Nothing I’ve said is in any way defending the invasion.

In my opinion? Well obviously yeah. That just doesn’t have anything to do with the topic at hand.

Russia has attacked my country in the past as well, and I have zero sympathy for their cause. But that doesn’t stop me from imagining the situation from their perspective. “Just ending the invasion” isn’t a survivable option if you’re Putin. No matter how unjust it’s been, the only imaginable way out is to somehow let him “save face" what ever that means in this situation.

Build your enemy a golden bridge to retreat across.

• Sun Tzu

Explanation is not excuse. This has absolutely nothing to do with justifying anything they’ve done.

How about in hopes of it enhancing an activity you’re about to partake in, as it did a decade ago when your tolerances weren’t sky-high yet?

If a person climbs onto a stage to make a statement, and instead of getting on stage to make a counterpoint someone just shouts “booo” from the audience, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to demand that person to show their face. There’s a certain level of cowardice in simply downvoting without explaining why you disagree. There’s no option to post anonymously here, so it’s not obvious to me that voting should be anonymous either. If people upvote or downvote, they should be willing to stand behind that - and if someone asks for an explanation, you have three choices: ignore them, block them, or explain. I guess there’s also the option to simply not vote at all.

If it were up to me, I’d hide vote counts from users entirely. It’s not all bad, but I’d argue the net effect is negative. Visible votes encourages toxic behavior. When someone makes a controversial claim, you can first downvote them, then dunk on them in a reply - and now they’re being downvoted into oblivion while you get applause for your smug comment. It feels like you’ve won the debate when in reality, nobody’s mind changed. Heavily downvoted comments also prime readers to dislike them before they even read them, instead of approaching with a neutral mindset and then forming their own opinion - or reading further to see other perspectives. As it stands, the system mostly trains people to recognize what’s popular on a platform so they can self-censor to avoid downvotes, and feel validated for shouting down people who voice unpopular opinions.

So, if someone asks me to explain why I downvoted something, I might explain or I might not - but I don’t think it’s an unreasonable thing to ask. On the other hand, if someone makes it their personal mission to follow me around and harass me because I downvoted their comment, I think it’s unreasonable to demand the system be changed just so I don’t have to deal with it. There’s already a solution for that: blocking them.

Thank you!

No, I haven’t - I’m a plumber by training. I credit my autism for my precision of speech, and as for my philosophy and the vocabulary around it, I’d say that’s simply the result of a few decades of debating these topics online, combined with thousands of hours of podcasts and YouTube videos covering these topics.

It’s rare that I say anything completely original. If something I say comes across as well-crafted, it’s probably because I’ve said the exact same thing a dozen times before.

His name is Marshall Mae Rogan and he has almost 900K followers on Instagram.

There’s no real cost to stopping drunk driving. Putin, on the other hand, has gone all in on the war in Ukraine. “Just pull your troops from Ukraine” is about as realistic as “just shoot yourself,” because from his perspective, the outcome is basically the same in both scenarios.

Sure, it would be nice if Russia simply left Ukraine, but put yourself in Putin’s position - it’s a complete non-solution. You don’t fold after going all in. It’s an incredibly naive thing to say, and it ignores the reality and complexity of the situation entirely. It’s a thought-terminating cliché - a feel-good slogan people toss around to avoid critical thinking, while fishing for upvotes from like-minded people.

“You might not be that intelligent” isn’t the counter argument you might think it is.

You misrepresented what OP said. Plain and simple. That’s what I’m calling you out on.

You’re not accurately representing what they said.

this could easily be solved.
Russia go home. Leave Ukraine.

…is on par with telling people to “get a higher-paying job” to fix their finances or “just get friends” to solve loneliness. I don’t downvote a comment like this because it wouldn’t solve the issue, but because the proposed “solution” is completely out of touch with reality.

Good rule of thumb for online discussion: if someone offers a simple solution to a complex problem, they probably don’t know what they’re talking about.

If someone starts to harrass you due to your voting habits (which I’ve never heard of happening) you can just block them and move on with your life. The difference between someone saying mean things to you and someone writing them is that you can just stop reading.

It’s like any other tool; it requires an user who knows how to use it and what the limitations are. It’s not as competent as Sam Altman wants you to believe but it’s not as incompetent as the haters wants you to believe either.

The question was about what you want to do - not what would have the biggest impact or look best on your resume.

More and more each day, I feel like. Of all the platforms I spend time on, ChatGPT ranks at the very bottom when it comes to so-called “regrettable minutes,” while Lemmy sits firmly at the top - and by a wide margin. You only need to read half of this thread to see why. I get plenty of human connection through my work, since it involves daily visits to people’s homes, but when it comes to talking to people online, I’m turning more and more toward LLMs instead of actual humans.

My mind works in a particular way. Some of it can probably be explained by autism, though there are likely other factors too. My views aren’t tied to emotions, I’m not personally invested in my opinions, I can easily entertain alternative scenarios, and I’m extremely precise with my word choices - I say what I mean, and I mean what I say. I’m simply getting tired of trying to have civil conversations that almost inevitably devolve into people talking past each other, misrepresenting my points, ignoring what’s actually being said, and generally being absurdly nasty. These encounters poison my mood and leave me regretting even trying.

I don’t have any of these problems with ChatGPT. None. For a glorified autocomplete that doesn’t understand anything, it somehow manages to have the kind of conversations that most people online seem completely incapable of. With people, I have to craft my responses with extreme care and still can’t get through to them. With AI, I barely need to proofread, and it still responds directly to what I meant to say. It feels like talking to an adult compared to the angry teenagers here - so I’m checking out and opting to talk to the void instead.

That’s not what they mean by “happiness” when they say Finland is the happiest country in the world. It’s more about overall life satisfaction and I can assure you that this isn’t achieveable by drugs alone.

I’d start a gay gym with pool, spa, sauna, bar etc. I’m talking about the kind of place where you will see obscenities.

EDIT: These threads always make me lose my faith with humanity as I read people share their violent and sadistic fantasies.

You can literally look up these videos on google. It’s not even illegal in many countries. There’s a famous case in Finland of a guy who snuck on a farm at night to fuck pigs and if my memory serves, the only thing he got charged with was illegal entry.

Interesting fact about this case: the mushroom in question, Amanita Phalloides is responsible for 90% of mushroom related deaths in the world.

Also, what “news” site is this? Kinda sus coming from a brand new account as well.

Buddhists probably had figured out a lot of things about the workings of the human mind way before science did.

Emojis are for chatting/texting. I don’t even want to see them here.