Really, I encourage you to log off and go outside a while, take a look a what the local flora and fauna are about and learn about that, maybe use online tools or communities to learn, but remember to log off and go outside and experience the natural world where you can.

I play tennis regularly, and I roller skate (inline) regularly. I find that these things provide me a great amount of balance (mentally) as a reminder that 99% of the world is physical / analogue, and that the electronic / digital part is, well, small and unimportant (no matter what is said by those with an axe to grind about the importance of their specific digital service).

I don't read books as regularly as I should, but I always enjoy when I do. I donate plasma once a month and the 'enforced idle time' is perfect for catching up on an hour of reading.

(I'm not very good at either tennis or skating, especially since I've been doing both for 10-odd years, but I enjoy them, they keep me fit, and I'm slowly improving or at least arresting the natural decline that comes with age, and planning on not giving either of them up until I'm literally physically unable to keep doing them)

"the abandonment of representation everywhere in the world"

Worth checking out Socialist Realism, both the thing that motivated the CIA to fund and promote non-representative art and help develop it into a fad, and also a large corpus of representative art that existed when you imagine it did not (there's many others besides, non-representative art has always been a small niche relative to all art produced which is primarily abstract or representative once you start to look outside galleries and museums).

I didn’t say complete abandonment. You’re imagining what I’m imagining.

Wisdom is where happiness comes from, not intelligence.

Jayme's theory depends on trade emerging post-Bronze Age collapse of a sort that requires a new kind of theory of mind and processing in a low trust environment driven by international trade. The Ea-Nasir letter was written c. 1750 BC shows that the same issues were already around ~ 800 years earlier and there's lots of international trade going on even in the 3,000s BC. The content of the Ea-Nasir letter and the personal reflections and issues presented there really destroy the central thesis of the book. It's also got a few other serious historic flaws (false claims about the existent of omens ignoring previous examples thousands of years earlier) that make it the kind of book that's interesting but without question also completely wrong in its central thesis.

>A lot of people use Claude as a friend/therapist/romantic partner

People developing a para-social (pseudo-social?) relationship with a corporate robot have far bigger problems than the word-chooser in their robot "friend".

Very intelligent people need intelligent-others to bounce ideas off of, and the LLM can be that.

Very intelligent people should be able to grasp that a LLM is not intelligent.

Have you tried to "rubber duck" an idea with an LLM. The latest models are pretty damnably good at it.

I have, and I still do this occasionally. I don’t believe the plant on my desk (I don’t have a rubber duck) is intelligent. I don’t need it to be intelligent, either.

I also do it with a LLM every now and then and, while it’s feedback is more useful than a toy’s, it does not need to be intelligent either.

Even intelligent people have demonstrated they are not immune to the damaging effects of AI sycophancy. The most recent example that comes to mind is Hank Green.

Yes, I use LLMs this way, they're not friends, not therapists, not persons, they're tools, like a word/language calculator.

Gardening and horticulture are ancient human activities that are incredibly old, the act of tending to and cultivating one's garden is a really delightful way to center the mind and get into a place where one is more grounded, connected to nature, and about as disconnected from capitalist interests a thing as you'll find. It's humanizing.

Just because the suits took a metaphor from gardening doesn't mean you have to think like the suits, maybe you want to liberate yourself from the kind of dehumanizing thinking where capitalism rather than nature is the central frame of reference.

Good luck with the beetles, man.

At least they didn't choose ants and termites. =3

I've been vegetarian a long time, I remember eating Bac'n Bits in the 1980s since they didn't actually have any meat in them.

I knew I wanted to be a birder since I was a kid, but wasn't sure how to make that happen, now I can bird by ear and pick up a lot of species, have 700 wild bird species on the life list with photos, and hit the trails every weekend to look for birds, I run feeders, and track local wildlife with iNaturalist/eBird. I do think as some folks age they recognize that they want to be more connected with nature and work on that in their ways, my family was mostly the same. Nature's more real than what you see on the glowing rectangles.