Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said.

The ones I hate the most are the ones that meticulously teach you “press A to jump!” (Cool thanks, yeah, I’ve been playing video games since Super Mario Bros, I’m pretty good on the basics) but then you get out of the tutorial and play for an hour or two and realize that you’ve never once had to jump, but that complicated combo that they didn’t even allude to in the tutorial is for some reason the core game mechanic.

A couple people have told me that they are just feeling burnt out/depressed/etc

That’s legit. A lot of people are. And when they are, they pull back, which leads to them getting even more depressed. It’s a pretty terrible cycle.

And it really is happening everywhere. There have been a lot of jokes (and rightly so) about the “male loneliness epidemic,” but while it isn’t male-exclusive and it isn’t sexual, there is indeed a loneliness epidemic. Some of it happens because online/social media/parasocial relationships feel like they fill that gap without actually doing so. But it becomes an epidemic because the diminished socialization with one person causes them to socialize less with their own friends, and it spreads like a contagion from there.

I’ve basically just stopped reaching out to anyone at this point.

I’ve talked about this with other people a lot, too, as I’ve gone through my 30s (I turned 40 this year): it really honestly always feels like “I’m the only one reaching out.” Like, it tends to feel that way to everyone I talk to, even the people to whom I feel like I’m the only one reaching out myself.

I think that’s partially for the same reason that teachers say they’re the ones doing all the work to grade students’ homework: teachers have to grade 30 assignments per class, whereas from the students’ perspective it’s “only one assignment, how hard can it be?” Meanwhile, the students themselves have multiple assignments from multiple classes to handle. In the context of this conversation, realize that while the individual touchpoints with a specific person feels like “just one friendship,” they’re trying to maintain several relationships, too. So you get the divided attention of all of your friends, because they’re dividing their attention across of all of their friends, just like you are. So you all feel like you’re shouting into the void, and you all pull back.

But it’s also partially because, in any friend group, the “squeaky wheel gets the grease.” You don’t tend to see a whole lot of outpouring of affection and care over people except when they’re in a dire situation. So if you seem outwardly fine, you might not get much in the way of proactive outreach.

Both of those factors get amplified significantly in the presence of (1) ADHD (I can literally just forget about contacting my friends for weeks) and (2) introversion (if you’re friends with a lot of introverts, they may find that just having your number in their phone feels like a strong friendship and feel no real need to reach out).

This imbalance shows up in a lot of peoples’ friendships. Sometimes it just means that one person is the “planner” of the group and just has to bring everyone else together. That’s an asymmetric friendship in a way, but if that person’s ok with it, then it’s fine. It doesn’t mean that they’re any less loved. That takes communication, and sometimes you just need to start up that conversation.

But it can also mean that you need to find new friends because you no longer fit with your old ones. And that’s also ok! As you grow up and discover what you need, you realize what you’re looking for.

Outside of my work, literally the only people I talk to are my parents, sister, and my girlfriend.

I would recommend joining a club or society or something. Not like a guild, but something that forces a little bit of conversation as a factor of its existence. RPG groups are great for this. If you have a background with a religious group and you’re still on good terms with it, maybe show up to some services. Service groups also can be great for this. You can even tag along with your sister or your girlfriend to one of her groups. Just try to find a way to get that socialization on the calendar so that it happens regularly and you can count on it.

Another option, though this is situational, can be to start a group thread. There’s less weight and difficulty around replying in a group thread, and it can be a place to just send memes or thoughts or pictures of a cool leaf you saw. Be honest and upfront that you want to socialize with people more, and that can end up being helpful. The reason this is situational is that it can help a distantly connected friend group feel more immediate, but it can’t really create a friend group that doesn’t already exist.

I used to have at least 10 people who I could call on a moments notice and all of those people are gone.

If those were people you only talked to at a moment’s notice, that might be the problem. It’s the scheduled, regular interaction that you both need in order to maintain the friendship.

Adult friendships are hard. And it’s a pretty safe bet that the answer to almost any friendship question you have that starts with “am I the only one who…” is almost certainly “no.”

Even if the Windows voice experience put Jarvis to shame, I wouldn’t be interested. I don’t want to use voice control on my computer. Just about the only time I actually need voice control are when I’m far away or my hands are busy; so it’s nice for turning lights on and off when I have my hands full, or controlling timers when I’m cooking, or turning music on without getting up from the couch. Sometimes I’ll use voice-to-text if I have a lot to say or need to think it through. But I almost never want voice control (even if it were completely perfect, which it is not!) for the same reason that I listen to podcasts on earbuds: I don’t want to bother other people! Certainly not while I’m working, and definitely not when it’s liable to take agentic actions for me.

Buttons, knobs, levers, sliders, keys—all of those are better than voice control 999 times out of 1000. I don’t even like touch screens that much, and I’d prefer them over voice control.

The Microsoft executives inhabit a different reality than I do.

Oh man, the Ouya. That’s a blast from the past. Play mobile games on your TV using a controller made out of cardboard and balsa wood and sized for a Roswell alien. Good times.

No, they’re saying that some hardware manufacturers report 80% as 100% (as you noted) while others do not. Just like some manufacturers report 5% as 5% while others report 10% as 5% with the realization that most people misjudge when they’ll be able to charge.

Well, the market will definitely contract. I would say at least one of the big AI players will go out of business or be acquired by a competitor over the next few years, and at least one of the big tech corps will sunset their AI model over that timescale as well. Nvidia stock is going to take a steep nosedive. I think the future for consumer AI is mostly in small, quick models; except for in research and data analysis, where just a few big players will be able to provide the services that most uses require.

They currently have enough money to keep going for a while if they play their cards right, but once investors realize that the endgame doesn’t have much to offer them, the money will stop flowing.

I’m probably going to be allowing most of my streaming subscriptions to lapse over the next year or two. Gonna stick with Dropout and PBS, but that might be all.

Once the bubble pops, we can go back to letting AI do what it’s actually good at—pattern recognition, summarization, translation, natural language processing—and stop trying to shoehorn it into every single thing.

Interesting. Some of them are just dip switches, too. I hadn’t heard about needing a cable, that’s an interesting wrinkle.

I don’t have any specific recommendations for you, but I will say that

• pretty much every modern Chromebook will be able to have Linux installed over ChromeOS. You might have to open it up and remove a write-protect screw.

• Linux is a surprisingly good platform for games these days, actually. Steam has done a lot of work to get it there.

• If you’re wanting lightweight specs, you’re probably going to find the best bang for your buck in an old Chromebook; however, I don’t know if you’ll see as many of those coming on the market, and you’ll want to watch out for old school devices. Those things get worked over pretty hard.

I think it’s the fact that he has a recognizable username that gives me pause on that, though. For a lot of people, his position is naturally going to afford him some level of deference and authority.

If the people making decisions spent time as normal editors anonymously, I agree definitely that that would be a good way to get to know the community more.

Looks to me like that link is broken. Must be something going on.

Honestly I kinda feel like “Multiple governments, NGOs, and legal bodies have described or rejected the characterization of Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide” sounds more damning than just “Israel perpetrated a genocide.”

Still, Jimbo, you should probably stay out of this. Wikipedia’s whole thing is that no one person is in charge.

C. G. P. Grey’s “Rules for Rulers” is illuminating on that front, but I don’t think you mean soft power. I think you mean gangsters. And I think that most US presidents avoid such a thing by virtue of being the C in C of the biggest military on the planet. Though maybe they get a little bit of it from the Pentagon, I dunno.

I’ve been in a lot of blue collar environments in a previous career, and this is definitely something that happens. It’s not normative, but you’ll usually find a few construction companies or factories or warehouses in an area that employ a much more equally-gendered workforce.

I get why you say that, but I disagree.

Fred Rogers was Ted Lasso, from what I’ve heard. Relentlessly encouraging, always on-mission, no dark side.

Ooh, you are in for a treat my friend. Parks and Recreation is a modern classic.

The first season is a bit rough. But once Adam Scott joins the cast, it becomes legendary.

“Because he can?”

You see, growing up in white conservative christian america, my brain has this old deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or who have different priorities in life than me and think of how stupid/worthless that makes them.

It’s so interesting to see how other people’s experiences of white conservative Christian America can be so different from mine. I have this deep conditioning to see people who are different looking or have different priorities and be curious about their choices and experiences, specifically because of my upbringing in a little country church.

In fact, I remember being cautioned to pull back on the reins a bit when I was in my “angry conservative” stage in college—back during W’s first term, when I was super far right for the time but still had beliefs that would make me a “radical lib’rul” today. Some of the people I went to church with were like, “yeah, I can see that your heart is in the right place, but you’re kinda over the top about this and this.” Most of what brought me out of that phase was meeting people who were different from me, but another part was Christian people I trusted saying, “that’s too much.”

That’s part of why I had so much cognitive dissonance when Christians started supporting Trump; it felt out of step with everything we had ever been taught as children, and even as young adults.

I’ve come to terms with the fact that I (and my parents, more recently) just aren’t going to be welcomed back into that community again, because it has gone so deeply maga. But it wasn’t like that when I was a kid.

their stupidity isn’t gonna frustrate me into being like them again.

That’s a really great way to say it. I feel that way myself, though I couldn’t put it into words.