The short answer is that all the labor the immigrants are performing goes away. That includes a bunch of people who are literally only in the country in order to work, incidentally. The right wing populist’s alleged dream would be a real shit idea, who’s shocked.

Damn, that’s crazy.

That would be an example of one of those invented reasons I was mentioning, yeah.

Who says it’d fail in the US? Oh right - people who are just politically opposed to the idea just because, and therefore invent reasons why it’d allegedly fail. Same as any other remotely decent thing that demonstrably works elsewhere.

An afterthought to this is that, while every country thinks it’s special, the US thinks it’s real special, and the exceptionalist mindset is probably not helping.

If the feeling is bothering you a lot, you need to dig. Try to find out what it is you’re hoping for from that other life, that’s apparently missing in your current one. If it isn’t that bad, it’s really, really common and you can honestly try to just distract yourself so you don’t repeatedly compare your life to a literal, and rather vague, fantasy. That’s not getting you anywhere.

I think a core thing is that people need a certain level of variety, some more than others, and still it’s really easy to get caught in a groove. Society is not built for that kind of enrichment.

Do you have a hobby or something?

Generally the US is pretty anti-climate, especially currently, and pretty anti public transportation. There’s been a lot of talk about how the US looks exactly like what you’d get if the car industry did a shit ton of lobbying, like pedestrian-unfriendly urban design, jaywalking laws and that sort of shit. Exact prices and landscapes and such don’t particularly matter if nobody ever has any incentive to do the thing.

Will the categories actually help? I mostly find that I search for the username or site name, and then it doesn’t really matter if they’re in a folder.

Also this is a rrrrreal nitpick but if you’re keeping them in the database, are they really throwaway?

This first post is fucking hilarious.

For the record: I’m not interested in reading comments stating your views on AI

Yeah, buddy, that’s very clear.

Because people are stupid and market hype is dumber still.

No. The story of hardware development is a fucking legend, it’s just tarnished by how completely fucking inept we are at using the gains. And it’s apparently getting worse all the time - my mind boggled when Electron of all things turned standard, because I would’ve thought putting Chrome into everything (including low power scenarios) was an obviously fucking blitheringly idiotic idea, but here we are. LLMs have the same problem except probably orders of magnitude worse. Aside from possibly getting worse at developing better performance, we usually seem to beeline for a way to waste as much of it as we can. Moore’s law, of course, is long dead.

It’s probably natural - unless some big site like Reddit shits its pants yet again, there’s not going to be a major influx of new users. Even if something like that happens, parts of the fediverse are just a hard sell - relentless negativity, poor browsability and discoverability, trolling and bitchiness, and a lot of the content that’s left is just… dull.

I’m bored out of my mind too, and even then hanging here is only occasionally worth it.

I was already vaguely interested, and when I was desperate for a pandemic hobby, it was a fairly natural choice. I can recommend “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” by Samin Nosrat as a good introduction - recipes, but, more importantly, explains a bunch of basic concepts and “whys”. Then, if you can stomach youtube (ublock origin or some other adblocker + sponsorblock are basically mandatory), check out e.g. Food Wishes (Chef John, aside from a râthër wéîrd spèàking style, is good at explaining things in an accessible way), Helen Rennie, Frank Proto and others.

Trial and error is a must eventually, but starting off that way is very likely just wasting food, effort and motivation because failing at cooking can be pretty demoralizing.

Same, I guess. But then I also didn’t really expect the “AI” to be a bunch of overhyped nonsense snake oil bullshit, with tremendous practical and ethical problems… so I’ve got to say I feel pretty comfy with the stance.