Same. They also don’t allow password managers and I have multiple systems that don’t use my main password, so I have at least 5-6 work passwords for different systems.

Nobody can remember all that.

So everyone makes the simplest password they can (since it has to be regularly typed in) and writes it down somewhere so they don’t forget it.

Quiet yes. They’ve gone quiet several times before. But it never results in different actions. They don’t change, they only ever become more circumspect.

It’s how Democrats deluded ourselves that things were turning around and then were so surprised to lose everything. All of the words in the world aren’t going to affect any real change.

I honestly don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to reach these people. I think something is deeply broken in a huge majority of Americans. Either they’re voting for this or they’re too checked out, self absorbed or hopeless to bother to do anything to try to fix it. 2024 revealed just how broken we are.

I also think that, after getting up to speed, they’d fight pretty hard against measures that are meant to backslide us to that point again.

I’m struggling to believe these articles are anything but pandering to the left. I struggle to believe there’s any significant number of conservatives actually having real second thoughts.

I mean during COVID you had conservatives literally claiming COVID was no big deal as they died. I think that was when I understood just how far gone these people could be. They will happily drink the Kool aid no matter the personal cost to themselves.

So losing their jobs is questionable as to whether or not it’s going to actually result in a different mindset, rather than some fleeting complaints that are forgotten by the next election cycle.

‘How to treat a sprained neck’

So not sure if I’m the one with the neck injury or if I managed to get killed treating someone else

Yep. My 2025 resolution is to be as uninformed as I can possibly be. My mental health can’t handle it and I stress out and obsess over things that I can’t fix.

15 years of being informed did fuck all for me. I’ll go vote when it’s time (where I will do a minimum of research on my vote), but otherwise my goal is to entirely ignore all politics and political figures for at least the entire year, but hopefully longer than that.

If there ever comes a time where I can actually make a difference, I’m sure it’ll be obvious and widely spread. All the outrage, pointless and ineffective protests and ‘awareness’ campaigns were utterly worthless. The last 10 times I called my local rep they laughed at me for being from the opposite party and told me to go pound sand.

I do not have the capacity, competency or mindset to run for politics myself, so as far as I’m concerned there’s nothing of value added by being informed and involved.

I think for many purposes, regular people just like cool art. We’ve very much become accustomed to a near overwhelming tide of reasonable quality, but ultimately transient media.

‘Content’ has a much lower value than it once did, simply by benefit of sheer quantity. Even ignoring AI, I have access to endless art, music, video content, etc.

AI art is not really different from the non-artist perspective. It’s just accelerating the flow. But do people really even care where their current art comes from in most cases? The average person might download some art for their phone or computer desktop. They’ll be exposed to marketing and cover materials (that they’d have no clue or care about how they’re made), and they might buy some art for their house. Either from a home goods store of cheap, mass production art, or perhaps on a vacation or art fair for something a little more personal. Beyond that, I doubt most even think about it at all. AI art will be largely invisible to them because the human artists already are.

I do think you’ll see a similar surge of ‘human’ art niches like we have for Vinyl collections today. A small subset of people will pursue the story and mystique of hand crafted art, but this will be a drop in the bucket compared to the entire industry. Only a small few will be able to fit into that new niche.

I’ve spent an astronomical amount of effort trying to remove as much depressing and outrage content from my feeds as possible. It’s a sisyphian task with new things constantly slipping through the cracks. Which has made me mostly check out of all but a very small list of online spaces (and even then ads and other impossible to turn off ‘recommendations’ show up).

Outrage and depressing content fuels the web and it’s best to recognize that. I’ve been a lot happier in my ignorance so far and would recommend it to anyone who’s privileged enough to get away with it. It’s not like being informed and engaged did fuck all for me in the last decade except give me a variety of mental issues.

It’s never that I think they aren’t evil enough, I just don’t trust conspiracies that require too much competency. I think most of them are too dumb and uncoordinated to pull off most of the conspiracies I hear about.

Honestly the last decade plus does feel like the lead up paragraph in a history textbook to some major paradigm shift. But it could still be years and years away. But it does feel inevitable.