Comment by ManlyBread
3 days ago
>AI
I'm apathetic. It's there, it's a tool.
>international conflicts
I am fortunate enough to not live in the countries mentioned. I am close to Ukraine so this one is sort-of important to me in terms that I don't want Russia to win, but at the same time there's no point in following the news closely. If something big happens I will most definitively hear about it whether I'd like it or not.
>The US / Europe
Nothing I can do about any of that so no reason to get emotional. The most I can do as an European is to vote. Anything else is entirely out of my control unless I'd dedicate my entire free time and career to change things and I am completely uninterested in doing that.
>the stock market
Invest in index funds and forget it exists. If even that's too much for you then you then just put the money in the deposit. Interacting with the stock market is entirely optional.
>tech sucks
Always sucked. If you don't believe me feel free to go back to any underpowered machine of your choice and use it as a daily driver for a while. Dealing with any tasks on an old PC with a single core processor and 5400 rpm hard drive is pure agony compared to what we have right now.
>How are you all staying sane?
Stop being terminally online and go do something you actually enjoy. Most of the stuff you mentioned doesn't even actually affect you in the slightest.
All of the above.
Stop reading the news. It makes you depressed or angry. Go hiking. Walk on the beach. Play with a dog or your children. Climb a tree.
Leave the slave slab phone at home, or delete every news and social app. Do not browse the web. Take a book and read.
It will be hard at first. Then it gets easier. Best thing I ever did.
Reminder. What passes for news today wouldn’t have registered for most people 100 years ago.
Seconding this. I only heard about Iran bombing 23 hours after it happened. I was playing SimCity 2013 with my 7yo. I’m reading older books, playing older games, exercising, and keeping a loose eye on AI so I don’t fall too far behind, but I always wait about two months before adopting anything new (like Claude Code, new tools, etc.). I know that’s pretty superficial, but the goal is staying sane, right?
Other people did the same as you and are now stranded halfway around the world waiting for flights.
I get the gist of it but I think being informed is useful. The best way is having access to quality news with a balance. It does not need to be constant outrage.
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> Reminder. What passes for news today wouldn’t have registered for most people 100 years ago.
This is a great point.
> Reminder. What passes for news today wouldn’t have registered for most people 100 years ago.
Up to a point. There are some things that should not be ignored, e.g., "Trump says he's not mulling a draft executive order to seize control over elections":
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-hes-not-mul...
"Trump, seeking executive power over elections, is urged to declare emergency":
* https://archive.is/https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2...
> should not be ignored, e.g., "Trump says he's not mulling ...
The prior news that "sources close to people who say they hear from a guy who went to school with someone who said ... that trump said he was mulling thinking about drafting an executive order ..." should be ignored, the follow up should be ignored and the inevitable follow to the follow up should also be ignored.
These are attention seeking outbursts at best, clickbait, lies and propaganda at worst.
There's been a couple of posts recently that have been great and I apologize about not having links, but one was about talking to strangers and the other was about helping others. For me, it's amazing how helping someone out or taking with a stranger can revitalize my look on life and everything going on in the world. It reminds me that there's good in this life and the world.
In believe this was the talking to strangers article. I had opened the tab, but hadn’t read it yet.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/feb/24/strange...
Can you link to the one about helping others please?
Going back to some old machines with this hardware and they feel rapid compared to now. Instant UI response
That's because you're more likely than not using the best (or close to the best) hardware that generation had to offer. Try using a mid-end or a low-end machine and doing more than one thing at a time, it gets ugly real quick.
>AI I'm apathetic. It's there, it's a tool.
You won't feel that way in the near future.
Is it the same future where I sent crypto from my no-code app to buy a NFT to use in my Metaverse apartment that I interact with through VR?
This is a really bad take (and bad faith) because all the failed tech initiatives you mentioned barely had any adoption whereas LLM based AI tools are used by a billion people a week.
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I’ve been hearing this for 3 years now. Exactly how long do you want people to live in fear?
This feels like Elon’s FSD predictions. In 2013 he claimed 90% of the miles would be driven autonomously by 2016. It’s now 2026… 10 years after the prediction was supposed to come true and we’re still waiting.
If you're sure of this, then what actions have you taken to shield yourself and/or profit from this? If I were a true believer that AI was going to takeover, I'd be allocating a large part of my portfolio into AI companies (hardware & software) along with learning a trade that's relatively safe, like cleaning septic tanks or construction.
Do you really believe in the narrative you're pushing?
> allocating a large part of my portfolio into AI companies
Even if you were certain that AI would take over virtually everything, the problem is deciding which AI companies to invest in. Thinking back to 1996, just when this new thing called "the web" was gaining tracking and assuming you were certain it was going to be huge, what companies would be the best investment? A lot of the companies doing web stuff went nowhere. Many of the biggest successes didn't even exist in 1996. It's not obvious which (if any) AI companies are worth investing in even if you're positive that AI is the future; the current companies might be massively overvalued; the best AI companies might not even exist yet.
I feel broadly the same as the above, except on the apathy towards Ukraine.
Ukraine is standing because they took action.
Something that helps me keep my sanity and dignity is by materially supporting Ukrainian soldiers. I will never regret having stood on the right side of history on this.
If anyone wants to contribute but you aren't sure how, I'm happy to help. Email is in the profile.
> Always sucked. If you don't believe me feel free to go back to any underpowered machine of your choice and use it as a daily driver for a while.
No, tech didn't always suck. Sure, it was slower hardware. But it was empowering hardware. You owned it, it served only you, didn't spy on you and you could make it do whatever you desired.
Now it's mostly walled corporate gardens, you are the product, every gadget spies on you and pushes advertising at you. On some phones you can't even choose what to run. Every mouse click and finger movement is tracked and phoned to the corportate overlords.
So yes, tech mostly sucks now but it wasn't the case earlier.
You can buy the same hardware today and do whatever you want with it.
Not really. Sure you can find something on ebay but some parts can be hard to find (I collect old SPARC machines).
More importantly, you can't go back to the time where you could interact with the world with the older machines. My SPARCstation10 would run a web browser marvelously in 1993, but that combination isn't going to browse any website today.
Yes but holy shit I can describe what I want and AI writes the code for me and then I describe the bug, talking to my phone, doing speech-to-text, and the computer fixes the problem for me! And you can be negative and dystopian about it and get hella depressed, or you can just choose not to be. Yeah, I get the Sunday scaries and freak out every so often, but are you gonna let that take you down or are you gonna do something about it?
I feel like I could've wrote this word-for-word.
I'm Pierre Menard