aiislove
3d ago
book a Motel/Cheap Hotel instantly on my phone. Think "Holiday Inn Express" grade of places. Clean enough
Any tips for sussing out hotels without knowing the area? I have stumbled into some horribly seedy hotels lately that all have cheerful 4+ average ratings on every website. It makes me really hate the entire yelp/google maps/whatever system as a whole.
(Staying On food) the reality really is grim for truckers
Have thought about this a lot lately. Idk if it's true in the entire country but at least I can always count on Panda Express and Chipotle in most places I've been for a relatively healthy relatively cheap meal. You're playing Russian roulette with a lot of other places imo and I just don't like regular tier fast food (so expensive now and really unsatiating)
aiislove
3d ago
Cool video, thanks for sharing it. I don't really have much to say about it and I'm not an expert at all, I'm mostly responding to boost engagement and hope someone with some good theories/explanations responds to your video.
To me it does look like a sort of four-pointed beam of light from a spotlight situation because otherwise I don't know how four "crafts" could so quickly move out from a central point like that. I have a hard time making out details in dark videos- did you splice together multiple clips, or is this the same clip slowed down/zoomed in several times? Was it over land or sea?
aiislove
6d ago
ACNH. They seriously need to add some passive income systems in the next game, it is just so tedious digging up fossils and taking them to the museum all the time, and not the kind of tedious that is fun.
Also got through Once Upon a Katamari recently, I have always been a fan of the series. I am really grateful they decided to do an entirely new game, but it has some rough edges. The controls are pretty frustrating (pro tip: turning off rumble/vibration helps A LOT), the music is probably the worst in the series, and there aren't enough eternal levels. I do hope they keep making new Katamari games though.
aiislove
6d ago
I sold a bunch of clothing on Vinted and eBay last year because I didn’t like the idea of some awful thrift store employee reselling it
What? Are they awful because they're scalpers (which you are too now) or are they awful because you wouldn't want someone else making money off of something you donated when you could make the money off it yourself, or are they awful because you see yourself superior in class to thrift store workers?
aiislove
10d ago
Why does the bulk of the evidence of extraterrestrial life that people focus on recently seem to come from the government rather than from scientists? It seems that every time you listen to the latest news on the topic, the government is providing wild claims while mainstream scientists seem to accept or provide nearly nothing as evidence of ET life.
I usually like Ross Douthat but I recently watched his video with Diana Pasulka regarding UFOs and ETs. I am not predisposed to making accusations of government plants everywhere but the interview was so bizarre that it felt like she was just a plant to sow chaos and confusion in the space to me. I have always felt that the term "UAP" was suspicious as it is exactly the sort of SEO hashtag you would create if an entity wanted to track and analyze a certain specific narrative or conversation around a topic that already exists but within a specific context (like government-synthesized data.)
I have always had nightmares about UFOs and found aliens very scary. Have any of you ever seen a UFO or encountered an alien?
aiislove
14d ago
This reads like a feminine fantasy of the male psyche. You hope that the man you admire wants to be an alpha chad. In reality the average man prefers something like 50s white America or postwar Japan, where every man is guaranteed an acceptable female mate. Every man knows that if he lived in Alpha World he's screwed. Every man! Every man who has ever lived has grown up around men older and taller than they are. We have all been cucked by the father, the uncle, the brother, the cousin, the grandfather, and the jock down the street since the day we were born. I have met men a hundred times hotter than I am desperate to be screwed by a man 10 percent hotter than they are. Every day I see extremely hot men who seem completely unaware of their attractiveness with ridiculously ugly women.
In the 50s housewife-for-every-man scenario, all he has to do is behave, fit in, and one woman out there will be fine for him. We all know that as soon as that breaks down we're in a horrible competition with the fittest guy around. Men are obsessed with NOT being alpha chad males: Every day I see dozens of men who would be so hot if only they didn't have some fugly male ponytail or godawful neon polyester workout gear or xy other little signaling device that says to women they're vulnerable, to treat them easily, that they are not a rugged alpha male so please don't expect much, because they're embarrassed of their ranking in the sexual world of competition. Do women really like this? Men want to have their vulnerabilities assuaged by a woman but I think women find this off-putting.
Men relish competition, hierarchy, inequality and status.
As a man, I find competition unfair, hierarchy a hideous evil, inequality morally repugnant and status an empty and sinister mirage. I relish none of these things. If I find myself winning in any of these areas, it boosts my ego, but in an immoral and unethical way.
males cannot ever have true gender-based in-group solidarity
I think it is possible but only in extremely small groups of people, no larger than an extended family. I can accept that my father and uncles are perhaps a better mate for the women in my group, but that is with the understanding that they will step down at some point and I will dominate once their time passes. The complexity of modernity and the city erases the stability of this and erodes in-group solidarity. I suspect men in pre-60s America were able to come to some sort of equilibrium of understanding among each other that echoed this sort of arrangement in modernity but its undoing has been nothing but terrible for men after its interruption.
Monogamy was imposed on young men
I doubt this. I have always imagined it as a gentlemen's arrangement to equally distribute sex to everyone other than the alpha chads. Monogamy of 1950s seemed to result in millions of the offspring of non-chad-alpha men being now sexually outcompeted by minority and immigrant chad offspring in the USA today. Imagine men of any race moving en masse to Japan, or look at mating patterns of Thai nightlife: more dominant men of non-Asian descent outcompete the local 10th generation beta sons. If given a choice, these men should choose the monogamy path for solidarity with each other rather than screwing over the 90+% of men who are not alphas.
aiislove
17d ago
I am confused by the narrative or popular opinion surrounding Elon Musk today. Every time I get on X he has retweeted some inflammatory race baiting thing that gets millions of views (which I generally agree with for context) and yet outside of a handful of "I bought this tesla before he was a nazi" bumper stickers which apparently exist I see little to no pushback on him or what he has done with X. Maybe I'm in a filter bubble and have really managed to mute leftist views in my life but a lot of his views are to me essentially white supremacist by the standards of the overton window of the west and yet he seems to suffer nearly no consequences for it. And at the same time he seems not to be doing anything outside of having too many white kids to raise with sufficient attention and retweeting about how bad things are in the UK or how the west is all going to be South Africa in a few years. Am I wrong? Is he doing anything to try to reverse the great replacement of whites? Has he suffered any major consequences for his beliefs?
aiislove
27d ago
imo, ai generated porn other people created feels very cringe, but ai generated adult imagery I have prompted myself is not cringe at all, to me. I am sure the ai generated adult imagery that I have prompted myself is cringe to other people.
aiislove
27d ago
I scored 64. This is such a crazy way to test face blindness. Once it got to the pixelated faces I did not recognize any of the faces. I have done other face blindness tests online in the past which have been a bit easier to me but I scored about the same in relation to the test's "average." I also know that I am significantly more face blind toward women than men: when I am meeting a bunch of new people in a new class, for example, it takes me a really long time to memorize the names of females especially. I do think I am relatively face blind though, recently I made the mistake of introducing myself to someone I had just met 5 minutes prior (granted it was in an overwhelming social situation where I'm usually anxious, but my friend and the person I did this to were both a bit annoyed with me.)
aiislove
27d ago
He just did a long as hell Soft White Underbelly video too. (yes the channel which usually interviews prostitutes and child abuse victims and whatever). I watched the whole thing. He's kind of flat and creepy like a lot of recovered drug addicts. I'm surprised he's a democrat. His paintings are bad enough that they trigger a Harrison Bergeron response in my brain.
aiislove
27d ago
The movie is very pretty, specially compared to the original series. This is to be expected; the animation of a 1979 TV show cannot possibly compete with the animation of a 2025 theatrical film. The colors are vibrant, with red and blue uniforms popping out of the screen.
I haven't watched the Netflix adaptation but I just watched the trailer and the OP sequence for it and I have to disagree. I am a huge fan of 70s anime (shoujo especially) and think the art style in the original version is a million times more attractive and effective than the art style of the new version. The 70s artists communicate so much in their sparseness and simplicity. The new version overloads you with a maximalist scrapbook aesthetic that looks very like, illustrator vector frutiger metro but sort of adapted to the 2020s. I mean the techniques of reproduction (the camera work or whatever process is used to convert the illustrations to a final image) has obviously "technically improved" but the charm and soul of the original is missing. It is similar to how AI generation or smartphone cameras continue to improve in clarity and definition but degrade in terms of soul and art and the sort of in between imprecision of the act of creation. The color grading also seems to lack cohesion in the new version compared to the original anime. And really I don't mean to disrespect the artists working today and it's good that they have careers at all but the taste to me is just a world apart from the taste of the 70s illustrators and animators.
aiislove
30d ago
This status-and-love-seeking behavior from full grown adults seems increasingly cringe to me the older I get. I can't help but imagine it's downstream of feeling unloved by the parent as a child and they are desperate to seek love from the world instead. This hit me so hard a few years ago when I met up with a few friends while I was in another country and they insisted that everywhere we eat was statusmaxxing or whatever, the type of place you could brag about going, even to the extent that they wanted to walk out of a place run by a sweet old man when they deemed the food subpar. This stems from insecurity and once you grow out of it it's horrible to see in other people. The full grown adult who wants a golden child actor or a star is doing something so horrible and so tacky and I really doubt most of them are happy at the end of it. Britney's parents raised a global superstar and they probably spend every night wishing she was bringing in more money instead of dancing half naked on instagram. I don't sympathize with the parents.
aiislove
1mo ago
Have been to South Korea a handful of times, they learn American english there, everyone around 35 or so and younger speaks really good english in my experience. Older people may not know it at all though. I'm surprised you find Koreans hard to understand.
aiislove
1mo ago
I find strong Scandinavian accents irritating in their dullness and weirdly Indian rhythm. Though I will say that many Scandinavian people speak really good english without much accent at all so I don't mind those speakers. Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian are pretty languages to my ear.
French and European Spanish speakers are also a bit monotonous to me, the German accent is fine but their speech patterns are usually too pedantic for my tastes
Certain overly nasal midwestern accents are irritating to me and east coast accents sound aggressive and unpleasant. AAVE can be charming but is grating in my internal monologue.
aiislove
1mo ago
Ehhhh it's kind of a mess all the way around. There are a handful of companies like Levi's which are grandfathered in and have a very specific niche that they do well enough that they are hard to mess up and I would describe as well run, though even those have rough patches.
Luxury brands are currently going through a huge problem where they've inflated prices outside of the reach of aspirational shoppers (basically everyone but the very rich) with zero increase in the quality of the goods they are selling- this is the case right now with every brand in the category from Chanel to the LVMH labels to McQueen. I believe I just read in the Business of Fashion that the luxury market (as in the number of buyers consuming luxury goods) has shrunk like 40 percent in the past 5 years. Of course before this LVMH for example was doing great for over a decade so things are cyclical and to some extent outside the control of management but the mishandling of the price point and quality control has been ridiculous and unnecessary and avoidable IMO.
Fashion management is also very prone to misunderstanding the customer's needs or desires, doing a poor job of matching expectation with product selection, they tend to fall for flavor of the day gimmicks that often fail, there is often friction between the business and creative sides of the businesses, and so on
aiislove
1mo ago
Great post, thank you for sharing.
I have written a lot about this before but the trajectory of a nation and how we compare with our parents' and grandparents' generations is massive for our own self esteem and the vibe of a society. America is in a tough place because we're so obviously doing worse than my grandparents' generation which has largely died out about ten years ago and there's little hope among all classes that they'll be able to afford a better life than their parents or grandparents did. I suspect the opposite is true in China and that accounts for the very different vibe and outlook between the two countries right now.
aiislove
1mo ago
I grew up my whole life in the midwest and never visited the west coast until a few years ago and got to visit the Bay Area for the first time about a year ago. I got the sense that it has declined in recent years while I was there and I imagine it's declined in the same way that other American cities have. But I also found the city really beautiful with incredible weather and still a million times better than anything on the east coast, midwest or the south. Californians love to complain about traffic and homelessness and a handful of other things but frankly they are all so much worse in Baltimore or Detroit or even Cleveland or Pittsburgh. All the billionaires leaving California seem insane to me, the weather and landscape of CA are unreal, the rest of the country is unbearably hot and/or humid for at least half of the year and/or suffers from terrible cold and depressing winters etc etc etc
Anyway besides all that I've been all over the world and coastal California from SD to SF is genuinely the best place to live imo. Granted it is expensive (still less expensive than Hawaii and a handful of other places) and, perhaps, the dense majority of people there are left leaning, though I find them less irritating than their east coast counterparts, and really quite easy to avoid if I just socialize with the Mexicans and non whitewashed Asians instead
I'm sure it's difficult and annoying to see your city decline and perhaps I'm naive and just haven't spent enough time in the area but I do think the complaints are overblown or maybe I just don't have the perspective to know what I'm missing but I've only had good experiences there
aiislove
1mo ago
Yup there have been a handful of services with this model over the years, they never seem to catch on. Actually fashion startups with sort of gimmicky business strategies (rent the runway type things for example) almost never work out, I suspect investors are not usually the type of people to understand the fashion industry, and fashion companies are notoriously poorly managed in general
aiislove
1mo ago
Yeah don't worry about how autistic it is, there is so much crap in the world that when you find the perfect thing just get tons of it. I have 3 pairs of my favorite pants which were a random seasonal piece from Express, I'm going to be annoyed if I can't find a 4th pair since I've already worn through the first two
aiislove
1mo ago
At first I thought you were asking how many of the clothes you try on work out for you and you buy them, which my answer was going to be like 10 percent, but then I re-read your question and realized you're asking what ends up working for you after you take it home.
In that case it's probably around 75% for me. I try to be extremely picky in what I purchase because I hate wasting money on stuff that doesn't work out. The biggest culprits of things not working is stuff shrinking after the first wash and the irritation of having a slightly inferior product compared to what I already own and I can't stand to trade down when I have something better on hand. Also I have a habit of thinking something looks good in the mirror without realizing it's uncomfortable as hell which I can't unnotice the first time I try to actually wear it
For reference I have a degree in fashion design and shop all the time and this is still a terrible problem.
If I find something I like from a brand that makes the same things all the time (like MUJI, Uniqlo or LA Apparel) I will happily buy multiples of the same style in different or same colors which helps a ton but is incredibly irritating when they change things or discontinue items and you have to start all over
aiislove
1mo ago
Would recommend checking out recraft.ai
aiislove
1mo ago
Oh, good timing, I just crossed a very large milestone in my portfolio today. A few questions:
- What do you think the chances are that we are currently in a large (AI related or not AI related) bubble that will pop? It seems like the money printing of the past few years has massive upward pressure on the stock market so I don't know how to unpick the two.
- I have always been a saver and live fairly frugally. But I am itching to increase my standard of living with some of my invested money. At what number in USD would you personally be comfortable beginning to draw down, say, 4% of your portfolio a year to increase your standard of living sustainably?
- It seems like I am outpacing the rate of inflation with my investments. For example I have doubled my money in 4 years, whereas I am not paying nearly 2 times as much for gas or groceries or restaurants compared with 2022. And it seems like inflation is much slower at the lower end of prices- for example goods at thrift stores or antique stores seem to be retaining low prices while things like houses and fine art are exploding in valuation. Do you think it's likely to stay this way in the US for a while or do you think the inflation will be coming for lower priced goods as well?
- Do you think it's too late to buy bitcoin or is it still wise to buy it today? I have only like $2000 worth of bitcoin because I never found it very appealing or interesting but I can see its use in hedging against fiat currency debasement and many people smarter and richer than me are still interested in its success.
- The older I get, the more I have access to but the less I want. I have already satisfied most of my needs and desires from my youth. How do I generate more desire within myself as I grow older? (I am in my mid thirties if that is relevant.)
aiislove
1mo ago
(note that everyone besides sub-Saharan-Africans basically descends from one lineage of Africans that crossed into Arabia)
From what I understand there were two separate migrations out of sub-Saharan Africa, the earlier of which resulted in East Asian and Austronesian people and the latter of which resulted in European people. I don't have the time right now to do the sketchy google searches to back up my claims but if you google "multiple human migrations out of Africa" you'll see that there's evidence for this (or at least for more than one out of Africa migration.)
Re-reading your claim I suppose it's possible that the two migrations derived from the Arabian population you refer to rather than Africa, I don't know
aiislove
2mo ago
As a designer and a creator and aesthetic person I would argue that "the act of expression" is nowhere near 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work. This is a really postmodern notion, if you're someone who like weeps at Cy Twombly or whatever then sure I guess that's what you think. But the technical detail of say, JC Leyendecker or Maxfield Parrish to me is easily 90% of the value of their work. I actually agree with you on the rest of what you're saying but I think you are devaluing broadly the value and worth of the technicality of craft or whatever which the AI can do in, on average, 90% of the same quality that a talented human can do. The 10 percent of expression in the end is crucial as I tried to lay out but it's not 100 percent of what matters.
Gemini's voice chat has been out for a while (a few months at least) and I will use it occasionally. The other day I drove to a random historic town and didn't feel like reading so I just pulled it up to ask it about the town I was in and specific things I'm interested in (asking about the architecture and for unusual facts and so on.) It did an ok job but was a bit repetitive and didn't have a super deep understanding of the town. I wanted to keep talking to it but I got back into my car and when it went to the car's speakers, it would begin to talk and then apparently hear itself and immediately stop talking, and then just loop that over and over. I hope they fix that soon.
When they first came out with it I would use it to practice German and then Spanish and then Japanese all in the same conversation so that was fun. It was pretty good at telling me mistakes I made in a constructive way.
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