Real or not, I still say not calling it “AI Wrangler” is a major miss…

Yep, we’re totally in those times… You do realise our methods and resources have changed immensely, right? It can be done. Your way remains and shall remain unjustifiable.

Yeah, it’s really easy to kill someone when you’re locked up all day in a double-walled room, or when you’re exiled alone on an island… Good thinking…

This is why our society is going down the gutter, because people are still trying to rationalise and justify the unjustifiable…

Again, this is not immediate self-defence, this is something else entirely: this type of situation demands systemic change.

As a Romanian, our Revolution ended the instant the people took back control of this nation and Ceaușescu had no more power (it was obvious, because literally nobody was taking orders from him at that point). Then they shot him. Then they shot his wife. That’s the point when the Revolution just turned into mob murder.

In this case, it is the people’s duty to protect their collective interests, yes, but killing still isn’t justified. You remove them from authority then send them on their merry way to live out their standards alone, far from the rest of us.

Friggin’ children know this already, if someone doesn’t play nice, you stop playing with them. Why the hell are we still debating the ““virtues”” of murder?!

No. Murder is murder. There is no rationalising one’s way around it. There is no acceptable context for killing someone other than immediate self-defence, which is not the case when discussing things in terms of justice systems.

Killing is never justice.

As long as we have the option to separate and isolate, nobody deserves to be killed. The death penalty is nothing more than formalised murder, however one chooses to look at it.

And by the time it manages to get out, it’s too late - the frog left…

I brewed alchemical potions for my action figures - Batman needed to stfu and drink his protein shake!

For me, the goal is managing to form as accurate a big picture view as possible. It’s a bit weird to me, too, as although my brain is famished for unnecessary details, when it comes down to the Overall (too early, don’t have a better word), it starts focusing on the essentials, trying to link everything it has gathered in a coherent mess. This may be related to how I grew up, I always had to be aware of the situation in our family for my own survival (know the players and how to play them).

Exactly, it’s like painting through engineering! That’s why I love it, the engagement it offers is incredibly nuanced if one goes beyond the instruction booklets and starts doodling with components! And there’s always a work-around, which is what I love even more in a way. I sorta’ go into a fugue state every time I’m building and end up with things which surprise even me!

Well, fancy that! I’ve recently decided to renovate my old place and turn it into my own little bunker on the ground and, same, I’ve started DIY-ing my way to success! It’s like Legos, but with more splinters! And, yes, art can be fickle once one starts focusing on skill, I’ve found. As the best example I can offer as to why skill has less to do with it than passion and openness, I’ve learnt my first ‘complicated’ bass line in a dream, on a 10-hour train ride, two months into studying the bass (a.k.a. owning and playing around with one). I basically didn’t even have skill of which to speak, just started forming it. All I had was a sense of rhythm and a desire to reproduce my favourites.

As for your last point, I must start with an apology, as I may have improperly expressed myself: it’s not stress, exactly, it’s… it feels like remembering pleasant times from earlier in my life, it really is just a benign sense of melancholy. Learning new things has always been a passion for me, the more varied the things, the stronger the kick! It’s just that the facts aren’t always pleasant (Shpoopiro was partly right, I’ll give him that - long live broken clocks, I guess…). And as for a goal, other than my (at this point) in-built instinct to try to form a big picture view, there is only the desire for truth. To me, truth is a sort of moral imperative, it’s strongly rooted in both my set of principles and my spectrum of values. Vast and varied Knowledge is the best path I’ve managed to find which leads to the truth, thus I have no hesitation.

For some reason, this reminded me of the time when my mum decided to try trimming our long-haired German Shepherd for the summer. She just wanted to snip a bit off, ended up having to give him a once-over with an electric trimmer because she did it hilariously uneven while freehanding the grooming scissors. It wasn’t a buzz cut, not that close, but… pretty damned close!

My guy was a happy camper after that, though! I think he enjoyed the newfound nudity!

I’ve had some of those, yes, but it usually comes after learning enough about the ‘affected’ subject to be able to do a cost-benefit analysis of what it would mean to risk seeking mastery of it. It doesn’t come as a fear of completion, it comes as a fear of it taking up too much space and leaving me with too little for everything else in which I’m interested. I genuinely don’t think completion in itself is ever possible, either from a practical or philosophical perspective.

To answer your question, I also like to write (journaling - which has slowly shifted toward writting essays for my own understanding, poetry), to paint, to draw, to mess around with Legos (which is, so far, the only medium which does an awesome job at accommodating both my artistic/intuitive and my rational components), to ponder (i.e. sitting in silence for a while and just chewing through the info I have, trying to establish new and useful connections between all elements), and reading a lot of fiction (primarily hard sci-fi). Oh, and I like to people-watch - which is somewhat improperly said, because I’m not there solely for the people, I like to observe the system of interactions unfolding

That is the flipside and my main motivation for constantly seeking new information. At worst, this entire thing leaves me with a sort of melancholy centered around the idea that one of my desires is slowly chipping away at one of my pleasures, even though the first will always trump the latter in this case (I’d rather suffer with the truth in my lap).

I can certainy understand your viewpoint, there are layers upon layers of unknowns. I can see how that Vastity can be overwhelming.

And we just accepted it, because we trusted that every company was working in our best interest… Jesus, what a long con…

Ooooooh! Boy, do I feel dumb!

Human Moment™. One of my former professors in Uni, the one I respected the most because she was one of the wisest and most perceptive people I’d met at that point, confided in us that it took her however many years since their introduction to realise that the small light on some wall-mounted light switches was meant as a guidance light if it’s pitch black.

“Because it really gets you, y’know?”

It still counts if the prey dies of laughter!

“But we’ll do it anyway!”

I say double them digits, babe!