• I prefer to operate the clutch and shifting on my truck myself.
• I’ll rather do manual labor than any work that involves sitting on a computer.
• I’m chronically online but without a smartphone addiction.
• I prefer long-form media.

Firefox

The less apps I have on my phone the better and I mostly browse Lemmy on desktop anyway.

What do you mean they don’t give you a choice? You always have the choice not to use it. DDG gives me AI summaries and I never read them. WhatsApp has an LLM button I’ve never pressed. Twitter has Grok, never tried it. Android probably has Gemini somewhere, and I don’t even know how to access it. As for Proton’s LLM, I hadn’t even heard of it despite paying for their email for a decade. I just don’t see how something existing as a feature in a service I already use somehow mandates me to engage with it.

If someone is so deeply anti-LLM that they want to avoid all this on principle, I don’t necessarily have an issue with that. But personally, I genuinely struggle to grasp the logic behind it. People seem to have a strong emotional response to LLMs - your reply makes that pretty clear - and that’s the part that really boggles my mind.

I’ve only ever tried ChatGPT and that’s what I’ve stuck with.

Most of the time it does what I ask. My two main uses are editing my writing and answering random questions. I also use it to bounce ideas off, and honestly it’s the “adult” I talk to when I’m about to tear my hair out trying to have civil conversations online. I feel like an LLM is tuned better to my autistic wavelength than most people are. I rarely get to talk about my deepest interests with others because they’re usually not the kind of things your average Joe spends time thinking about - so rather than boring people to death or sharing thoughts with friends who won’t even respond, I find myself turning to ChatGPT more and more.

It’s interesting that I genuinely enjoy my interactions with an LLM more than with most people online. I’m not sure what that says about me, other people, or the LLM itself. Out of everything I do online, YouTube and ChatGPT give me by far the fewest regrettable minutes.

If you don’t like LLMs then why can’t you just not use them? Why do you have to start avoiding everything LLM like the plague?

You can export settings and blocks from your old account to a new one. The users here tend to be pretty privacy-minded, so not wanting to put all your eggs in one basket is probably a common mindset. That’s why I ditch my old accounts once they hit around 1000 comments and start fresh on a different instance to lose the tail. It’s too easy to become “famous” on a platform this small. I’m sure many people like that - I don’t.

About a hundred. The list used to be thousands of users long when I tried filtering out everyone pushing extremist policies or just being hostile in general - but it turns out that’s most people here, since my feed completely died down. Now I’m trying a different approach: blocking only the worst offenders and using keyword-based content filtering to hide the comments that poison my mind.

AI-powered content filtering can’t come soon enough. Even keyword filtering is a blunt tool. I’d rather just describe the kind of content I don’t want to see and have it filtered out before it ever reaches me. I’m sick of how angry everyone is here. Most people probably don’t notice it much since it’s usually directed at people they dislike too, but anger hits me differently. I don’t like feeling that emotion, and I don’t like being around angry people.

Bimbos. Like proper, over the top plastic ones.

Only when I can’t be arsed to deal with the backslash.

I used to think my dream job would be building custom furniture in my own workshop at home, but now that a small part of my work actually involves making custom pieces, I’ve learned it’s not my dream job after all. I’m far more productive when I have a set time and place to show up - otherwise I’ll procrastinate until noon and end up working through the whole evening.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/debt

Is it not debt when you owe money to the bank?

stainless hose clamp

That’s exactly what I was about to do

I didn’t actually mean to remove that piece. The bolts and nuts had rusted away, and it fell off while I was hammering the old exhaust loose. I had to cut the remaining bolt shafts from the DPF flange and drill new holes for through-bolts.

You usually don’t lose anything by at least trying to fix something that’s already broken. At worst it’ll just remain broken. Even if I don’t intend to repair it, I’ll still usually tend to disassemble it just to see what it looks like inside - and there’s often a part or two I can scavenge for the “DIY box” in case it comes in handy later. I also don’t worry too much about how pretty the fix is, as long as it works. Also, there’s instructions for almost everything online. Just go for it.

You can invest in index funds online. I passively earn over a month’s salary that way every year.

That’s actually kind of clever. I wouldn’t immediately know how to counter this map on a debate.

Edit:

ChatGPT: On this map, distance from Australia to South America is absolutely enormous — thousands of kilometers longer than it is on a globe. Yet in reality, there are direct flights from Santiago to Sydney that take about 12–14 hours. On this map, those flights would be absurdly long or impossible. Airlines can’t be faking that because passengers time them, track them on GPS, and even bring their own fuel calculations.

The value of my portfolio dips too, but I don’t actually lose anything unless I sell. I just hold and wait for prices to recover - as they always have so far. In fact, when the market drops I buy even more, because the same money gets me more shares. People don’t lose their savings because of a crash; they lose them because they panic and sell for less than they paid.

No. Loss of vision alone would be enough.

Luckily I get my water from the tap.