The Trivial Complaints Thread ... #3

[Beldarna]

Thank you so much everyone for the hugs. Hugs right back to you I've slept horribly and it has taken a lot of time to decompress. I talked to a coworker about it yesterday and it felt better afterwards. I slept really good for being me this night. But I still see the poor animal when I close my eyes. It will take a long time to ease it's way to the back of my mind. Still nothing on the police page for incidents in that area.

Taffeta I mean no disrespect, I express myself clumpsily when I am stressed. But John did not try do distract, he does that when a topic is boring to him. And a traffic accident can be very boring if he had no part in it. He can passionatly talk for a long time about anything that interests him but the minute the topic is something he has no interest in, he stop listen and try talking about something else. One of the reasons I suspect he has ADD (there are other things pointing at that directions as well). Me talking again about a traffic accident that I already disclosed in texts were of no interest. Sad but true.

BC poor ducks and poor you I remember going with mom one time when we hit a dove. That has haunting me for close to 25 years and it died right away.

That bridge collapse was terrifying! It was a bit of beauty in how it fell, but wow, how little it took to make it fall. I am so sorry for those who lost a loved one . Luckily the police were fast at closing the bridge which prevented a lot of casualties.

It's both a plus and a minus with AI in art. Within Temptation has released three musicvideos by using AI and has gotten a lot of backlash because of it. But they explained it's still a lot of work to make it right. John is a photographer and AI is part of the latest photoshop and he has used that sometimes to edit a pic, like adding a leg that was covered or extended a floor. For some it's cheating and stealing, for some it's a tool. Unfortunaly the haters voices are the loudest.

[lovesbabysquirmy]

I don't want us to be feeding Skynet... remember all the terrifying Sci-fi we have that warns us NOT to be doing this stuff?  Scenarios like Minority Report really worry me.

[cowboyopossum]

Thank you so much everyone for the hugs. Hugs right back to you I've slept horribly and it has taken a lot of time to It's both a plus and a minus with AI in art. Within Temptation has released three musicvideos by using AI and has gotten a lot of backlash because of it. But they explained it's still a lot of work to make it right. John is a photographer and AI is part of the latest photoshop and he has used that sometimes to edit a pic, like adding a leg that was covered or extended a floor. For some it's cheating and stealing, for some it's a tool. Unfortunaly the haters voices are the loudest.

I agree that it can be used as a tool, but what do you mean by "haters"? For most, the thought of AI taking artists out of jobs is awfully scary.

[BlackCurtains]

See, I'm not afraid of AI taking over. The reason is simply because it's still created and taught by humans. Humans are very flawed. If anything a hyper intelligent AI would be more like a human with an inflated ego that isn't as self aware as it think it is. That will be its flaw. There's a game called I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream that's based on a (terrible) short story about a super computer that has taken over the universe. The game is very, very good. In the end how they defeat the computer is simple, because it does not believe it is imperfect. It thinks it's a God. There are humans with this line of thinking as well, and they are probably the most flawed out of any of us.

As far as AI taking away jobs, I really don't think that will happen. I've used the gen to create OC in a pinch, but I still commission artists if I have something very specific in mind. There are enough people who are against AI or who are not interested in using it to keep artists in business.

*puts on Mod hat: Also let's keep this civilized, please. No name calling ("haters") and no baiting. No arguing. We're just talking

[cowboyopossum]

I apologize, I never meant to start anything. 

[BlackCurtains]

No, no, it's okay Beldarna's first language is not English so I don't think she meant anything bad by "haters", at least not how you seemed to take it I just wanted to stop a potential argument.

You are free to join the discussion!

[Beth3346]

I saw the video/stuff on the news about the bridge incident, sounds like a technology fail. So sorry for the families of those affected. It must've been terrifying to be caught up in that :/

I agree that the news these days is often scary and negative. I think what scares me most is the amount of news generated by something not quite true or how stories get twisted into something else - whether by media or social media or whatever. I always read multiple sources to get a good grasp on what is going on, but some of the ways in which things are interpreted worries me...

yeah i feel like i'm in this weird place where I do still look at mainstream news but i feel uneasy. i try to avoid the opinion columns. especially with the way the NYTimes covers trans issues and the "both sides" coverage. i'm sorry if you're view is that some people don't deserve equal rights i don't care what you have to say. i have specific columnists and reporters who work in areas i care about. but when it comes to breaking news it seems like the news gets a lot wrong. especially when stuff just happened. i try to give it a few days and then read up. it makes me feel almost conspiratorial sometimes to say i don't really trust the press. i do to a point but there's really no such thing as objective coverage. nothing is completely objective. i don't blame people for disengaging when its so much work to sort out what really happened. even events back in the 90s and aughts were covered so poorly IMO. later when events are revisited we get to find out all of the shenanigans that influenced coverage.

as far as AI goes i'm very very skeptical. i think it's something that could be beneficial if it worked well and could do mundane tasks. the problem is so much of LLM type AI doesn't work well. that's the kind of AI that takes in a bunch of data and provides output. ChatGPT, Diffusion, etc. i'm not super familiar with the generative AI for art. it seems like it could be cool for creative artists but i do think there should be some kind of compensation/opt out for artists who's work is used to train the AI. do these companies even know who's art was used thought? i doubt it. and the idea of people selling AI generated art doesn't sit well with me.

i'm not an artist but i am a web developer and the code hosting services i use have rolled out AI coding assistants that learn off code that people store on their hosting services. there is no compensation for using people's code to train the AIs. in fact they charge you to use the AI and your code helped train. there is also no guarantee that the code training the AI is good, working code either. the results based on my personal testing are hit or miss. it's nice for repetitive stuff. but as far as anything challenging i find the results disappointing based on the hype.

i could go on and on about AI and how much i don't like it. i would never think it's bad to play around with for fun. I've done this myself with ChatGPT. my real worry is jobs lost and poor quality output. there are already a bunch of junk AI books on Amazon put out by scammers trying to make money for nothing. i also worry that companies with greedy leadership who don't care about quality and want to increase profit will try to replace employees with AI. there isn't much regulation yet and the people who run the leading AI tech companies suck and don't care about people. TBH i think they're a bit out of their minds. replacing humans with bad AI is bad for employees who lose jobs and customers who have to deal with a poor experience. there isn't a vision from these people to make the world better. to have everyone do less work and live in abundance. in it's current form AI is a hype bubble and a grift. like crypto and the metaverse was/still is. even the commercials promoting AI in software and devices don't really say much about what the AI will actually do. it's just "hey we added AI. give us more money!"

and yeah the "deepfake" videos terrify me. especially since so many people believe that if it's on video, it must be real. also i've read that a lot of it is porn so that's horrifying for people who may end up in a video without consent.

like most stuff that comes out of big tech, AI could be cool. but not in it's current form.

[Taffeta]

@Beldarna, I really worried and thought over how to say something to your post, because I understood you were very upset. I'm also not defending his reaction, it was definitely out of line.

That said, whether your husband is diagnoseable or not is not the issue. He may well be. But you just phrased it really awkwardly, so it came over as associating lack of empathy with a neurodivergent diagnosis. And that's obviously not okay. Speaking as someone who has experienced direct harm from that assumption, seeing it on a space like this (which I consider generally accepting and safe) is a bit of a jolt.

I know you were pretty stressed out. I just wanted to flag it up because I know you didn't mean it the way it came out, but the way it came out bothered me.

I am actually less scared of AI (do we need a separate thread to discuss this btw? It's interesting) as in real AI (actual artificial intelligence) than human-developed and human-taught AI, because that enables it to be influenced and manipulated in dangerous ways.

As a writer, too, I take pride in what I write being my own. I don't want someone to look at what I write and think I used something to help me write it. I don't know if that is the same as going out to artistically collaborate using the tech and acknowledging it as a tool...I think it may be different with words than with pictures. Not sure how...just how it feels to me.

I DO worry about it being used by people in universities to cheat assignments going forward. I don't want a doctor who didn't write their own assignments or do their own research to get their medical degree. :/ Plagiarism is already a big issue in universities (speaking as a former GTA, it's something we were trained to deal with). But AI is like having another person write an essay for you, only cheaper :/ I think this could be a problem in the future. Dr Google and all that :/

And I worry about how AI already represents neurodiversity - I saw someone do some research on this, and AI presents an autistic person as a gloomy, skinny, white male in his twenties. It's not helpful.

[BlackCurtains]

I made a new thread for the AI discussion

[lovebyrd]

I had bought a car ex-demo and was going to get it so took a train thinking it was only going to be one way. I get there and there are huge scratches from taking off the dealer stickers!!! Someone did a terrible job taking them off because the scratches weren’t there before. So I had to take a train and bus home in the pouring rain (love england) and they’re telling me my refund will be delayed due to the bank holiday

[Taffeta]

Oh goodness, the rain -.-

I said to my Dad the other day, literally the only difference between winter and spring here right now is that it's a bit more green out and about.

The rain today (and hail, yesterday)...has been excessive.

[Ponyfan]

I'm in the US and on my World Clock, I have a few time zones for some major cities in other countries because I was wanting to know the time in other parts of the world.  I tried telling my mom about it once and she said she didn't care what time it was in Paris or Tokyo because she wasn't going there and didn't know anyone there. 


The muscle right below my knee has been hurting most of the day.  I don't think it was hurting when I got up.  I had to lift a small piece of fence and some lattice to get the dog out earlier.  Maybe that's when it happened?


Ponyfan

[Minty_Magic]

One of our neighbors/family friends is having a mental health crisis and tbh I’m kind of appalled by the response we have gotten from our local authorities. This will probably be long…TW for hallucinations/self harm and drinking. Hopefully this isn’t too heavy for this thread.

Spoiler

My dad recently reconnected with his old friend who is our neighbor and the dad of one of my sister’s best friends. We’ve known the family forever and he’s always been a little bit of a party guy, but apparently he’s having a full fledged mid life crisis. He has my dad drive him to bars often, he forgets his car in the parking lots, and he’s busy picking up young women while he’s out drinking like crazy. He also claims he brings home “friends” from the bar and they continue to party into the night some nights. My dad doesn’t really like spending time with him since he is so irresponsible and has tried to limit their interactions to getting him food or bringing him places. His friend however gets so drunk that he THINKS my dad has spent the entire night with him.

Yesterday, he called my dad in a panic and said there was an “intruder alert” and that he saw a hand that was bleeding. He thought maybe he had cut it. He said he needed my dad’s help and asked him to come over. We obviously told him to call the police because like hello! We aren’t equipped to handle an intruder! My dad was still determined to go over and check on him, but thankfully we got him to wait until the police got there. The police got there and…there was no one in the house. They asked if his friend had any mental health issues but my dad said he didn’t think so. The guy claims he has celiac disease and that somehow causes him to hallucinate sometimes. I looked it up and I guess that’s a thing…..but I got the impression it was pretty rare so idk if I am buying that. Anyway he was completely freaked out and asked my dad to stay with him, but we were going to a concert so we couldn’t. The police left him with no resources. My mom contacted his ex-wife since we were worried about his mental state to see if she knew someone who could stay with him. She also mentioned that he actually did have a history of hallucinations and said it was probably best if we weren’t around.

My sister texted her friend and she said he actually had a similar spell just a few months ago where he called the police thinking someone was in his home. They found him hiding in his tub with a gun. Luckily, they took his gun away, but the daughter confirmed he now had a switchblade. She said that he had told her that he saw the arm and was slicing at his couch where he thought it was, so it really seemed like he could be a danger to himself. He texted us later during the concert to say some friends came over and he felt safe, so we thought that we could at least leave him be for the night.

Nope. Today my dad followed up with him to see if he was doing okay and remembered anything. Turns out no one actually came over last night and he didn’t sleep at all. He also was crying and said he got a phone call from his mom saying she didn’t have much time. Problem is, his mom is in a nursing home and can’t talk, so we knew something was still up. My dad brought him some water and Gatorade and said he seemed really distraught. He was worried he might hurt himself, and the way he was talking about his conversation with his mom it seemed like it might be an end of life goodbye type of deal. His daughter decided she should go out to see him and try to convince him to go to a hospital. She contacted the police who responded to him yesterday to see if they could go with her since she was scared, but they said since he wasn’t actively a threat they could not help. We called the non emergency line as well and tried to emphasize that like, this guy is hallucinating he is not safe alone! But the police said they could send out a crisis unit in about 30 minutes and that was it.

We ended up going with his daughter to try and back her up. I haven’t seen this guy since I was a kid, so I felt weird tagging along, but I didn’t want to be home alone while everything went down. The guy seemed exhausted and out of it. He was drinking a beer when we got there. What was crazy though is he was ACTIVELY hallucinating while we were there. He thought he saw a pizza delivery man twice and was talking to him. He told us he had 8 friends from the bar over, but no one was there. He thought water was dripping from his ceiling onto his skin, but nothing was there. He would come in and out of it. Like he’d joke about hallucinating, but then tell us he saw something that wasn’t there in all sincerity. The crisis workers finally showed up after about 30 minutes as promised, but they were just volunteers and couldn’t do much. They tried to interview him, but he refused to talk to them because he admitted he wasn’t in his right state if mind and this wasn’t a fair judgement of him. They spoke with his daughter too, but they ultimately decided they couldn’t force him to go to the hospital and left.

His daughter pleaded with him to seek some sort if help, just for his “celiac” if nothing else, but he refused. His excuse was he was pretty sure his mom was going to die tonight and he didn’t want to miss that call. His daughter was smart and asked to see the call records because she wasn’t convinced they had talked either. There was no trace of him calling her nursing home. His fighter called the nursing home to ask if her grandma was okay and if she had tried to make any calls today. The lady at the desk said no, everything was fine with the grandma and actually her dad had called earlier, but to ask if he called before that!! I guess he forgot that call. We finally had to leave once it was getting late, it was clear we weren’t going to convince him to go anywhere.

I feel bad for his daughter, she really tried. I know you can’t force someone to get help, but I genuinely don’t understand why he wasn’t deemed a threat to himself. He has had his gun confiscated for a similar incident. He has a switchblade that he obviously was swinging around at imaginary people. He’s having full fledged conversations with people that aren’t there. His arms are covered in sores….he says that from his celiac too but idk. His house is also kind of falling apart. It’s loaded with junk and there is a hole in the ceiling from a leak that happened a while back. He has a Christmas tree still upstairs because he struggles to make it to the upper level of his house by himself. I feel like he is at a tipping point, I wish there were other resources for him to maybe try and help in the interim? Luckily we live close, so we promised his daughter we’d try and stay in touch for the next few days to let her know if things start to improve.

[Pokeyonekenobie]

Yikes, Minty.  I'm surprised they didn't really do anything, either.

Spoiler

I wonder if his daughter can call the police next time and tell them that she is concerned for her safety because of his hallucinations.  I know when my brother was having episodes like that (drug induced) my parents were able to get him admitted to the psych ward temporarily because of their concerns for him even though he was an adult.  Maybe a family member has to say something sometimes?  I don't know what the rules are where you live so that might have something to do with it.

I have to work today and I just don't want to.  I'm tired of working.  Where can I live that will pay me to stay home and paint? 

[lovesbabysquirmy]

Minty_Magic, that is so sad.  I don't think Arizona has great resources for this sort of thing, either. 
I am shocked that the police were told "he has a weapon" and they didn't respond the way that oftentimes the police do when those words are used.  I mean, not that they should always respond that way, but....
Giving people their "freedoms and rights" to be mentally unwell is just not okay.  UGH! 

My complaint is that my leg scabs are finally peeling and healing but the sensation is exactly like when they were open wounds and SO DANG ITCHY!!!!  what the heck , brain!  stop sending weird signals that make me want to SCRAAAAAAAAAAAAATCH!