in the Deleted Items folder. “Delete” just moves the email there. At my company anything older than a month in Deleted Items gets actually deleted. But more importantly if you just delete it, maybe nobody knows it’s’ there. If you report it the outlook team can delete it from the servers.

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 other 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. The end state of that is all art is generated by LLMs and nothing new is ever created.

I could go on, but in short the drawbacks greatly outweigh the advantages. Yes, you can get quick answers to questions, but the net outcome on people and society is massive damage.

Okay, if you can explain to me in detail how four dimensional topology is going to be important to me while I’m stocking the shelves of your grocery store, I’ll give you an answer.

I always just use a cold stick of butter like a crayon. Grab the hot toast and wipe the butter on it straight from the stick. Butter knives are only for room temperature butter.

I’m 57 and I started running this year. Overtraining is the biggest issue for me. I’m up to about three miles maybe four times per week, but most of those miles are zone 2 HR, really slow and easy runs. On the weekend I’ll do a tempo run, or intervals, alternately. If I maintain that schedule for more than a month or so I end up a little more sore every time I go running and my time starts to drop. So I have to take most of the week off every four or six weeks. I also take a lot of supplements; creatine, L-carnitine, Beta-Alanine, protein, etc. They help. I feel I can exert myself more since I started taking them. I also take EFAs for joint health, collagen for connective tissue recovery, and sometimes MSM, though evidence on that one is spotty.

“Now this, bhikkhus, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

He didn’t say anything specifically about the ethics of human reproduction. He taught that craving sense pleasures leads to suffering. The monks that followed him were celibate. But he knew few would follow that path. So he taught a simplified code of ethics for householders (don’t kill, don’t lie, etc.) and assumed that there would always be people who want to make more people. Rebirth was an important part of his doctrine. The volitional actions you perform in life create karma which then, after your death, produces another birth. Escaping the cycle of karma and rebirth by letting go of the concept of self, of the idea of me and mine, was the ultimate goal of his path. And it’s only possible to get there in a human body. So in that sense he was not an anti-natalist.

Why live? What’s the meaning of life? What’s the purpose of life? I hope I don’t have to explain that people have been asking this question since we first were able to form words and start thinking. You’re going to get as many different opinions to answer this question as there are people to write a response. You could spend a lifetime studying philosophy and not find a definitive answer. And in the end you just have to decide for yourself which answer most speaks to you. Are you atheist, materialist, spiritual, philosophical? Take your pick.

Personally, I like Buddhist philosophy for these kinds of questions. And I suspect the Buddha would say that we are here because of craving for sense pleasures, craving for existence, and ignorance of our true nature and the true nature of reality. We live because we want to exist, we want to have experiences and feel the things that are available to us as living beings. Whether it’s food or sex or money or adventure or admiration or love we feel like getting the things we want will make us happy. The flip side of craving is aversion, where we feel like achieving separation from those things that are unpleasant will make us happy.

Volumes have been written about this and it’s impossible to summarize well in a single post. But if it speaks to you there’s a lot more to say about it.