Khrux

27 here, back to university too for similar reasons and seeing the same thing.

I don’t actually blame the lecturers or teachers. A huge part of higher education is self motivated learning with access to people who are incredibly knowledgeable, who also happen to be your teachers / lecturers.any lectures are there to guide the topics of independent learning.

Until a certain point, the purpose of most education was education itself. The matter half of the 20th century into today has seen a shift of the purpose of university being for employment on the other side. This is an enormous difference, it no longer appeals only to people who are passionate about the subject. If 70% of the lecture theatre is there not to learn but graduate, it changes the learning itself. People by nature want to optimise their tasks to get their goal; if the goal is to be as educated on the subject as possible, then you’re motivated across the board. If the goal is to get a job and the degree is a checkbox in the process, or even if you’re going because “that’s what you do”, then the motivation is to pass. There is no bare minimum to learning, there is to graduating.

The goalposts move on difficulty too. Universities are for-profit companies, who sell qualifications. Inevitably the difficulty of the qualification will creep downwards, as the expectation of difficulty from the learner does the same.

I think this has been happening for long enough that in all but the most prestigious or passionate corners of higher education, the staff and teachers also first entered higher education in establishments where everyone was motivated by either employment or profit.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe plenty of people in higher education are motivated by education for the sake of it, but it’s no longer the default expectation.

I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

I’m guilty of using LLMs from time to time, and more guilty of finding it gradually replacing what I used to Google search.

If it’s something that Wikipedia can help me with, that’s still my first port of call, but gradually, for anything problem solving related, I just ask an LLM.

Even a year or two ago, I was googling things with reliable websites for advice at the end, like reddit, but clearly that has decayed as a reputable source for support.

Googling things that require more than just knowledge is difficult now, and asking the sometimes wrong machine is consistently more useful.

I have an ADHD diagnosis, and I do think this is 60% just being better at diagnosing it, but I do also believe ADHD is sort of on the rise.

There is an incredible book called Scattered Minds by Gabor Maté, which is the significant book on ADHD in the same way that The Body Keeps the Score is for trauma, which delves into the potential ADHD causes beyond it being hereditary.

Of course modern dopamine-consumerist culture is part of the problem, but it largely makes ADHD symptoms obvious, and various unmet attention needs in early childhood are significantly more linked to developing ADHD, not to fault the parent or other caregiver who may not have the availability or ability to provide that attention due to modern societal demands. It’s been some years since I read it but I really remember one part clearly; it’s basically impossible to test nature Vs nurture in separated-at-birth twins because the act of separating twins at birth spikes the likelihood of having ADHD so much.

But honestly I think the largest contributor to increased ADHD cases is not that we’re better at diagnosing it, it’s that modern society increasingly warrants its diagnoses. 12000 years ago ADHD traits weren’t a disorder, as much as having different physical strength or height to your peers isn’t. Modern capitalist society demands an efficiency of its workforce and ADHD is an inherently inefficient trait, and therefore suddenly warrants treatment.

Don’t get me wrong, medication is incredible, and has turned days I’ve barely been able to get out of bed into productive days, but that’s still valuing being productive.

But I want maximum acoustics in my bathroom. The world needs to know.

I mean it’s been heavily filtered for the better part of a decade. I never really minded some of the filtering, which at first was just quarantining the far right, but then nsfw subs got hidden, etc. Pretty quickly it was the old standard front page with a bit of chaos.

Also strangely enough, when I first started using Reddit around 2011, everyone just went straight to the frontage for everything, and the defaults in the front page dominated the app, it was probably around 2015-2016 that people actually pivoted to /r/all after the defaults of the front page were bland and stagnant, and from then on, the admins have taken steps to make /r/ all bland and stagnant too.

The only time I ever find myself getting preachy is when people who eat meat talk about halal meat as unethical. I have no idea why it bothers me so deeply when it’s technically fighting for better treatment of animals, but there’s something especially frustrating about the options are:

1. Kill them quickly.

2. Kill them slowly.

3. Don’t kill them.

Honestly if you never go back, not much. It wouldn’t even impact your credit rating, and your country likely doesn’t have the means to enforce it. I could imagine you get harassed by us debt collection agencies but they can’t do anything about it either. If you’re never returning to the US, it’s fine.

You could likely even still holiday in the USA. It won’t impact your visa as it’s not a criminal offence either.

I’m not a lawyer, and could be totally wrong, but I asked my dad who is also not a lawyer.

When I was still using Instagram reels, I was always amazed how quickly the algorithm figured me out. If I hesitated for even a second on a reel, it would amend my next ones immediately. I assume the real trick is comparing it to the average time spent on a reel, everyone spends longer on a wall of text reel, but when I stop on a Linux reel for an extra second, I’m immediately in the 1% for engagement.

I read something years ago about how your phone keyboard tracks your recommended words, it knows if you’re more likely to type apple or Apple, or if you type soup more than average, and any app that gets that data and compares it to the baseline has an instant, in depth profile on you.

As much as the UK is slow to act and the people won’t face full charges, the big name in UK politics that appeared in the files, Peter Mandleson is gone, and his closest political ally Morgan McSweeny is too. These are two of the most loathed corrupt politicians of the current government and their involvement made them too toxic for politics. Prince Andrew had had his royal styles, peerages and titles stripped too.

The UK is a disgusting country and the second most implicated after the USA but it’s response is very different, namely the people involved cannot run the country anymore.

I’ve been super happy with the fairphone 6 after being on various flagship and second grade Samsung phones for a decade.

I’m slightly saddened that my out of the box customisation options are so locked down compared to Samsung, but I’m also aware that the average fairphone buyer is more primed to root and alter their phone due to being on the edges of hobbyist tech. I also miss wireless charging, I’d say I was 50/50 between using wired and wireless charging, with all my cool home automation linked to when I started wireless charging at certain home stations, and wired equivalents just don’t hit the same spot.

That’s literally my only gripes. My battery’s health seems to have performed better in the year since I got it than my Samsung phones did, and everything else is totally comparable. I’m one of the few people who likes Bluetooth headphones so I don’t mind the lack of a headphone jack.

My overly ambitious Minecraft mod I long since gave up with was basically a pollution and yield mod to incentiveise a flow or early manual work > midgame automation > lategame manual work for the best resources.

I do agree entirely. If I could use the internet of 2015 I would, but I can’t do so in a practical way that isn’t much more tedious than asking an LLM.

My options are the least rancid butter of the rancid butter restaurants or I churn my own. I’d love to churn my own and daydream of it, but I am busy, and can barely manage to die on every other hill I’ve chosen.

Compared to crypto and NFTs, there is at least something in this mix, not that I could identify it.

I’ve become increasingly comfortable with LLM usage, to the point that myself from last year would hate me. Compared to projects I used to do with where I’d be deep into Google Reddit and Wikipedia, ChatGPT gives me pretty good answers much more quickly, and far more tailored to my needs.

I’m getting into home labs, and currently everything I have runs on ass old laptops and phones, but I do daydream if the day where I can run an ethically and sustainably trained, LLM myself that compares to current GPT-5 because as much as I hate to say it, it’s really useful to my life to have a sometimes incorrect but overalls knowledgeable voice that’s perpetually ready to support me.

The irony is that I’ll never build a server that can run a local LLM due to the price hikes caused by the technology in the first place.

I heard a theory (that I don’t believe, but still) that Deepseek is only competitive to lock the USA into a false AI race.

I mean as a first language speaker, it is.

As much as I don’t disagree, I think the “Apple is closest to Nazism” comment touches on something different. Other massive American companies have awful practices but they don’t care particularly how their way of making money looks. Apple wields a specific aesthetic power that generally dictates a hegemonic uniformity, that strays the line of being to their detriment at times. I don’t think any other big tech company would care in the same way if not for their desire to copy Apple.

I don’t mind it being deep, just don’t fill it with your actions and deeds. A big part of fun for TTRPGs is ‘play away from the table’, which for the players is typically making art, backstory or builds for current or future characters. Most long backstories I read don’t invalidate a level 1 character but mostly explore values, just as my real life story could be as deep as I choose to write it and I’d not even have the skills to be level 1.

My suggestion is:

• Get people together for a session 0. Only pitch the campaign and tone then, if not construct it collaboratively too.

• Hand out pieces of paper or card face down, have each player take 1, and ensure there is one between each player. These cards say Love, ally, rival, or enemy.

• Explain that players should make an NPC for their backstory that matches this word, and should make a shared NPC with the person next to them based on the card between them.

• Now let them take another card of their choice. They can either make another NPC with this, or use it to make the relationship to one of their shared NPCs asymmetrical.

• They can design their NPCs and backstory now or before session 1, up to them.

Finally, explore what the players can choose to do to contribute between sessions to the game. If they don’t do anything, that’s fine, but they should have a way to meaningful contribute to something. Typically I encourage world building and cultural lore, such as unique foods and why that has a thematic resonance.

This is hard to structure, I had a player who was a former forever DM, who played a knowledgeable librarian in a former monster hunter guild. I asked her to make some monster statblocks, as she’d know them inside and out in character.

My advice to players:

Make your backstory show that your character has done no huge deeds yet, and most importantly, have everything that matters in it revolve around NPCs. Not just is this the best drama, but NPCs can move, join factions, be redeemed, betray you, die and everything else.

• That cost halfling village you design that perfectly exemplifies your character, but will never be seen in this urban campaign halfway across the continent? Make the most important part of it the mayor’s daughter who happens to be your childhood friend.

• The strange necklace that made you stronger but more angry when you wore it? The final time you saw it was when your brother stormed out of your co-owned business after a bitter argument.

• The lord who helped you smuggle your liquor into the city? That’s the same lord that wrongfully imprisoned the player character next to you.

One of my favourite scenes from a campaign came when a player, after spending a session getting the chance to meet with a resistance leader, turned to the others and said “this is my ex-wife”. That whole dynamic was interesting too, as both had come from a warrior culture and initially parted due to neither being the “strong warrior”, now both trying to fight against that same faction a decade later.

My all time favourite NPC was a talented tailor in an urban campaign, who owed one player character a favour and was generally fond of them all. Nothing like the party having a go to guy for fancy or silly outfit amendments.

It’s interesting how Discord absolutely nukes its own trust by pretending to be more than it is. I loathe discord, to the point I’d use a competitor (not teams) just to evade it. I’m sick of finding a hobby group using it as a Frankenstein forum / chat / info hub when it’s only built for chat.

Discord is fine for this use, but I’m getting used to the distrusting it so often that it blends into reasonable use.

That’s still incredibly low, I’d have assumed an enormous increase.