So I get what you are saying…

A few possibilities:

1. Covid and the pandemic fundamentally changed how people interact and relate

I know this is strange, but pre-covid, people grew up in a world in which dating and to some extent working required a social life. People met at bars, through friends, at parties, doing common activities. Then dating Apps and hookup Apps came along, but bars still existed, social scenes still existed, people still had parties.

Work also had to be a physical social thing: you needed to show up, there was a more social aspect to interacting with people, and people were more likely to socialize outside of work. Some remote work happened, but not a lot.

Then covid happened. All of work changed so that the infrastructure existed for most people to work without needing to be in person. No one could party, no one could go to bars, no one could do things. There also used to be a large social stigma to staying at home. If you were at home on a Friday, you were a loser, uncool, not invited to things, and it bothered people, and felt like social exclusion.

With covid, everyone stayed at home. There was no social exclusion by being at home. People worked at home. And suddenly, being social in person was so much less important. You could get a job by applying online and it didn’t require a social network quite the same way, or that network could be online. You could meet someone, date, and procreate online without needing a social network at all. The main thing that mattered, in order to procreate, was whether someone had a stable job and was employable.

Even post-covid, I feel like we’ve had a shift. There are still parties, there are still clubs, there are still bars. They are less required or needed part of society. Not only that, we’ve gone into more of an era of have and have nots, and some people desperate, some people scamming others, and so there are more risks in going out of meeting someone who is problematic. It’s why people prefer driverless robotaxis over regular lyfts and ubers, even when it costs more: it’s not that the driver interaction is bad, it’s that social interactions entail risk and if you are employed and can date using Apps, or have a partner, it’s sometimes simple to avoid that.

Technology is now much more addictive. So many people, myself included, think it’s emotionally healthy to go out and be around people. In the same way I know broccoli is better than candy, I know that people are better than the Internet. But when I am stressed, when I’m annoyed, when life is frustrating, what do I want? I want the Internet and candy, not hanging out and meeting new people.

possibility 2

2. People have become much more classist as inequality has increasingly risen, partly because perception of being in a lower class carries risk. When the class itself it what causes wealth to increase, people become hyper-aware of perceptions.

It’s possible your friends make more money now and see themselves as better because of their careers and specifically are less responsive because of that. Should that matter in a friendship? No, but does it? Sadly, many people are extraordinarily superficial and cruel and evil. Almost all of us (that use Lemmy) use devices that contain rare earth minerals mined by the ultra-ultra poor who are essentially there in a forced labor situation because no one else will hire them and if they don’t mine rare earth minerals they will die. The conditions are brutal and evil, there could even be actual slavery involved in some cases, and the supply chain is confusing enough that no one knows which devices involve slavery. That’s evil. We are all evil. To those people, we’re the monsters… and they aren’t wrong.

So given that most people are selfish and evil and just care about their own interest, it should not be surprising that these people, if their wealth has increased, don’t care about you anymore. Much like people don’t stop using devices despite slavery involved in the supply chains because fundamentally people choose evil when it’s easier most of the time, you shouldn’t expect people making more money to want to stay in contact with you, because sadly, the only thing that matters in our corrupt evil society is money, apparently.

possibility 3

3. People are so exhausted from work that they just don’t have time.

Working 40 hours a week is hard as hell. It used to be for most men they worked 40 hours, but also had a full-time assistant at home who cooked, cleaned, shopped, and did other things.

Now if someone wants a family, often both people are working, and more people are single. Wages have not kept up with inflation, so that means if you are single, you often can’t afford a cleaner, a personal shopper, meals being delivered, etc.

The result is chronic exhaustion. Working Mon-Friday, being tired as hell trying to be more and more efficient, because companies have demanded more efficiency to avoid being fired without paying more, and then on your off time, you either scroll Internet to try to decompress, Saturday you just sleep nearly all day and finally have a moment to be exhausted and miserable, and Sunday you catch up on cleaning, shopping, and worry about money, and then Monday the hell starts all over again.

Your friends may be dealing with that, the whole barely treading water thing, and it’s awful.

possibility 4

4. post covid issues, long covid

A lot of people who got covid developed health issues, and some aren’t obvious. Some are things like, you don’t quite have full on long covid, but you are just more tired all the time. You don’t have chronic fatigue, but your health isn’t as good. It just impacts people. People with such issues aren’t quite disabled, but they aren’t totally functional either. And I bet there are a ton more people like this than say so, because it’s not easy to talk about, there aren’t government benefits for being chronically tired after getting covid if you need to work and it’s not totally debilitating, etc.

I think it’s more likely Possibility 1 and 2. People are going out and partying less (no data to support this, just from going out myself and seeing bars and clubs with fewer people) and people are more classist and drop people who have less money these day. I wouldn’t block these people, but don’t spend any more time on them. Go completely no contact on your end. If they reach out, great, if not, who cares. They will likely not reach out and it will feel like giving up a soda you really like and you’ll get cravings to reach out, but don’t. A month of no contact later, you’ll realize it’s best to not interact with them anymore. The second month will be easier, and by the third you won’t miss them much at all. Force yourself to be uncomfortable and then you’ll be more likely to use meetup.com, go out to bars, do things where you are more likely to interact with new people who will be worth the time.

How is labeling a bug report that is based on user ignorance a lack of empathy? It’s just sometimes factual that users are still learning and make mistakes, and I say this as a low skill FOSS user and enthusiast.

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You make good points. You seem really smart. (Who are you?)

If there were enough education among the poor, or poor people were just smart enough, then the ultra rich wouldn’t be able to trick the lower classes into voting against their economic interests. Unfortunately, there’s no way for that to change, so we’re in this perpetual cycle of a selfish rich class deceiving the lower classes into voting against interest using religion and wedge issues as a mechanism.

I still think market economics work really well to distribute resources if you address externalities and don’t let the rich deceive the poor into acquiescing into terrible policy.

Once the boomers become a smaller voting block, younger people are bound to vote in blocks that change these horrible policies. The good news is the Internet, and even TikTok, have allowed younger people to be more aware of issues and eventually it will result in better policy.

Seriously. Someone like her should be kept in a palace with attendants and people to do everything for her while she just divides her time between leisure and economic policy that others simply implement. Like, I would happily be a servant for someone of her intellect to just assist her in any way. Not only does she just completely understand economics, but she speaks so clearly and eloquently about economic situations in ways to make the truth evident for someone lacking her exceptional abilities. I genuinely think that if she were queen of the world, about 99 percent of the worlds problems would dramatically decrease of just be gone within 5-10 years after her coronation. Many of the worlds problems are caused by not understanding externalities and markets and then not aggressively regulating those same markets if and only if needed.

The picture is very persuasive. :-/

You win this round, you evil Marxist maniac!

I wasn’t saying that there shouldn’t be housing first… I’m just saying that there are conflicts between religion and religious values and proper resource management

maybe there should be housing first and then cultural and religious problems that lead to resource issues should be sorted out later

In classical economics, the best way of dealing with this situation is you just tax the rich more and give it to people who produce less value, and eliminate the minimum wage. There should just be some amount that is redistributed and people vote on how much it is and whether to raise it or lower it. If it’s raised too much and people get lazy and smart people stop producing, it can juts be lowered. We really should just have it as one single amount, without so much regulatory complexity. UBI will likely happen at some point in some manner.

Lina Khan is so smart! The world would literally be so much better if everyone just made her queen of the world and had her decide everything. (This is not sarcasm. Someone that incredible and smart is a rarity and if she could rule the world, I’d gladly accept that.)

Not having her do something in which she had power to actually change market conditions is always a mistake, as we are seeing.

Your ignorance of the realities of famines and resource management shows, and it’s fucking pathetic. I am poor, I don’t hate poor people, I am explaining the problem is that religious people refuse to have sensible limits on procreation when there are government handouts. For example, in China, they have sensible procreation policies at times. I don’t support their lack of freedom of speech, but nature and math are realities that can’t be ignored. Clearly, you prefer platitudes and would rather ignore science.

That’s not what I said at all. What I was saying is that if you give free housing and free snap to people, society will have to take care of those children, and there’s a risk of a lot of people who aren’t willing to or aren’t able to work. Possibly with AI and UBI in the future, this won’t matter, but for now, it does. I am also not a wealthy person. I am poor as fuck, have considered suicide because of poverty, and do work hard but have had a lot of tragedy in my life. I am explaining the problem of unregulated free food and housing eventually leads to resource problems. You don’t know me, or what I’ve been though in life, and fuck you.

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She may have spared herself a large amount of pain and agony and made a rational choice by dying. Many people with borderline personality disorder struggle for decades in misery and then end things decades later. The limited pleasure in those decades may not be worth the immense pain many feel. Perhaps she was highly rational and made an autonomous decision to terminate her suffering.

The problem isn’t open information, the problem is they actively concealed information from her and didn’t list possible treatments, leading her to be shocked when she read it. Psychiatrists need to be open with patients and not hide things in records hoping they aren’t discovered by patients. She could have been discharged with something listing rule-out diagnosis and treatments for each one.

Psychiatrists also overly emphasize a dogma of brains being unable to change because it’s more profitable to have lifetime patients, and this shapes how patients think about their possibilities. If an expert says you’re always going to be broken, very few will challenge that.

Use duckduckgo.com to search “restaurants near me”

Unless they use a complex system to look up geolocation for all queries and forward an approximate version of that to Bing, then Bing is getting IP addresses and search terms.

Is there a way to run this in a Linux-based system?

If you do searches on DDG, which is powered by Bing, you get responses that are relevant to your IP-based location, which means something about your IP is being passed to Bing aka Microsoft. That’s how.

It’s DDG

It’s duckduckgo. Search duckduckgo.com with the term “restaurants near me.” You’ll often get responses that are close to your IP location.

That couldn’t happen unless DDG passes your IP address on to Bing. It’s possible they censor part of the IP and only pass part of it to Bing, but probably not.

(Go ahead! Try it!)

Since Bing sells to data brokers, data brokers know your IP is linked to a search for rambutan, even without fingerprinting your browser.

I’m not calling duckduckgo.com a honeypot… I’m also not calling it not a honeypot. But it knows too much for something supposedly private.

Any closed source firefox extension that has access to the browser display could be parsing the texts and selling it and your IP and other identifiers to data brokers. It’s part of how these extensions are profitable.

Cloudflare also does highly advanced fingerprinting and has a script called cloudflare insights, so it seems likely that any cloudflare activity is generating marketing data.

That sounds so hard to do locally. I don’t even know where I would begin. Is that expert level stable diffusion?