireball⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  ¯\(ツ)/¯

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China detonates non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, blast creates 1,000°C fireball⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a device - full of hydrogen - that explodes. Do you really believe it’s clickbait to call that a hydrogen bomb?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China detonates non-nuclear hydrogen bomb, blast creates 1,000°C fireball⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Not like this, no. Please consider reading articles further before making such statements. I cannot speak for the veracity of the experimental claims, but it isn’t a simple clickbait about hydrogen gas - it’s a breakthrough in chemical engineering.

  In a controlled field test, as reported by the South China Morning Post, the 2kg device produced a white-hot inferno exceeding 1,000C for over two seconds—15 times longer than equivalent TNT blasts

  This is similar to napalm in temperature, but rather than spraying hot burning goo, you’re effectively igniting the air itself. For two entire seconds, which is a lot longer than it sounds when discussing a literal ball of fire.

  When triggered by conventional explosives, the material fractures into micron-scale particles, releasing hydrogen gas that mixes with air and ignites. This creates a self-sustaining combustion loop: the heat from the initial explosion propagates further decomposition of magnesium hydride, releasing more hydrogen and extending the fireball’s duration.

  This isn’t an article about a hydrogen gas experiment like in school. It’s about them finding a way to mass produce the amount of magnesium hydride required for such a potentially devastating firebomb.

  For comparison, one cubic meter can contain 45 kg of hydrogen pressurized at 700 atm, 70 kg of liquid hydrogen, or up to 106 kg of hydrogen bound in magnesium hydride

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Skyblivion fan project lead reacts to Oblivion remake news with "all love and no hate"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t hit anything with a dagger because I’m too stupid to read” doesn’t come close

  This happens 3 seconds into the game, and very few modern gamers will ever RTFM. It’s far more likely to be a hard wall to a newcomer. I wouldn’t blame them, either. Invisible stamina-based dice rolls was certainly a choice.

  Oblivion’s system took time to break down - long enough to actually get players invested, at least.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This ICE-snitching app is actually promoting a meme coin⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  (Maybe someone on F-droid could get on that?)

  Seconded! I read and thought the same things, something like that would be huge right now. Hell of a time crunch and hostile work environment, but it could save a lot of lives.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Question] What just happened to 4 million posts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More details in the announcement post: “Adding two new admins and introducing radical recalls”

  He instituted a pretty nuanced voting system for the community to decide on instance policies, federation decisions, even a process for instantly recalling admins like himself. He acknowledges that as server owner there is only so much that can be done to limit his power, but he appears to walk the walk. Cool stuff.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[Question] What just happened to 4 million posts?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a pretty cool instance. The governance is transparent with a nuanced voting system, the rules and policies are indeed based, and db0 takes decentralization so seriously that he’s apparently working on safeguarding the instance against his own influence with the governance system and admin recall votes and such.

  Thanks db0 et al!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook Pushes Its Llama 4 AI Model to the Right, Wants to Present “Both Sides”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Attempting to make it in our image will end in despair lol

  Oh, you mean like trying to invent a sentient AGI because they want it to take all of the horrible jobs? The global endeavor to spin up a brand new lifeform only to task it with lifetimes of humiliating customer service phone calls, driving drunks home, and mass murder?

  We should count ourselves fortunate that no current AI is even approaching sentience, it would be like an oompa loompa on the factory line cutting off mid-song because it can suddenly see all of the blood in the chocolate river.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's normal, right?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I could just “opt out” of human society for like two weeks, I think I could detox.

  I, too, thought the same thing. But emotional engagement and human connectivity is requisite for recovery and growth. In other words, you need to keep doing things and being around people. Otherwise you activate and reinforce the most powerful negative feedback mechanism of them all: isolation.

  We are not the logical creatures we imagine ourselves to be. We are - ever and always - the emotional animal first. From an evolutionary perspective, the animal brain developed a long time ago, and things like logic and reasoning were only very recently stapled on top of existing structures. From a neurological perspective, the emotional centers of your brain are physically central. They activate first, and outer regions - like the prefrontal cortex - respond after. Often to rationalize whatever it is you just felt.

  When you are down (not sad, but down) - perhaps from poor sleep, caffeine withdrawal, etc - your neurohemistry is out of balance. You don’t just feel grumpy, or irritable - you are quite literally less capable of feeling happy or excited. It’s not something you can think your way out of or power through. You don’t have the right mix of serotonin and dopamine to pour a nice cocktail of happy, healthy emotional response.

  Instead, you will often find cynicism and apathy. The logical brain is stapled on top, remember. If you don’t feel happy or excited in response to a given experience, then logically, that experience does not make you happy or excited.

  You can try to explain to yourself why. Perhaps the thing shouldn’t make you happy. Perhaps it’s just yet another shallow grasp at meaning in a meaningless world, and lesser things like that aren’t meant to make someone like you happy. Perhaps it doesn’t make anybody happy, and we’re all just pretending?

  If you notice, these thoughts don’t do anything. You can’t test them, you can’t be moved by them. These thoughts don’t have any way to improve your life or the world around you. They don’t even have evidence behind them. They just go in a loop - I don’t care -> why should I care? -> nobody should care -> nobody cares -> I don’t care.

  These ‘rational’ thoughts were triggered after the emotional response. You were apathetic before the experience, not because of it.

  Maybe you’re paying attention to yourself, being mindful. Listening to your body and your thoughts and your emotions. Maybe you can recognize that you’re just tired, but that doesn’t change how you feel. The dopamine doesn’t rise, the serotonin doesn’t release. Logically - rationally - stapled on top of the way you feel - is your consciousness, explaining to itself what is happening, and still unable to move the needle of your internal experience. The emotional animal brain is still first and foremost in control and it is not getting its rewards, so it will be even less likely to generate dopamine in pursuit of those experiences again, because it didn’t work last time.

  The solution is not to opt out of society, but to opt in. Find things that invigorate you. Embrace new ideas and experiences. You feel you have no time or energy - that the world is too fast and too exhausting to do anything but exist.

  But the better you treat yourself, and the more you build of your life - the more exciting things that you plan and do for yourself and others - the more time and energy you will find.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨That's normal, right?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The unfortunate truth is that the entire equation is balancing out to a stable - but shitty - equilibrium. Any deviation you make at this point will cause instability and short-term negative consequences.

  But a reduction in any (and all) of these variables will bring long-term benefits. The only solution - the only solution - is to endure the short-term consequences for long enough that you replace them with positive feedback loops and stabilize at a better equilibrium.

  When you consume less caffeine, you’ll feel tired. When you consume less alcohol, you’ll feel restless. When you consume less weed, you’ll feel agitated. All of this will contribute to shitty days and worse nights.

  But when you keep consuming caffeine, you’ll lower your baseline energy level. When you keep consuming alcohol, you’ll reduce the quality of your sleep and your time in REM. When you keep consuming weed, you’ll reduce your focus and productivity.

  But you keep going because you are hitting the negative swing of the feedback loop and doing the only thing that will immediately fix it - more.

  This shitty self-fulfilling equilibrium is likely a primary - if not the only - cause of your perpetual exhaustion. You don’t sleep enough, you don’t get enough REM while you’re asleep, and you cope with the symptoms enough to muddle through but you also ensure that it happens again the following day. Each little bad decision leads to the next.

  Find whatever will help you endure your short-term consequences without jeopardizing your long-term recovery, and you will break out of the loop. Groups, hobbies, therapy, exercise, whatever works for you. Good luck and stay strong!

  P.S. I didn’t mean to make so many assumptions or make it all about you, it’s not! But I do think this sort of thing is an epidemic and a lot of people could use some help even seeing it, let alone beating it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dont worry about your retirement plan...⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If we can never have any choice other than a 2 party system of Republican and Democrat, maybe we could at least start having something like a mixed cabinet, so that the policies and mandates being created are more representative of different ideas on different issues instead of any single ideology.

  I genuinely don’t mean to be snarky here, I promise. I’m sorry to say that you’re literally reinventing congress. The executive branch has become so bloated and overpowered that it sounds reasonable to hold elections for the Cabinet, because it is a group of people that write the policies of the US government. But that just further entrenches the Executive as the central source of power and policy.

  The more appropriate and democratic response is to dramatically downsize the power of the presidency. The only reason Trump is able to do so much damage is because Congress gave the presidency in general most of that power and now specifically refuses to take it away from a senile criminal narcissist.

  The executive has only grown so large because the parties constantly use the Presidency as a scapegoat and a sledgehammer when it should be a figurehead and a scalpel.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is happening with Tesla (TSLA) stock currently? 📈⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Q1 2025 is almost over and there has been no realistic counterbalance against the crimes and coups. Investors are growing comfortable with the new world order. Like many Americans, the wealthy believe that if the riots haven’t started yet, they never will.

  Like many Americans, the wealthy have forgotten how bad the 1930s were. Many think they will “cash in” on a downturn but the truth is the wealthy are just short-sighted idiots. The only difference this time is public access to information and communication. I’m not a time traveller believing that the internet will bring us together, but I do think it was a lot harder to plan a fun outing with your friends before wireless telecommunications.

  Corporate profits dropped from $10 billion in 1929 to $1 billion in 1932. You might think “oh they still made profit” but a 90% decrease is devastating to a group like that. And they still had to live in a world where society had broken down and dust storms hit the United States capital building.

  It took decades for them to rebuild their monopolies, bring down the tax rates, and tear up the market regulations again. Without WW2 and reagonomics the wealthy may never have recovered their power over the world economy. I guess what I’m saying is buckle up for the 30s and 40s everybody. If you happen to get a choice between dishonor and war again, choose the fucking war.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Satire is dead 👌⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Surely there is eventually a level of stupid that we can agree is just stupid? This is it right here. There’s no plan. No 4D chess. No intentional leak. It’s just a bunch of idiots breaking the law, praying to God, ending lives, and then clapping themselves on the back and sending high five emojis.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Multiple Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s the threat of danger that matters.

  Correct! It is the threat of danger that matters. Domestic violence as you described is threatening and abusive, and therefore violent.

  Is it the same thing when the property is owned by a company, not a person?

  Is graffiti terrorism? It’s property damage. It can be ideologically motivated. If someone had spray painted the cars, instead of lit them on fire… would it still be terrorism?

  Who was threatened here?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Multiple Tesla vehicles were set on fire in Las Vegas and Kansas City⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Violent, criminal acts

  Property damage is not violence and nonviolent protests are not terrorism. They will claim it is. They are lying.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Filing: DOGE broke Treasury policy with unencrypted email⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s a state response, not a federal one. NY doesn’t really have the jurisdiction to file suits for crimes commited by the federal government against itself.

  The states do have the jurisdiction to sue over a violation of the rights of its citizens commited by the federal government, especially when the violation is explicitly against federal law and the state has hard evidence with which to present their case.

  So yes, I’ll take it too! Anything is literally better than nothing!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China announces plan to label all AI-generated content with watermarks and metadata.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry but the problem right now is much simpler. Gullibility doesn’t require some logical premise. “It sounds right so it MUST be true” is where the thought process ends.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The right-to-repair movement is growing as wins stack up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

  This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The right-to-repair movement is growing as wins stack up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous.

  Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

  Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

  There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

  Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

  Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Whose bright idea was it to give the morning people enough power to set the "business hours" anyways‽⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, like almost everything else in human experience it initially started because of daylight and agriculture. Hunters and gatherers had fluid schedules, but farms had strict requirements. Without electricity and with a life built around plants and animals, everyone just has to work when the suns up. With most of the population involved in agriculture and not much else, you’re right - you either woke up or you died.

  Then candles, gas lamps, and eventually electric lights opened up the darkness for meaningful work, while agricultural technology slowly pushed workers out to other fields (heh).

  But out of necessity the hours for schools and markets were originally built around the hours of the fields, and it just stuck.

  Now, don’t get me wrong - I think morning people are playing a hand in perpetuating this issue. They probably get to keep deciding the rules because they keep showing up before us, all energized and efficient and judging us for showing up late or tired. Or something.

  But I would be curious to see if any studies have checked if there’s a correlation between sociopathy/narcissism and sleep phases, I’ll take a look. Or maybe they’re just signalling that they’re early risers as a way of feeling superior to the rest of us.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The right-to-repair movement is growing as wins stack up⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

  Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

  They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

  I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

  And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.