As others have said, there are many reasons people don’t provide emotional support besides “they’re not your friends.”

Some were not really my friends, some had problems of their own, some were just weak (or avoidant). The only ones I still blame are the hypocrites in the first category.

I am saying that - when both parties are willing - being able to name and repair those hurts is part of having healthy relationships.

I think 12-step programs are a cultish load of bullshit, but one part that I did apply in my life is making amends. I’ve reconnected with a number of people I’ve wronged and acknowledged that they didn’t deserve it, and I’ve had some deep conversations with people whom I felt wronged by. But there are also people I’ve frozen out with no way back, and others who, if our paths crossed, would be met with conflict. Those who didn’t help me when I was down, that’s one thing. Forgiveness is possible. But the ones who went out of their way to put the boot in during that time, that’s something else entirely. I don’t dwell on those occasions, I don’t seek those people out, but I wouldn’t let it pass, either.

I went through divorce at the age of 27 and is one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced. It is a lot like a death.

I went through a divorce at 31. For me, it was more like a liberation than like a death. My ex felt the same way. We were too young when we first got together and ended up going in very different directions in our lives, though we’re still close after all those years. I’m on good terms with most of my exes.

You’re right about how to deal with it. In my case, I walked to a nearby pond with a friend, pronounced the ritual formula “There goes nine years of my fuckin’ life” and threw the wedding ring into the pond. Then I went back home, got drunk and boned my friend. She was wonderfully supportive during the whole process.

After that, I was done with it, except for some paperwork. A quick catharsis, then I got on with my life.

And yeah, when you go through big changes, you quickly find out who your real friends are. The ones who supported me during that time, and during an earlier period when I was temporarily destitute, are still people I’m close to decades later. I don’t miss the others, though I now understand that in many cases, their lack of support was due to their own problems and weaknesses, and not just a betrayal of me. But some of the people who were there for me literally gave me the shirt off their own back. And since then, I’ve been there for them, too, and have in some cases sent them airline tickets so we could get together again.

In my case, it was different. When I first got married in my mid-20s, I moved to a different country and lost touch with most of my friends. When I got divorced at 31, suddenly all these women started dropping by to visit and hook up. Before I was married, they hadn’t shown all that much interest in me. What had changed was that I had made the transition from a constantly broke musician and student to having a well-paying job, owning a flat in a good part of London and traveling a lot. So I was somewhat cynical about the sudden interest. One of the songs I’d play on my guitar and sing when they’d visit was the old Bessie Smith tune, Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.

I ended up meeting and marrying someone I met outside my old social circle, who was as uninterested in money as I was, and who knew I was no meal ticket. We’re still married over 3 decades later (and are moderately well off, despite always having followed our interests rather than chasing money).

They promised change, and delivered a coalition enabling the Tories to do what the Tories always do.

Fine then, kill it.

That’s a really good start. Let me know when you hit zero.

I prefer my unique IDs to be derived from the whole UTF-16 table.

Someone in California had a vanity plate that read “NULL.” Turns out that’s where the state computer assigned traffic tickets where the license plate was unreadable, so he got a shedload, and it took him a lot of work to get that mess cleared up.

Null is also a German surname, so people who aren’t taking the piss get caught in problems due to stupid input validation and bad testing.

As an aside, Ashleigh is an abomination regardless of how it’s spelled, derived from a toponymic surname that later became a boy’s given name. Parents who give their daughters such names should be put in the stocks and made to eat gruel made from spelt cooked in day-old hotdog water.

That idea seems to me to mostly stem from religion.

It also was strongly pushed by Skinner and other behaviorists, though I’m not sure they’d agree that humans are conscious either.

How could you tell they do not experience consciousness if they exhibit or mimic all the traits of it?

How could you tell if a camera sees or not, if it exhibits or mimics all the traits of it?

It is constantly under assault from those who want AI to be conscious

Those people aren’t doing science when they want that, they’re trying to pump up their share price.

The problem I see so often with smart computer people is that they don’t understand that they don’t know shit about other things

Or maybe you’re not talking to the smart computer people at all.

Consciousness requires contemplation of self.

Fish are conscious. Do they contemplate selfhood? So throw that one back into the oven until it’s fully baked.

Emergent phenomena are still phenomena.

Ai exposes, I think, the uncomfortable fact that intelligence does not require a soul.

Nobody doing science is talking about souls when explaining what consciousness is.

give it 100 trillion parameters instead of 2 trillion and maybe

And maybe it’s got nothing to do with the number of parameters.

What a crock. An LLM is no more conscious than a spreadsheet. The Google engineer has bought into the hype.

You’re not creating life, pal. You’re just making call centers shittier than they already are.

Trump’s the guy who thinks that the only reason a woman would pretend to like anyone is if they paid her, since that’s the only way women will pretend to like Trump.

He’s not zero-sum with Putin, though. He’s Putin’s lackey regardless of what it costs him or his precious reputation.

They just distort the language of empathy to enable their cruelty.

If it’s racist, why doesn’t Trump like it?