I intentionally ended things with someone I had thought was a close friend recently. They had been flaky and fickle for probably a year or so now (basically every since they met their current partner), never really reached out and when they did it was always some weirdly hurtful way (for example, on my birthday they sent me a message that started with “as you know, I’m in [different country]”, despite not talking to me at all for a month or two)

I had a borderline mini-mental breakdown earlier this year, reached out to them for some support and whilst they were supportive, after meeting me for lunch I jokingly said that “next time we can talk about the stuff you’re probably interested in [i.e. the stuff that was getting to me]” and their response was “I literally don’t care about things people don’t want to tell me about”.

The final straw was when one of the two kittens I adopted a few months ago died very suddenly, and their response after my housemate and our mutual friend told them about it was to send me three tiktok videos (their only direct messages to me for probably a month or more, and based on the timestamps just them wasting time on their daily bus journey). I waited a few days just to make sure I wasn’t missing some context, then lost my temper and told them “I genuinely don’t know what the fuck is wrong with you that you think this is an appropriate response”, at which point they blamed me for not telling them myself and said they weren’t going to be my “emotional punching bag”.

I just decided they’re narcissistic enough that they thought the smallest token of their attention would make me feel grateful, blocked them on every platform I could think of and will probably never intentionally interact with them again.

The worst part is seeing mutual acquaintances treating them like they are good people - either they are and I feel shit because somehow I wasn’t worth it or they’re not and they’re getting the benefits of being a good person without the actual hard work. Hard not to take it as a really personal rejection of who I am as a person either way.

One thing worth noting is it is easier to fire something out of the solar system than it is to fire it into the Sun. In fact firing something into the Sun might actually be impossible with our current technology!

The joke is that it’s happening to someone other than them.

It’s obvious, giraffes have patches to fix any bugs in their original implementations.

On the one hand, you are right. On the other hand, will the consumers of robotaxis want to use small cars or will they push for full size ones?

He always struck me as one of those people who wasn’t, in his heart of hearts, actually left-wing, but rather just wanted to be counter-cultural. The culture has shifted around him and now if he wants to be counter-cultural it means being alt-right.

A famous example of a deaf/blind person is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Keller - this article contains some explanations about how she was able to learn to communicate with the world.