Yup, I know. But damn, homemade pâte is awesome. And with the right steps, it becomes part of a heart attack bomb decadent breakfast I love:

• Sourdough slices, buttered on both sides, toasted. Spread the pate over them.
• Fried eggs, with soft yolk. Salt and lots and lots of pepper.
• The sweetest melon you can find, diced, with some slices of ham or salami over it.
• Sliced tomatoes and cucumbers
• Half-and-half latte. Made with fresh coffee, that woke the neighbourhood up with the smell.
• A cigarette.

I just had dinner so I’m not craving anything right now, but this afternoon I was craving toasts with chicken liver pâte.

I think you’re onto something here. I can see exceptions (some non-boomers doing this shit, some boomers not doing it), but it does sound like something you’d expect from your typical boomer. And it fits, since plenty boomers are entitled shitlets acting as if the world revolved around their individual belly buttons, opinions are just an extension of that.

How do you know that? There wasn’t any context given.

We’re in the internet. In the internet “taking the red pill” usually conveys “accepting that alt right discourse as true”. It’s conventionalised here. We’re also in a federation of social media sites where your typical user is left-wing, and talks a lot about politics, further reinforcing the above.

So yes, there is context. And all other interpretations of their utterance (like referring to some actual red pill but never mentioning which; or a referential joke, but not sharing the reference) sound silly in contrast.

[From your other comment] Do you even know what that reference is from? The alt right didn’t invent it.

Origin (Matrix) doesn’t dictate current meaning.

Boy wish o could be like him… Never a doubt

Doubt is often a good sign of a working mind.

Yes. Even if you read it. The vibe is awesome.

Nowadays I don’t have this problem, but I know exactly which sort of person you’re talking about: they act as if their opinion was always important, relevant, or welcome.

For me it’s most of the time just an annoyance, except in one situation: if they’re vomiting uncalled advice on my face, because then I’ll interpret it as an insult. (EDIT: 3/4 of the examples in the OP show this.)

@Actual_Idiot@midwest.social asked me the empadão recipe. I’ll share it here, inside a spoilers tag to avoid cluttering the thread. It’s a bit laborious but if done right it tastes amazing.

Equipment required: stove, oven, pot, and a baking tin large enough for the whole dish, preferably rectangular and tall.

Meet your neighbors, join a local group of any kind, find community in real life and proximal to you, not just online.

To add to that (it’s great advice BTW): when shit hits the fan, neighbours are usually more helpful than far away relatives.

Or neither. Just don’t play the game at all.

In this context “taking the red pill” would mean to accept all that alt right discourse; and “taking the blue pill” would be to keep yourself ignorant to it.

But both assume the alt right discourse is true and moral; it’s neither, it’s immorality built upon bullshit. The whole metaphor of “red pill, blue pill” is only there to distract you from the fact it’s selling you a false dichotomy backed up by irrationality.

It depends a lot. Every weekend my sister, BIL and nephew visit us (my mum and me); sometimes it’s for Saturday dinner, sometimes for Sunday lunch. Either way the meals tend to be fancier than when it’s just the two of us, and generally better.

For Saturday dinner it’s a coin toss between empadão (savoury chicken pie) or pizza. The preference depends on my mood to prepare the pizze or let my sister bring the empadão. Drinks get funny, there are two clear “camps” here, the latte folks (mum, BIL and me) and the fizz folks (sis and nephew).

For Sunday lunch, my favourite would be something like:

• barbecued pork belly and filled chicken thighs. Bought from a place nearby, they’re great. If neither I’m probably oven roasting something, like beef ribs.
• mayo salad. With potatoes and homemade mayo. It is not Sunday lunch if there’s no mayo salad. And no, I’m not adding weird stuff to it; only yolks (one raw for emulsion, one cooked for flavour), veg oil, salt, vinegar, boiled and diced taters. Get away with your carrots and peppers and olives, they don’t belong to my mayo salad, and if you bring me that white bottled stuff I’m going to curse you and your descendants to the 7th gen! [/pseudo-angry rant]
• an actual salad (the above doesn’t count): green leaves, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, croutons, probably something else. I like [ruchetta? rucola?] that bitter leaf, or watercress, but it’s usually lettuce. Preferably with a simple dressing (olive oil, vinegar, salt), but if I’m in the mood I might use a yoghurt-based dressing instead.
• I’d be OK if the carb was pasta or polenta, but given my mum’s tastes, realistically speaking it’s going to be white rice. Just no taters, unless there’s no mayo salad, but then it isn’t my fav.

Once a day for sweets. Preferably at dusk; after racking my brain through the whole afternoon, my brain could use a bit of glucose.

I do tend to snack more often than that, but it’s usually cheese or cold cuts. Mostly due to my tastes, but proteins are slightly better than simple sugars because they take a bit longer to digest, so I’m not eating as much of it as if it was a sweet.

Those are all things I wished I have learnt when I was younger:

1. Always ask yourself, “do I know this?”. If you don’t know, do not act as if you did.
2. Keep the distinction between how things are and how things should be crystal clear. Wishful thinking only causes harm.
3. Some people are best avoided. More on that later.
4. You will fuck it up, because you’re only human. Be kind with yourself and learn with your own mistakes.
5. Have moral principles and stick to them. They don’t need to be the same as mine, or of anyone else; but do have something to guide your actions and judgement.

On #3, I feel like it’s best to avoid people who:

• insist after you told them a clear “no”.
• keep fucking things up, and evoke in their own defence “but I thought that…” or “trust me” or “I had good intentions”.
• accuse you based on their assumptions. (You’re responsible for what you do/say; you are not responsible for shit the others make up based on what you did/said.)
• oversimplify complex matters.

Probably more. Point is, though, not everyone is a plus in your life.

5:12 now for me. Still no sleep.

(I’m “working”. Or pretending to; actually browsing Lemmy, watching anime, playing games. I actually like these hours, they’re peaceful, and they would be quiet if not for one of my cats having zoomies.)

[Off-topic] I got curious about the comment chain, checked it in a private window, and… well, I don’t remember when I blocked that poster, but by their profile I’m glad I did it — it’s a waste of time to chat with assumptive fools, you spend more time brushing off their assumptions (only so they vomit yet another assumption, and another, and another…) than actually saying what you want, or reading something meaningful. You probably won’t miss them.

[On-topic] I got the same experience as in your second link, but with translation instead of programming — using machine translation to give me ideas on how to translate specially problematic excerpts; idiomatic expressions, tricky grammatical distinctions lacking in the target language, stuff like this. Just ideas, mind you; I wouldn’t copy the machine translation, I’d pick one or two words from it and come up with my own, so it was still human-made.

Then I noticed the “problematic excerpts” were becoming more and more common.

Some might argue “than mite as well not uze calculatorz lol lmao u’ll get rusty math”… you know what, it’s actually a fair comparison, and one of the reasons I do think people should do maths by hand sometimes. Tools are supposed to allow you to do more, not to cripple you until you’re doing less.

We are tools assisting them. I don’t want to spend my life as an “LLM output checker”.

It’s possible you read this text already, but if you didn’t, Cory Doctorow wrote a great piece about this. Some good excerpts of it that fit really well what you said:

Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

And obviously, a reverse centaur is machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaur-like, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse-centaurs, which is something none of us want to be.

The AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can’t do your job.

Happy, sad, and pissed at myself.

So, today I bought myself some new clothes, for an upcoming social event. I’m happy because I found what I wanted: it fits the dress code and my personal style, and damn, they look good on me. Sad because they costed me more than I was expecting, and I don’t like spending money on this. And I’m pissed at myself because of why I had to buy new clothes: because I’m bloody overweight, the old ones don’t fit me any more, and I don’t see myself getting thinner in the near future.

2:18 here, by the way. No sleep; anime music very related. (You know our night’s busy, keep on dancin’, while the demons are not around…)

…frankly does anyone else here hate the fact English has no word for the time between midnight and sunrise? “Postmidnight” doesn’t cut it, the spelling corrector doesn’t even acknowledge it.

I wasn’t aware of this podcast, so thank you for the rec!

That’s one way to do it, I guess. For most people it’s simpler: develop a second writing style and only use it online when sharing sensitive information — such as when whistleblowing or sharing pirate content. That writing style should:

1. Prioritise brevity. The less you say, the harder it is to tie your online personae.
2. Stick to the standard spelling of the language you’re using. Typically there’s only one standard way to write something, but multiple non-standard ways.
3. Avoid as much as reasonably possible words and grammar that reveal your location, social class, education level, age, or any neurodivergence you might have.
4. Only use three types of punctuation marks: comma, period, interrogation.
5. Keep text structure simple.

Small note regarding people who speak 2+ languages: keep in mind each language you know interferes on your usage of the other languages, often in predictable ways. Even your native one. And this can be used to narrow down a bunch of profiles to who you are.

The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.

This is only a paradox under the assumption that gullible people are smarter. Because, yes, you need to be at least a bit gullible to see “charisma” in the others, or to not acknowledge everyone and their dog has a “vision”.

The study found that being more receptive to corporate bullshit was also positively linked to job satisfaction and feeling inspired by company mission statements.

“Chrust me, you’re happy!” “Yay, I’m happy!”

This applies also outside working environments, I think. It’s more of a general thing, on how bullshit spreads and gets enforced over sanity. I think the vicious cycle the text points out should appear elsewhere too.

Perhaps some pressure towards critical thinking might counter it?