All humans become nothingness when they die.

The Buddhist idea of karma is that it is the accumulation of your cravings and choices over your lifetime(s) and isn’t “you” per se. What we think of as our self ceases to exist at death, and our karma is the condition/cause for another birth. So in that view of rebirth you are defining the conditions for another life by your choices and actions, but that life isn’t you. Sounds like karma could still apply in the Death Note universe.

It’s already been made. We just can’t have it here in the US because it would kill our domestic auto makers. Can’t have competition if you’re not competitive, right?

I think this is the press release for the new analysis they are referring to. It’s titled Majority of Americans Can’t Achieve a Minimal Quality of Life, According to New Ludwig Institute Research. You can find “bottom 60%” in the fourth paragraph

In 2023, the bottom 60% of households earned just 22.1% of all disposable income but needed 39% to meet MQL.

Cry. We get trained early to hold it in. Whether it’s a good intentioned “please don’t cry” or a heartless “stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about”, we learn when we’re young that it’s not okay to let out our emotions. But sadness passes in tears. My wife of 25 years died less than two months ago. I have good support from people who understand letting out your emotions and I’ve been crying hard almost every day since then. I’m mostly past the acute grief now. I’m getting out and doing things with people, spending time with friends. I still have moments where I see something of hers and have to take a moment to cry. But I’m up and living my life.

So be gentle with yourself. Hold space for your sadness and let the tears come. It’s the only way I know of to pass through it.

Pro:

• It’s good at explaining things. You have a question about coding, geography, or most anything you could answer with a thorough internet search and enough time to sift through the results, it’ll give you an answer immediately that’s tailored specifically to your question.

Con:

• Answers are sometimes subtly wrong in a way that’s hard to pick out unless you already know the answer or are already an expert. It’s like having a really smart uncle who likes to prank you every few times he talks to you.

Pro:

• It can generate any text you ask for. A love letter to your girlfriend, an application for a job, an article to post on the internet. Instead of spending hours thinking about something, learning something, and sharing your opinion on it, it can just give you polished text that makes it look like you have a smart take and an opinion.

Con:

• People who use it for this are getting dumber. It’s growing near impossible to teach kids in school because they can just Chat GPT a paper on the Great Gatsby in seconds. All they end up learning is how to ask an LLM to give them an opinion. This is also producing a tidal wave of slop in every outlet that used to depend on human creativity. Open source coding, books, news, online articles, and many others arenas used to take effort to generate something, and there are systems, businesses, and processes built on the assumption that a human is generating content. Since that’s no longer true these systems are breaking down.

Another Con: It’s fucking up the economy, the job market, consuming absurd amounts of energy, and sucking up the production of computer components.

Pro:

• It allows anybody to generate art in almost any style with very little effort. You can produce the picture you want in the style you like in moments.

Con:

• The reason it can do this is the AI companies stole and used art generated by real people in the training data for their LLMs. So now if you want a cartoon in the style of your favorite artist you don’t even have to ask them to make something for you. You just ask an LLM. Obviously, this is killing the goose that laid the golden egg. Business for artists dwindles and they struggle more and more to live.