Therapists are not supposed to bond with their patients. If you find one whom you can stand for half an hour, then take what you can and leave the rest, they’re not to be your friend or lover. The fact that chatbots let people fall in love with them, is a huge fail from a therapy point of view.

Bouncing ideas back and forth is a good use though. A good prompt I’ve seen recently:

I’m having a persistent problem with [x] despite having taken all the necessary countermeasures I could think of. Ask me enough questions about the problem to find a new approach.

If you worry about privacy, you can run an LLM locally, but it won’t be fast, and you’d need extra steps to enable search.

You can use local AI as a sort of “private companion”. I have a few smaller versions on my smartphone, they aren’t as great as the online versions, and run slower… but you decide the system prompt (not the company behind it), and they work just fine to bounce ideas.

NotebookLM is a great tool to interact with large amounts of data. You can bet Google is using every interaction to train their LLMs, everything you say is going to be analyzed, classified, and fed as some form of training, hopefully anonymized (…but have you read their privacy policy? I haven’t, “accept”…).

All chatbots are prompted by the company to be somewhat sycophantic so you come back, the cases where they were “too sycophantic”, were just a mistake in dialing it too far. Again, can avoid that with your own system prompt… or at least add an initial prompt in config, if you have the option, to somewhat counteract the company’s prompt.

If you want serendipity, you can ask a chatbot to be more spontaneous and suggest more random things. They’re generally happy to oblige… but the company ones are cut short on anything that could even remotely be considered as “harmful”. That includes NSFW, medical, some chemistry and physics, random hypotheticals, and so on.

Aren’t copyright laws awesome?

• Buy digital copy… no you can’t, you can only license one
• Buy physical book, now you have a copy
• Want a digital copy? No you can’t, copyright forbids it…
• …unless you destroy the physical copy in the process, then it’s only a format migration
• Donating the books after digitizing, would be “stealing”!

And still, they are suing them for migrating formats without authorization 🤦

All hail Disney’s lobbying and the 150 year copyright term!

GOOD Regulation can be good: like, not selling contaminated food to the public.

BAD Regulation can be VERY bad: like, requiring hospitals to use middlemen who negotiate medication pricing with insurance providers, and whose only goal is to steadily increase the “savings” to insurance by increasing the “prices”, then requiring hospitals to “forgive” most of it to the insurance, while people without insurance get a bill for 1,000,000% the real cost.

Unfortunately, the US has seen bipartisan support for the latter kind, and recently has been slashing the former.

Shifting the point of view might be a good idea.

Based on this:

• June 22, 2025 - Where the US attacked nuclear sites in Iran

Hassan Abedini, deputy political head of Iran’s state broadcaster, said Iran had evacuated the three sites some time ago.

“The enriched uranium reserves had been transferred from the nuclear centres and there are no materials left there that, if targeted, would cause radiation and be harmful to our compatriots,” he told the channel.

The International Atomic Energy Agency also said Sunday morning it had detected “no increase in off-site radiation levels.”

…this other one would make more sense now:

• June 16, 2025 - Russia is ready to mediate on Iran, and to accept Tehran’s uranium, Kremlin says

TLDR: It’s a mess.

Back in the day, I started migrating notepad stuff to Markdown on a Wiki. Then on a MediaWiki. Then DokuWiki. Then ZimWiki. Then Joplin. Then GitHub Pages and a self-hosted Jeckyll.

Each, single, one, of, them, uses a slightly different flavor of Markdown. At this point, I have stuff spread over ALL OF THEM, much of it rotting away in “backups to migrate later”. 😮‍💨
I’ve been considering “vibe coding” some converters…

As for syncing… the Markdown part is easy: git.
Working with a Markdown editor to update GH Pages, was a good experience.
Having ZimWiki auto-sync to git, was good, but didn’t find a decent compatible editor for Android.
I switched to Joplin lured by the built-in auto-sync options, but kind of regret it now, when it has a folder with thousands of files in it.

Obsidian is not OSS itself, but has an OSS plugin to sync to git.
I’ve read that using Logseq alongside Obsidian should be possible… and was planning to test that setup, keeping Obsidian in charge of sync. Possibly with GitHub/Jeckyll, git-lfs for images and attachments.

PS: assuming one could have working back-and-forth converters for the different Markdown flavors, and everything stored in git, then one could theoretically use git hooks to convert to/from whatever local version used by a particular editor.

The Play Store has become way more restrictive, they’ve purged tons of old and/or “inactive” apps… including some I happened to have bought some time ago.

It’s made me even more of a fan of F-Droid.

replacement cycles for phones extending past 40 months

Rookie numbers. Unless disaster strikes, I fully expect to ride my current phone for the 60 month official support period I was promised.

Another one to the list:

Google Flagged Parents’ Photos of Sick Children as Sexual Abuse

Google uses Microsoft’s PhotoDNA screening algorithm

BTRFS, with periodic snapshots and scrubbing, in RAID 1, only accessible remotely.

Just saying, that can be a “2”.

Works on Android:

• The Play Store exists
• All apps run in secured containers
• Sketchy* apps run in VMs
• Rooting disables banking and security apps

(* including all versions of Windows)

It’s not Israel or Iran or whatever, it’s the region itself:

• Main land bridge from Africa to the rest of the world
• Scarce in basic resources like water and arable land
• Lately, plentiful in oil, which everyone wants some of

Add to that some religions where everyone can go “but before that, you [insert aggression]” for thousands of years back, and it’s no longer about any dozen of countries.

Rather than ask “who is a greater source of instability”, one should ask “which country is a source of any stability”.

Hm, makes sense, but I feel like we’re still missing something.

I saw comments about Durov, similar to this investigation, maybe around a month ago.

With the xAI partnership news, I looked into it and found this nice thing:

• Tool to delete all your messages from chat/channel/ conversation on Telegram without requiring admin privileges - https://github.com/en9inerd/tgeraser

In Telegram, you can clear them one by one, or date ranges, or use disappearing messages, but this tool still found some I had missed.

(Disclaimer: I got pulled into Telegram by some friends leaving WhatsApp with the policy changes of 2021, my threat model is less one of FSB, and more one of indiscriminate AI siphoning for ad targeting)

people who advocate for animal welfare tend to also be more outspoken against human suffering

If I got a cent for every time I’ve heard an animal advocate say “I love animals, I hate people”… I’d have a couple bucks already. This thread seems to count towards that.

This isn’t a zero-sum game you can help people and the animals at the same time.

Prove it.

Show me how you get the resources to do both. Animalists are high on saving whales, kitties, puppies, etc. while letting their neighbors die home alone, or worse… when not directly saying “I love animals, I hate people”.

Please leave this thread and post articles about human suffering

No, I think I’m right where I should be. I don’t doompost either.

You “love” the idea to “force” people to suffer, because they aren’t your chosen ones?

Are you sure?

How does this fit into these two pieces of news?

• May 28, 2025 - xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app
• June 10, 2025 - Russian MPs back new state messaging app to combat WhatsApp and Telegram

Can we solve human suffering first? Not saying this isn’t important… just that it’s kind of hypocritical to shift the focus away from the “hard” stuff, to something “easier”.

Licensing the algorithm would also have another consequence: SEO optimizers.

Google uses their algorithm to both push ads, and to punish content farms. Imagine for a second what Google results would look like, if content farms could run the algorithm preemptively to optimize massive amounts of AI slop.

The US is actively shrinking its “sphere of influence”. Just look at USAID: a worldwide sphere of influence, shutting down as we speak.