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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Awesome comment, thanks for the detail.

    To play a bit of Devil’s Advocate (from a bench-top scientific standpoint I come from immunology/microbiology background—so I know enough theory to be dangerous but don’t have your depth of evolutionary understanding) doesn’t a lot of this rely on cosmic timescales? I’m sure I could easily do a web search on this, but I think there are a lot of galaxy clusters that are much older than the Milky Way. That would give the potential for many multitudes of planets that have been around much longer than Earth, which gives a lot of time for intelligence to evolve and sustain. Now, if an intelligent civilization can ever survive for that long is a different question in and of itself.

    I personally have wondered if the natural, sustainable, next step in any intelligent evolution is artificial forms of intelligence. Maybe biological intelligence is just the bootloader for less squishy forms of life? Immortal silicon life sort of renders the biological limits of space travel a lot less problematic. I know that comment exceeds the scientific into the philosophical, but it’s a thought I’ve had a lot lately.








  • We talk for our dog. We don’t have children, but our dog has full on conversations with us but it’s just my wife and I making his “voice.” It always goes along with the context and it seems to be what he would be saying. Our old dog and our current dog even have their own distinct intonation/dialect when saying things.

    It’s to the point that sometimes we look at each other and go “huh, it’s weird when you think about the fact that he’s never actually really spoken before….”

    Folie a deux?



  • This is so true. I try to explain this to my wife and she doesn’t understand.

    If I’m on my phone I’m either:

    1. Answering endless Teams chats or emails (I get work messages well outside of normal business hours because of my job—it’s annoying but I’ve also gotten used to it because we basically do everything async)
    2. Doom scrolling

    I hate social media. I’ve hated Reddit since API. Lemmy is great but I’ll go days sometimes with the same home page. So I basically cycle through the same 3 sites endlessly. I got a Steam Deck to try and help with this, but when I hop on it my wife thinks I’m “playing video games so should be working on something.” I’ve tried to explain that using a Steam Deck is the equivalent of her scrolling social media, but alas.

    So yeah. Basically nothing to do these days. I think the most frustrating part to me is how most content seems to be geared towards making me angry. I never remember it being like that.



    1. 8 Sleep Bed—it’s liquid cooled and heated based on your sleep stage. I know it’s expensive, but the sleep it’s given me has been unrivaled by anything else I’ve ever used to regulate my sleep. I work shifts so good sleep is priceless. You spend a third of your life asleep, so it’s worth an investment.
    2. Hue lights for my entire home—privacy issues aside, it’s a game changing investment. We replaced the recessed lighting with recessed hue lighting fixtures as well. It’s insane how having multiple lighting settings and colors for times of the day/moods can change your entire mindset.
    3. Home gym—if I were pressed for one component it would be the power cage and Olympic bar, but investing in a fully functional home gym has given me much more in return than what I’ve put into it (whether that be physical work building equipment or money).



  • When my dog died almost a year ago to the day, it was one of the worst things my wife and I have ever gone through. I know that’s proof of my privilege—but I think it’s also proof of how much animals mean to us. They’re pure good. I work a lot of weird shifts; when I come home my wife may not be awake or present, but my dog was always there. It initiated intense, physical grief in both of us.

    Lean on any friends or family you have. Post here. Don’t deny how bad you’re hurting, but look for another animal to help after you grieve. I feel like our pets represent different chapters in our life, and when one leaves us a new chapter opens. That chapter may come with a different pet for a different time of your life. We chose to use the closing of our chapter as a transition point—we had a few horrible months at first but ultimately kicked some bad habits we had been building for a while. But where you are right now is horrible, and as another human being I understand to an extent how badly you’re hurting.



  • So yes and no. Some of this depends on what sort of “loop” you’re stuck in, which I can’t answer unless I have more details. The rest doesn’t depend as much on that.

    On one hand, 21 is extremely young—which means you have an absurd amount of wiggle room and time to course correct, even if you’ve done some really dumb stuff.

    On the other hand, time only starts to move faster and if you don’t commit to course correct at some point you’ll end up a lot older in a way tougher spot.

    I think the answer here is some sort of average of extremes (like it is for most things in life). You shouldn’t worry about the future too much because you’re so young, but you should start taking action to course correct now so that the next 5-10 years are easier.



  • Sleep with caffeine pills next to your bed. Set an alarm for 20 minutes before when you want to wake up. Take the pill with the alarm, and go back to sleep. You will magically wake up super awake at the time you want to be up.

    This is obviously a lot less good than the healthy solutions here, but I work a rotating shift schedule and this trick has been working for me for over a decade.