Can you explain why and how? Do you imagine other (better?) batteries, or the disappearance of the need for batteries?

Small talk

There’s no room next to the onion. That’s where I keep my other onion.

I can scan some and email them to you

Cherries are in season 🍒 (they literally grow on trees). Oh so yum yum. Shared a basket with my neighbours

In a hierarchical society, those on top will use any existing govt structures to their benefit

That’s exactly why there’s separation of power! The idea being that executive, legislative and judiciary are of equal power. One can block or strenghten the behaviour of the other on an independant, case-by-case basis. Those properties should, imo be strenghtened, not weakened.

people affected by a decision should be the ones to make it, not merely to vote for those who promise to do right by them.

Samesees. My utopia would be liquid democracy.

But even here, there would be law! It’s a necessary good, to combat arbitrary prosecution, imo.

Oui, papa a fait une blague

Would you say we’d be better off by merging executive and judiciary, doing away with legislative?

I think about it quite similar to you. I’d even go a bit further: shortsighted and bad laws are the biggest source of problems.

Often the kind of law that a populist gains popularity/notoriety through.

Plenty of examples where both public and executive and legislative would’ve deemed certain behaviour problematic, yet the perpetrator, of marginal power, walks free.

I’d say the law also gives power to the marginalized, when the judicial behaves independently, as they should.

I agree with you there are perversions to this ideal, such as elected judges, plea bargains.

There’s never been a time where the world was conflict free, and people merrily skidoodled around.

Happyness is as much internal, as it is influenced by your environment. It takes both. And the relationship is bi-directional.

Blaming the latter for the first, is a dead end.

In my case it was a combination of fear, and misery being comfortable. What’s your reasoning?

Birds of a feather flock together

why would somebody not do it if it would make their life better?

Because they don’t want to get better :(

Learning from past mistakes isn’t an example of free will, though.

Doing so, or not doing so, either one is a choice out of free will. 😉 or is also the outside world that enforces that?

I think RAG will be surpassed by LLMs in a loop with tool calling (aka agents), with search being one of the tools.

DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B

Converting free text to standardized forms such as json

I’ve thought about it and I think you’re right. People feeling caged is what causes so much pain. Pain they then inflict on others.

Could you decide that punching yourself in the face—hard—is enjoyable?

In the past, I have participated in auto mutilation, yes. At a certain point you want to feel anything.

The decision to change is always driven by discomfort with that emotional reaction, another stimulus.

You’re right! And it’s very scary, facing the thing that’s causing the discomfort.

That’s why I spend so much time trying to occupy my mind with puzzles, code, games, alcohol. Anything to distract me! Anything to direct that racing mind towards. But in the end I had to face the discomfort, walk inwards, towards it, to find where it came from.

It wasn’t my body, it wasn’t the calculating part of my mind.

In short, if we all react to the same stimulus in predictable ways, where’s the free will?

Luckily we don’t all react to the same stimulus in the same way. We can look back and learn from past mistakes.

We can share experiences, learn from eachother.

We can look eachother in the eyes.