My e-book reader (Tolino).

As I got older and had problems with my eyes, this was a game changer. I had basically stopped reading books and now I do it daily. I can choose the font and letter size, background color, and backlighting based on what works best for my eyes that day and the light where I am.

Being able to hold a very light device with a big screen when I would have to balance a heavy weight as a paper book is also great, and I take the reader with me everywhere, whereas a big book would stay at home most of the time.

The reader has a bigger screen than my phone and the battery lasts longer.

The reader works flawlessly with my library, so I don’t have to buy books, which keeps costs down, and I don’t have to leave the house to get a new book.

Calibre helps us share books in our family, which is one reason we’ve stayed away from Amazon’s Kindle, so we’ve all gone to “.epub”.

I tried to replace Twitter by Mastodon but, in the end, I just left Twitter and don’t use Mastodon at all.

This is me, I left Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. I reduced my online time a lot and it is better for my mental health and I have more time for my hobbies.

Mastodon made it clear to me how much algorithms steer me and keep me online, when I don’t need that, don’t profit from it. When I had to search for content on Mastodon that was for me it felt not worth the effort while being fed by an algorithm on Twitter /Facebook / Reddit kept me endlessly scrolling.

So I am very thankful to Mastodon for opening my eyes, but I will not use it anymore. Tchncs (world news, tech news and cat owl pictures) , Grouvee (gaming forum, keeping track of my games) and German Tagesschau ( tv news of my country) is enough to stay up to date and I feel freed from a burden that social media became for me.

Also my phone stays in my bag now and I am more in the moment wherever I am - I have used it 99% less than before and my next smart phone will be a cheap one with the only must haves being the newest Android version and a replacable battery so it will last me for long.

As long as they don’t do it on real humans nobody is hurt.

Living out the fantasy of having sex with children (or other harmful sexual practices and fantasies) wit AI or alike can strengthen the wish to actual do it in RL. It can weaken the strength to abstain. If you constantly have fantasies where for example “the child AI wanted it too” then it can desensitize you and making it harder and harder to push that thought aside when in a tempting situation. Instead of replacing the real thing with a fantasy you are preparing for the real thing. Some pedophiles already interpret children’s behavior as sexual that isn’t at all, but the AI might be told to act in that way and strengthen these beliefs.

This is still something that is and has to be studied more to fully understand it. Of course this is difficult because of the stigma. There might be differences between people who only are attracted to children and ones that are attracted to adults and children and there is just not enough data yet, but even the communities in which pedophiles who do not act on their attraction discuss coping strategies this is heavily discussed and controversial.

If you are interested in the subject a bit more, this is a start: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8419289/

Unhinged AI will solve anything human made by getting us killed. That will work very fast because there is no “human made” climate change when there is “no human”.

I also hate how they went from “human made climate change does not exist so we can keep everything as it is” to “we can’t meet the goals anyway so we can keep everything as it is” and how many people fall for it.

They want to keep their money and power at all cost and at this point I question more and more if we can take it from them peacfully. We have to take it to make a better world possible or even survival possible, because they will not be helpful ever.

Years ago I had fun with “what if the US never actually went to the moon”. I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy “birds aren’t real” or “giraffes do not exist” or … the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn’t and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can’t have nice things.

Thank you for the smile!

Not if you have kids or cats or you will be always out of toilet paper.