There’s some reckless recommendations to try psychedelics in here; be cautious with things classified under that name, because there are some VERY nasty chemicals getting pumped out by mafia chemists (some of whom work for large pharma corporations) and pushed under the name of relatively benign substances.

So first off, be sure you know what chemical is actually in the specific pill/blotter/tab you are considering eating.

Second, once you know what you’re dealing with, understand the cautions and protocols involved in using that particular one. I won’t start rattling them off, the information is out there.

That being said, a gram of mushrooms is safe for nearly everyone of normal adult physiology, and it’s pretty easy to tell if you’re looking at and gagging on mushrooms.

I was severely depressed at one point a couple decades ago and a chocolate containing a couple grams of mushrooms at a Folk Festival pulled me out of it for a good while and filled my head with thoughts of what was possible rather than what was not.

If you don’t smoke weed, try smoking some weed, if it’s safe to do where you are. It’s more of a momentary thing and if you don’t like it, most folks can handle waiting it out. This video is perfect for that situation, IMO. It can definitely be a heavy thing if you go too far too soon, but you’ll come back fine with a story to tell, or to never tell.

The more general proposition, which is that these chemicals can kinda shake you loose mentally, is true, but whether that is a good or a bad thing depends on who you are, how in control and confident you feel about life and the world, your immediate environment when you are on them (many end up taking these drugs at noisy parties full of drunkards, which are not the best places to be tripping balls), and many other factors.

For instance, your talk of the adult mask vs the child you cannot find might be exactly what’s happening, or it might be words you’ve put on some other mental block or bit of cognitive dissonance which you do not yourself understand yet. If that were the case, it would be quite possible for a dose of psychedelics to cause your mind to completely drop the veil of delusion, and cause you to look at that reality in the flash of a moment, with no time to mentally prepare for it, and that can be a terrifying experience for some, when reality intrudes on something that they didn’t realize was foundational to their understand of the world, and vulnerable in that way.

The long term effects of such an experience can likewise be very good, very bad, or completely neutral. We all have these masses of jelly inside our skulls and actually we are those masses of jelly.

Freudian leak?

As Hedberg said, say what you will about Hitler, he did kill Hitler.

Dude, from a much more privileged place, please, enjoy your movies and bring yourself all the happy moments you can get.

The fiction of the last 30 years is revealed to those with eyes to see.

All this time the capital class and their lackeys have been saying “Russia is a our superfriend now and China wants to be democratic so we are helping them by using their slave labour and don’t you feel guilty for questioning our supremely good intentions here!”

And meanwhile it’s the same old global power struggle, but you can make SO MUCH using slave labour, it was just too tempting to send every bit of our labour - even our high tech - over to their factories.

51, I can drive a semi, but before I took some training for that I learned on a standard from my grandma.

It’s mostly about using every last one of the cpu cycles efficiently, which is old school think from the days when 640k was supposed to be enough for anyone. When I was a wee tyke in the 8bit era we had machines that did graphics, but they were for launching games from a terminal/console.

There are many servers with GUIs, primarily Windows servers, and there’s probably web or GUI interfaces available for every useful service you can run which will be handy in some contexts, but there’s a kind of speed and simplicity you can get with a good console that no gui can touch. Hard to explain unless you’ve done some work.

I must be the fortieth to advise you to install Linux.

This is reach Kim levels.

I am Canadian, which means American Lite, and I currently work for a global company based in France, so lots of French people. The casual racism is often astounding and at levels that would get you seriously hurt in certain places on this continent. It’s not hate-based at all that I can see, just ignorance of what exactly is going on on the other side of the world is my assumption.

I think I recall reading now that they had implemented it here. The whole “what happens there, happens here” dynamic made me cancel it out when they cancelled it down there I guess.

Did we ever have it in the first place? :>

There are those of us who were on the Internet before the capital showed up, and all of us said that it was a bad idea to use these corporate silos, that there were implications that were not great to handing what we knew would one day be the public square over to private interests. We were not listened to, of course, and for the thirty years that the government kept the house of cards propped up with zero interest they created a real illusion that it might actually work.

But maybe I have to reassess Elon. I have heretofore considered him something of a bad man, a Senator Palpatine with his “saving the world through capitalism” schtick, but with an Emperor lurking in his twisted mind. And here we have that very Emperor, taking off the mask. But perhaps… perhaps… perhaps Musk is actually Vader. Perhaps in revealing, to all with eyes to see, the very problems we Libre’d zealots have been crying out in the wilderness about, perhaps he is the one who will restore balance to the Internet.

Nah he’s just an apartheid rich boy who talked a good line while he could keep pulling free money out of the bag, but now that he has to put money back in the bag he’s taking whatever work he can get.

They repealed that anyways.

Well, I suppose the education system gets the teachers it pays for…

In what ways do you envision working with LLMs as an educator of children?

I have used ChatGPT to explain to myself a number of fairly advanced technical and programming concepts; I work in Animation through my own self-study and some good luck, so I’m constantly trying to up my skills in the math that relates to it. When I come up against a math or C++ term or concept that I do not currently understand, I can generally get a pretty good conceptual understanding of it by working with ChatGPT.

So at one point I wanted to understand what Linear Algebra specifically meant, and it didn’t stick but I do remember asking it to expand on things it said that weren’t clear, and it was able to competently do so. By asking many questions I was able - I think - to get clearer on a number of things which I doubt I ever would have learned, unless by luck I found someone who knows the math to teach me.

It also flubbed a lot of basic arithmetic, and I had to mentally look for and correct that.

This is useful to an autodidact like myself who has learned how to learn at a University level, to be sure.

I cannot, however, think of a single beneficial way to use this to educate small children with no such years of mental discipline and ability to understand that their teacher is neither a genius nor a moron, but rather, a machine that pumps out florid expressions of data that resemble other expressions of similar data.

Please, tell me one.

Lol I’m more into personal autonomy, myself.

Now, up here in Canada, we have some very gory pictures of cancer happening that take up like 80% of the face of the cigarette pack. I don’t see why we can’t have something a bit like that required in front of churches. Perhaps something from the surgeon general about what happens when you huff too much Jesus.

Once I was in my teens and handing my money over to the tobacco industry because that made me very badass, I had a lighter, and what you would do is, first, you hold the flame up to the point where the spoon meets the stem and then yank the stem off so you get a long skinny bit of plastic off it. Then you’d snap off the “M” at the top, hold your lighter up to it until just starts to melt, and then stick it onto the upside-down spoon thing.

Toy mouse!

See, to me that sounds like “all drugs need to go,” and as it happens I use drugs. Religion is also a drug that people use to cope. You can’t ban drugs, it doesn’t work, you just need to help people consume it at non -toxic levels.

I’m mostly here to advocate for his cause rather than him, but I also won’t go along with narratives that serve interests that are clearly at odds with mine and his and yours alike; I made that mistake in the aughts when I was a New Atheist and thought that it was my solemn duty as a defender of truth and child brides to fight Islam with everything I had.

Islam’s fine, I was wrong. RMS was wrong, on this and on other things too. I know because he’s a man.