Tootfinder

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, so what exactly are the details of the "engineered" model of love from my previous post? I'll try to summarize my thoughts and the experiences they're built on.
1. "Love" can be be thought of like a mechanism that's built by two (or more) people. In this case, no single person can build the thing alone, to work it needs contributions from multiple people (I suppose self-love might be an exception to that). In any case, the builders can intentionally choose how they build (and maintain) the mechanism, they can build it differently to suit their particular needs/wants, and they will need to maintain and repair it over time to keep it running. It may need winding, or fuel, or charging plus oil changes and bolt-tightening, etc.
2. Any two (or more) people can choose to start building love between them at any time. No need to "find your soulmate" or "wait for the right person." Now the caveat is that the mechanism is difficult to build and requires lots of cooperation, so there might indeed be "wrong people" to try to build love with. People in general might experience more failures than successes. The key component is slowly-escalating shared commitment to the project, which is negotiated between the partners so that neither one feels like they've been left to do all the work themselves. Since it's a big scary project though, it's very easy to decide it's too hard and give up, and so the builders need to encourage each other and pace themselves. The project can only succeed if there's mutual commitment, and that will certainly require compromise (sometimes even sacrifice, though not always). If the mechanism works well, the benefits (companionship; encouragement; praise; loving sex; hugs; etc.) will be well worth the compromises you make to build it, but this isn't always the case.
3. The mechanism is prone to falling apart if not maintained. In my view, the "fire" and "appeal" models of love don't adequately convey the need for this maintenance and lead to a lot of under-maintained relationships many of which fall apart. You'll need to do things together that make you happy, do things that make your partner happy (in some cases even if they annoy you, but never in a transactional or box-checking way), spend time with shared attention, spend time alone and/or apart, reassure each other through words (or deeds) of mutual beliefs (especially your continued commitment to the relationship), do things that comfort and/or excite each other physically (anywhere from hugs to hand-holding to sex) and probably other things I'm not thinking of. Not *every* relationship needs *all* of these maintenance techniques, but I think most will need most. Note especially that patriarchy teaches men that they don't need to bother with any of this, which harms primarily their romantic partners but secondarily them as their relationships fail due to their own (cultivated-by-patriarchy) incompetence. If a relationship evolves to a point where one person is doing all the maintenance (& improvement) work, it's been bent into a shape that no longer really qualifies as "love" in my book, and that's super unhealthy.
4. The key things to negotiate when trying to build a new love are first, how to work together in the first place, and how to be comfortable around each others' habits (or how to change those habits). Second, what level of commitment you have right now, and what how/when you want to increase that commitment. Additionally, I think it's worth checking in about what you're each putting into and getting out of the relationship, to ensure that it continues to be positive for all participants. To build a successful relationship, you need to be able to incrementally increase the level of commitment to one that you're both comfortable staying at long-term, while ensuring that for both partners, the relationship is both a net benefit and has manageable costs (those two things are not the same). Obviously it's not easy to actually have conversations about these things (congratulations if you can just talk about this stuff) because there's a huge fear of hearing an answer that you don't want to hear. I think the range of discouraging answers which actually spell doom for a relationship is smaller than people think and there's usually a reasonable "shoulder" you can fall into where things aren't on a good trajectory but could be brought back into one, but even so these conversations are scary. Still, I think only having honest conversations about these things when you're angry at each other is not a good plan. You can also try to communicate some of these things via non-conversational means, if that feels safer, and at least being aware that these are the objectives you're pursuing is probably helpful.
I'll post two more replies here about my own experiences that led me to this mental model and trying to distill this into advice, although it will take me a moment to get to those.
#relationships #love

At my keynote for the 2025 Acadia Ethics Conference, a number of clinical therapists in attendance surprised me by embracing AI's potential to bridge mental health gaps and even flag anxiety-producing items in their offices from a single photo.
https://www.

Kennt wer eine gute KI-Kritik an derartigen Argumenten? Also eher Meso-Ebene plus der zugrundeliegenden Prämissen? Das ist eher die Ebene, die mir im Alltag begegnet

Yearly Subscription:
- $8 per Month VAT once -> $114.24 at once
Monthly Subscription:
- $14 per Month VAT monthly -> $199,92 over 12 payments
I prefer monthly payments because they don't take a big chunk out of my budget and I have control to cancel if I want. But that costs extra. I get the constraints and why that model exists but I hate it.

Why Does Your Brain Always Expect the Worst?
#MentalHealth #BeBetter

Why Does Your Brain Always Expect the Worst?
Your brain constantly predicts the future based on past pain, but you can retrain it and turn catastrophic thinking into hope.

»Missing Link - Machtzentrale Palantir – eine Software lenkt Organisationen:
Palantir will ein Betriebssystem für Organisationen. Was steckt technisch dahinter - und wie verändert es Strukturen und Machtverhältnisse?«
Ist dies schon digitale Diktatur der sich Fortschritt betitelt aber Mental rückständig ist? Konservatieve nutzen Hightech um sich modern mental Rückständig zu präsentieren.
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Missing Link: Machtzentrale Palantir – eine Software lenkt Organisationen
Palantir will ein Betriebssystem für Organisationen. Was steckt technisch dahinter – und wie verändert es Strukturen und Machtverhältnisse?

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17274 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_mat…

Composable Uncertainty in Symmetric Monoidal Categories for Design Problems
Applied category theory often studies symmetric monoidal categories (SMCs) whose morphisms represent open systems. These structures naturally accommodate complex wiring patterns, leveraging (co)monoidal structures for splitting and merging wires, or compact closed structures for feedback. A key example is the compact closed SMC of design problems (DP), which enables a compositional approach to co-design in engineering. However, in practice, the systems of interest may not be fully known. Recent…

Last week I asked Google to stop releasing broken things. Apologists said maybe I needed to contribute more, write code or demos.
Last year I outlined some of what I *have* done and how, for the most part, Google / Web•dev doesn’t give a shit:
https://adrianroselli.com/2024/07…

Don’t Use Web•dev for Accessibility Info
Web.dev is a site from Google Chrome developer relations that provides content both to evangelize Chrome and to more broadly support the web platform. Rachel Andrew’s monthly “new to the platform” posts are effectively required reading to try to stay abreast of the browser support landscape. However, the accessibility content…

How popular media gets love wrong
Okay, my attempt at (hopefully widely-applicable) advice about relationships based on my mental "engineering" model and how it differs from the popular "fire" and "appeal" models:
1. If you're looking for a partner, don't focus too much on external qualities, but instead ask: "Do they respect me?" "Are they interested in active consent in all aspects of our relationship?" "Are they willing to commit a little now, and open to respectfully negotiating deeper commitment?" "Are they trustworthy, and willing to trust me?" Finding your partner attractive can come *from* trusting/appreciating/respecting them, rather than vice versa.
2. If you're looking for a partner, don't wait for infatuation to start before you try building a relationship. Don't wait to "fall in love;" if you "fall" into love you could just as easily "fall" out, but if you build up love, it won't be so easy to destroy. If you're feeling lonely and want a relationship, pick someone who seems interesting and receptive in your social circles and ask if they'd like to do something with you (doesn't have to be a date at first). *Pursue active consent* at each stage (if they're not interested; ask someone else, this will be easier if you're not already infatuated). If they're judging you by the standards in point 1, this is doubly important.
3. When building a relationship, try to synchronize your levels of commitment & trust even as you're trying to deepen them, or at least try to be honest and accepting when they need to be out-of-step. Say things and do things that show your partner the things (like trust, commitment, affection, etc.) that are important in your relationship, and ask them to do the same (or ideally you don't have to ask if they're conscious of this too). Do these things not as a chore or a transaction when your partner does them, but because they're the work of building the relationship that you value for its own sake (and because you value your partner for themselves too).
4. When facing big external challenges to your commitment to a relationship, like a move, ensure that your partner has an appropriate level of commitment too, but then don't undervalue the relationship relative to other things in life. Everyone is different, but *to me*, my committed relationship has been far more rewarding than e.g., a more "successful" career would have been. Of course worth noting here that non-men are taught by our society to undervalue their careers & other aspects of their life and sacrifice everything for their partners, which is toxic. I'm not saying "don't value other things" but especially for men, *do* value romantic relationships and be prepared to make decisions that prioritize them over other things, assuming a partner who is comfortable with that commitment and willing to reciprocate.
Okay, this thread is complete for now, until I think of something else that I've missed. I hope this advice is helpful in some way (or at least not harmful). Feel free to chime in if you've got different ideas...
#relationships #love

In Ursula K. Le Guin's "A Man of the People" (part of "Four Ways to Forgiveness") there's a scene where the Hainish protagonist begins studying history. It's excellent in many respects, but what stood out the most to me was the softly incomprehensible idea of a people with multiple millions of years of recorded history. As one's mind starts to try to trace out the implications of that, it dawns on you that you can't actually comprehend the concept. Like, you read the sentence & understood all the words, and at first you were able to assemble them into what seemed like a conceptual understanding, but as you started to try to fill out that understating, it began to slip away, until you realized you didn't in fact have the mental capacity to build a full understanding and would have you paper things over with a shallow placeholder instead.
I absolutely love that feeling, as one of the ways in which reading science fiction can stretch the brain, and I connected it to a similar moment in Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME, where the android protagonists need to ride an elevator through the civilization/galaxy-spanning megastructure, and turn themselves off for *millions of years* to wait out the ride.
I'm not sure why exactly these scenes feel more beautifully incomprehensible than your run-of-the-mill "then they traveled at lightspeed for a millennia, leaving all their family behind" scene, other than perhaps the authors approach them without trying to use much metaphor to make them more comprehensible (or they use metaphor to emphasize their incomprehensibility).
Do you have a favorite mind=expanded scene of this nature?
#AmReading