It was strange - I'm not much of a gamer anyway, but I'd never felt that way before after finishing a game. I really fell in love with NYC, even though it's not at all the kind of place I'd want to live in.
Still, I had this sad, melancholic feeling hanging around for probably a week after.
4 out of 20 posts on my front page are currently blocked. I think the record so far is 17 out of 20 when there's a major event going on in the news, for example when Charlie Kirk was shot.
I've similarly blocked all the communities I'm not interested in - to the point that my All feed is basically the same as my Subscribed feed, just with more memes on it.
Still, it's not enough. I don't want to block entire news communities, for example, just because I'm not into certain stories.
I even tried blocking users until I basically nuked my whole feed. That's why I went back to just blocking the worst offenders and leaning harder on filtering out comments too.
Well, I do have Star Trek communities blocked too. That said, I don't block stuff because I have something against it per se - I'm usually just sick of seeing it flood my feed constantly.
I even block topics I'm genuinely into, like AI, because I know the comment sections will be a total shitshow and I don't want to tempt myself.
It's a mid-sized town of about 100k people, but I've really only advertised to a few thousand in one tiny corner of it. Most of my customers live within 10 minutes of me.
I'm a plumber by training, but I'm naturally a bit of a generalist and a life-long tinkerer and have done some work around my own house. I did commercial plumbing for 10 years before I went self-employed. That's the only thing I'm trained at. Nowdays I just watch a lot of YouTube tutorials and sometimes just wing it, too.
Going self-employed was by far the scariest thing I've ever done - lost countless nights worrying about it - but once I jumped, everything just worked out. Probably the best decision I've ever made. Literally today, a customer told me "everything I touch turns to gold." As a plumber, I got a "thank you" maybe twice in 10 years. Now I get genuine gratitude almost daily.
If you'd asked me about going self-employed as a plumber or electrician, I'd have said it's gonna be a battle. But as a handyman, your customer base is way wider thanks to the broad range of services. Plumbing is still a non-negligible part of what I do, but I'd struggle if that was all I offered. Painting is something I do so much that it's one of the few trades I'd actually recommend specializing in.
Go for it - seriously. Even failure isn't as bad as the regret of never trying.
I started my handyman business 2 years ago. This past year i've been at full employment with zero advertising. I think that's pretty good for a new business with no existing customer base.
Ironically, at the end of last year as things were slowing down a bit I ordered like 3000 new flyers and I only managed to distribute around 500 of them untill the phone started ringing again and that still continues.
The problem isn't that "everything is AI" - it's that people think AI means way more than it actually does.
That superintelligent sci-fi assistant you're picturing? That's called Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). Both are subcategories of AI, but they're worlds apart from Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs are intelligent in a narrow sense: they're good at one thing - churning out natural-sounding language - but they're not generally intelligent.
Average user here thinks AI is synonymous with LLMs and that it's not only not intelligent but also bad for the environment, immoral to use because it's trained on copyrighted content, a total job-killer that's going to leave everyone unemployed, soulless slop that can't create real art or writing, and basically just a lazy cheat for people who lack actual talent or skills.
"So what you're saying..." is such a tired meme, and the irony just piles on when you follow it up by strawmanning their argument.
Wanting to block someone else from seeing what you're writing on a public forum is straight-up petty. Blocking as it works right now already does exactly what it's supposed to: it stops the other user from engaging with you further. They can still interact with your posts, but you won't know about it.
If blocking worked the way you described, it wouldn't just affect you and the other person - it'd screw over everyone else on the platform too. For example, someone spewing utter bullshit could block everyone fact-checking them, and suddenly those corrections vanish for the whole audience.
Plus, it'd be ridiculously easy to circumvent. Making a new account takes a few minutes, or just log out and boom - you're unblocked again.
GTA IV
It was strange - I'm not much of a gamer anyway, but I'd never felt that way before after finishing a game. I really fell in love with NYC, even though it's not at all the kind of place I'd want to live in.
Still, I had this sad, melancholic feeling hanging around for probably a week after.