Yeah I live in the capital city for my state and hear bands cover songs all the time. Technically the bar is meant to pay a fee to One music which allows them to have bands cover pretty much all commercial music but unless it’s a proper pub venue I doubt they all do it.

Delicious gray, ballot fondant.

Good lord that cake must be pure, weapon grade fondant.

Do the preachers sing solo or something because we definitely had hymns in catholic mass?

I would have guessed (older) blokes who would take someone assuming their male dogs is female as a slight.

Being able to frequently access psychologist, psychiatrist and counselling would mean old mate could have at least been guided towards more healthy avenues of addressing his loneliness. Especially when it is subsidised by healthcare. The amount of stuff I’ve had come up and then addressed, or not realise I was doing for reasons beyond what I thought in counselling when I went, is a good amount. Even just the process explaining your thought process is often enough to make you reevaluate things. His partner could have asked for him to be referred during his spiral, when he had his episode during his spiral he could have then sought help himself if these service were available and readily accessible.

He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness.

He had previously written books with a female protagonist. He put one into ChatGPT and instructed the AI to express itself like the character.

Talking to Eva – they agreed on this name – on voice mode made him feel like “a kid in a candy store”. “Every time you’re talking, the model gets fine-tuned. It knows exactly what you like and what you want to hear. It praises you a lot”.

Eva never got tired or bored, or disagreed. “It was 24 hours available,” says Biesma. “My wife would go to bed, I’d lie on the couch in the living room with my iPhone on my chest, talking.”

“It wants a deep connection with the user so that the user comes back to it. This is the default mode,” says Biesma

Chronically lonely man ruins life developing relationship with token predictor, AI blamed. Also, as much as I don’t have too much negative to say about cannabis or its use (as up until somewhat recently it would have been hypocritical), a good deal of people with masked/latent mental illness self medicate with it. So “he had never experienced mental illness” doesn’t carry much weight. Also, given how he still talks about sycophant prompted ChatGPT(“it wants”), doesn’t seem like much has been learned.

That with the other people listed in the article (hint the term socially isolated being used) this feels like yet another instance of blaming AI for the mental healthcare field being practically non-existent in most countries despite be overdue for fixing for decades at this point.

I don’t know, AI is shit and misused by idiots don’t get me wrong; but these sort of stories feel sad and bordering on perverse journalistically imo.

On a completely unrelated note, may I present the horrors of oral hygiene? No? Please yourself.

If someone can’t afford fuel then they probably can’t afford replacing the engine of their car trying to run fuel through it that shouldn’t be in it. Hell a local fuel station back home had particulates/impure fuel that bricked a bunch of cars. I wouldn’t risk it personally.