I don’t see how even the way Twitter does it is any worse than not having such system at all.

I’ve gotten this only a handful of times and simply refreshing my VPN has solved it every time.

Why ride when you can drive?

The use of it in the US was banned only last year and I’m not aware of there having been such movement.

The use of asbestos in the US was only banned in 2024.

I’ve been saying this for a long time. If a robot / AI can do your job just as well as you can if not even better then it probably should. For example, I don’t think we should get rid of combine harvesters simply because scything employs more people.

I’m curious to hear your reasoning that makes you so confidently suggest we’ll never reach AGI that is consciouss?

I think this is great. One of the main reasons I’ve been paying for the subscription is the limited memory of the free version. Now, the more I use it, the more it remembers about me and references things I’ve mentioned in past conversations. Sure, there are potential privacy concerns, but the same goes for commenting on Lemmy - I don’t tell ChatGPT anything I wouldn’t be comfortable sharing here.

It indeed is often the same 5 - 8 posts because everything else gets hidden by politics word filters.

I blocked all .ml communities so this problem no longer affects me

This has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. Russia has been drafting people for military service twice a year for decades. This is how countries with conscription systems work. Finland does the same thing.

I’ve never seen the point of a folding phone other than as a gimmick you show off to your friends.

Not if - when.

I’m getting the sense here that you’re placing most - if not all - of the blame on LLMs, but that’s probably not what you actually think. I’m sure you’d agree there are other factors at play too, right? One theory that comes to mind is that the people you’re describing probably spend a lot of time debating online and are constantly exposed to bad-faith arguments, personal attacks, people talking past each other, and dunking - basically everything we established is wrong with social media discourse. As a result, they’ve developed a really low tolerance for it, and the moment someone starts making noises sounding even remotely like those negative encounters, they automatically label them as “one of them” and switch into lawyer mode - defending their worldview against claims that aren’t even being made.

That said, since we’re talking about your friends and not just some random person online, I think an even more likely explanation is that you’ve simply grown apart. When people close to you start talking to you in the way you described, it often means they just don’t care the way they used to. Of course, it’s also possible that you’re coming across as kind of a prick and they’re reacting to that - but I’m not sensing any of that here, so I doubt that’s the case.

I don’t know what else you’ve been up to over the past few years, but I’m wondering if you’ve been on some kind of personal development journey - because I definitely have, and I’m not the same person I was when I met my friends either. A lot of the things they may have liked about me back then have since changed, and maybe they like me less now because of it. But guess what? I like me more. If the choice is to either keep moving forward and risk losing some friends, or regress just to keep them around, then I’ll take being alone. Chris Williamson calls this the “Lonely Chapter” - you’re different enough that you no longer fit in with your old group, but not yet far enough along to have found the new one.

I don’t personally feel like this applies to people who know me in real life, even when we’re just chatting over text. If the tone comes off wrong, I know they’re not trying to hurt my feelings. People don’t talk to someone they know the same way they talk to strangers online - and they’re not making wild assumptions about me either, because they already know who I am.

Also, I’m not exactly talking about tone per se. While written text can certainly have a tone, a lot of it is projected by the reader. I’m sure some of my writing might come across as hostile or cold too, but that’s not how it sounds in my head when I’m writing it. What I’m really complaining about - something real people often do and AI doesn’t - is the intentional nastiness. They intend to be mean, snarky, and dismissive. Often, they’re not even really talking to me. They know there’s an audience, and they care more about how that audience reacts. Even when they disagree, they rarely put any real effort into trying to change the other person’s mind. They’re just throwing stones. They consider an argument won when their comment calling the other person a bigot got 25 upvotes.

In my case, the main issue with talking to my friends compared to ChatGPT is that most of them have completely different interests, so there’s just not much to talk about. But with ChatGPT, it doesn’t matter what I want to discuss - it always acts interested and asks follow-up questions.

How do you even have a conversation without quitting in frustration from it’s obviously robotic answers?

Talking with actual people online isn’t much better. ChatGPT might sound robotic, but it’s extremely polite, actually reads what you say, and responds to it. It doesn’t jump to hasty, unfounded conclusions about you based on tiny bits of information you reveal. When you’re wrong, it just tells you what you’re wrong about - it doesn’t call you an idiot and tell you to go read more. Even in touchy discussions, it stays calm and measured, rather than getting overwhelmed with emotion, which becomes painfully obvious in how people respond. The experience of having difficult conversations online is often the exact opposite. A huge number of people on message boards are outright awful to those they disagree with.

Here’s a good example of the kind of angry, hateful message you’ll never get from ChatGPT - and honestly, I’d take a robotic response over that any day.

I think these people were already crazy if they’re willing to let a machine shovel garbage into their mouths blindly. Fucking mindless zombies eating up whatever is big and trendy.

That explains the downvotes - infants!

Should I have? Is this an autistic thing to wonder?

Earth is by far the most complex thing in the entire known universe. I don’t know how you expect the events here to be clear or simple.

What about just a nipple?

[EDIT] I audibly laughed, btw. Doesn’t happen to me very often, so thanks for that.