• 5 Posts
  • 78 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • I thinknif you’ve lived in Britain that long most people would think of you as British, especially if you have a reasonably British accent. Where I live in Scotland, most people are happy to accept anyone who actually wants to live in Scotland as Scottish!

    Hut there’s always going to be racist idiots. I’ve been told I’m “not really British” just because I’m from Scotland (by someone who obviously doesn’t understand the difference between England and Britain. And I’ve seem the whitest, pure Anglo-Saxon English people being called “not really British” because they wanted to stay in the EU. So, try to ignore the idiots!


  • I love 60s and 70s music, heard a lot growing up from my boomer parents. So many classic, timeless hits. Then my mum found some “Fab No. 2s of the 60s” CD, a compilation of songs that didn’t quite make it to number 1…

    It was truly awful, all clichéd cheesiness and triteness, so many lame songs that sounded like other, better songs. Just sucko-barfo all round. I think there are arguments for why music from the early stages of a genre (like 60s pop and soul) are particaurly good… But there’s also a hell of a lot of selection bias going on.



  • I really got a lot out of the Myres Briggs when I was younger. I know its not scientifically valid, and it’s stupid of folks take it too seriously, but it really helped young me understand that other people weren’t wrong/dumb/weird for approaching things differently. And it helped me understand some of the axis on which difference can lie in a helpful way.

    I think in the post internet age people are very aware of different categories and identities, but growing up in the previous millenium it wasn’t something that we talked about much. The introvert / extrovert division is overblown and overly simplistic nowadays, but before people use to just criticise each other for being “too shy” or “too loud” like there was a “normal” way to be that everyone should get.

    The big five is certainly more reliable and scientifically supported, but I never found that it helped me understand a coworker or friend better. Partly I think conscientiousness and neuroticism sound a little too value laden. People can happily self describe as “detail orientated” (Sensing) or “big picture types” (Intuitive) but nobody really wants to say “I’m closed-off and unconscientious”. And I think that’s why MB has been popular in business / organisation worlds, because it’s a useful way to get people discussing themselves and how they approach problems. It doesn’t matter that in reality my level of extraversion varies depending on the context, or I’m Judging in certain tasks but Perceiving in others.








  • This is a really interesting, thoughtful comment (and exactly why I love lemmy).

    I don’t know if it’s just my lack of imagination, but I find your description of AI pet/companion as an art/media object much more plausible and interesting rather than when people discuss their possible sentience. It really doesn’t seem to many steps from Spotify’s discovery weekly playlist or Google Assistant reading all my emails, when combined with LLM capacity to plausibly bullshit, to having a ‘virtual friend’ who texts me jokes, questions and what not.

    Especially since we’ve both normalised interacting with humans in entirely digital ways & created a massive corpus of how humans interact via social media archives. Why do I want a calendar app pinging me a notification when I could have a virtual companion message me “I hope your haircut goes well this afternoon, looking forward to seeing your new look!” or “don’t fucking forget your appointment again you dumbass” depending on what companion I purchased.

    Given many people’s preference to “get everything in one place”, it seems likely that instead of newsletters, comedy subs or travel updates, we’ll just have different imaginary friends sending us the stuff we need/want to know, mixed in with our actual friends. Some of whom might as well be virtual since we never see them in the flesh.