What do you use for TTS? I’m interested in both a service that’ll turn a PDF into an audiobook and that reads a document line-by-line. I use Librera for the latter but the FOSS voices available on F-Droid leave a lot to be desired.

Can I ask how you ended up there in the first place? I can scarcely think of a more interesting place on earth.

How integrated are you into the local community? How well do you speak the local language? I’m a foreigner living abroad and I would never trust either my own perception of this place nor 99% of other foreigners’ perceptions.

Surprised by how hiɡh up Mexico is!

I’ve always wanted to learn to sing, ever since I was a kid. I even started taking lessons before I went through a major life change that pushed all of that aside. I meant to come back to it but I realised recently it just doesn’t matter to me enough to pursue it compared to other things I want to achieve. And it really never became fun for me: it seems like the only way to improve is to 1) make it a team sport, which isn’t an option for me, 2) start improving from when you’re young enough that you’re not self-conscious, or 3) painfully just listen to yourself be awful until you improve as an adult. Which is totally 100% doable, but pretty joyless & not worth the time investment for me rn.

Not too good. I had a half hour long conversation with a friend on the phone recently & I realised it’s the first time I’ve had a phone conversation with somebody I actually wanted to talk to in months, except for that time I called another friend freaked out bc I was scared of my neighbour harrassing me. Not exactly the same giddy energy. This phone friend and I tried to meet up and got foiled multiple times. Shit’s exhausting.

My first edit to this post was “maybe I should take up gardening or sth but where to start” bc I want to be able to interact with and get feedback from just about anything besides my coworkers once in a while.

Sorry, I can’t hear you over my sitting down and standing back up repeatedly xD

Ok, ngl–haven’t read the article itself. But this blog is extremely interesting. I used to have an intimate family connection to the world of physics through someone who was planning to throw their lot in with them for life (hence, I got to see up close several people attempting the same, and each of them had unique struggles and reservations and approaches). It is very meaningful to see someone coming out of the opposite side.

Lol no doxxing but in broad terms which lemmy communities did y’all meet in? Interest-based?

One of the recent Facebook whistleblowers said her version of social media was her & her friends sharing news articles in a Signal group chat. That’s, like, my wet dream.

But I have no reason to believe Discord is even an iota less evil than Facebook.

I wish I could loosen up and enjoy malicious tech but like I said, I just can’t unring that bell, even though it makes my life meaningfully worse. Iykyk

Thanks for sharing all of this. I agree with you. TBD whether returning to social media will be a net good or a net evil in my life, but it’s such a relief to be able to see people agree for once with what is such an obvious, high-stakes moral position.

Edit: although I’m 100% on board with the book quotations I actually am not inclined to agree with a lot of the stuff in the first video. For one, I think sterilising human beings really is more of a practical than a moral limitation and I think he doesn’t give enough space to the instances of where it actually happened. And for another–I started to type about how I disagree with him on civilisation being necessarily a positive unambigous transcendence or whatever, and then about how calling bacteria & sharks mindless is arrogant, but then he goes full anthropocentric in the end and says that humans in civilisation are the only ones who can live meaningful lives and all animals following their instincts (& people living outside of civilisation today & the vast majority of human history apparently) are just perpetuating meaningless suffering? This is an extremely narrow-minded, arrogant, parochial, self-aggrandising perspective. I’m surprised he advocates for wild living for animals when he has no curiousity at all about how the world actually works outside of the human city and countryside. Really reaffirms my dislike of talking heads, especially those with the comments turned off lol.

In the article they talk about extremely subtle pronounciation changes. It doesn’t seem like it was a conscious decision.

I used to have a job where I was the only non-Indian on my team and I didn’t go as far as to develop an accent (also I went home every day lol unlike these guys) but I felt like I was unintentionally picking up some Indian affectations/word orders.

Antidepressants can have serious side effects that can persist even after stopping. Look up the Surviving Antidepressants forum. That doesn’t mean don’t use them, but it’s just a truism that all pharmacological intervention has risks. To see randos diagnosing & medicalising someone for a lemmy post that isn’t an obvious cry for help is…objectionable, and in poor taste, and imo diagnostic of some much larger problems, but I don’t have the time to spare to argue that point. But people promoting what could be life-altering compounds as no biggie demands a response. (Again, my position isn’t ‘don’t use antidepressants,’ it’s ‘messing with your brain chemistry demonstrably can have serious consequences and is a serious decision.’)

edit: rephrased

Thanks for your response. It’s not just the term “ownership” I am frustrated with, because there’s a reason we use the term: it’s accurate. I think in an ethical world we would be building a society and environment that allowed us to be good neighbours to cats (and all other forms of life) rather than forcefully assimilating them into our homes and taking away all of their freedom. I think veganism is a horizon most people have considered (even if just only barely) because of the brutality of factory farms but people hardly have the imagination to acknowledge the cruelty of what goes on in their own homes and alternatives (for obvious reasons: it’s relatively easy to not eat animal products, very difficult for any one individual to make a non-human-friendly impact on the environment around them). I think the way you think about your cat is fair. What prompted my rant was the kind of attitude that someone who responded to this post earlier had–“are you kidding, OBVIOUSLY my dog loves me, OBVIOUSLY I am entitled to make decisions about its reproductive rights, because even though he’s my best buddy he’s my inferior!” I find the “I’ll eat an extra steak for you” attitude vile but I almost never encounter it IRL whereas almost everyone I know will project the most convenient possible narrative and emotions onto their pets and praise themselves for keeping them. I mean, as I say in OP, it is what it is, it’s arguably better for a cat to be indoors in this messed-up world. But only arguably and ambivalently so. It’s most people’s cavalier attitudes about it that I find to be inexcusable and diagnostic of deep cruelty.

Nothing says critical thinking like stumbling into a thread, insulting everyone, repeatedly announcing intuitions and entitlements without engaging any argument because duh, of course the mainstream view (that non-human animals do not deserve full respect/autonomy/consideration as individuals, that my self-serving intuitive projection of an animal’s feelings is accurate) is self-evidently correct without any need to justify it, and then blocking the sub.

If you aren’t a troll you’re behaving like one. “Shut up, be normal, go outside” aren’t arguments.

Nobody is going to be able to convince you unless they come to understand where you stand on the morality of human beings being able to dominate and restrict one another’s freedoms or on the richness of the interiority and moral value of non-human animals and tediously go through a deconstruction of the status quo worldview. Because, again, we’ve already gone through these questions and generally come to similar conclusions.

As a general heuristic in life if I directly benefit from something, and especially if someone else affected by my profiteering can’t talk back to me, I see that as a flashing red light saying I need to question things and can’t take my motivated intuitions as fair conclusions.

I’ve been listening to Karen Bakker often lately (I may even read her book sometime) and if what she says about AI and other new technology being able to give us a method of interspecies communication is true…jesus christ, the moral revolution will be copernican.

Are you vegan or do you agree with the critiques of speciesism in other contexts?

“Stop typing, I believe nothing that you say about your history or what you’ve seen” doesn’t inspire much engagement in any case but there are some premises that I & this community generally take for granted that you…may not.

Dogs are a special case when it comes to arguing about contemporary pet ownership imo because of their uniquely entangled history with humans. (Human beings have had relationships with other animals “since time immemorial”–both prey/predator relations as well as cooperation like the Hadza honeyguide bird–but to my knowledge domestication per se is quite a new phenomenon. “Domestication” itself is a pretty polysemous term that needs further defining ig.) But that said, even though I absolutely tend towards thinking of foraging, pre-agricultural life as a space of strong egalitarianism, including on an interspecies level–perhaps to the point of idealising or romanticising–I don’t think anyone can presume to understand those early dynamics. I’d like to think dogs were partners rather than property, but I don’t know. I think in any case the truth cannot help but be more complicated than the attitude of “my pet is my baby and I love him and he loves me with his cute eyes and that’s the natural order of things!”