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I recently at around 42yo learned how to darn/mend my socks. My mom taught me how to do it.

I have enough money that I could just throw my socks with holes to throw trash and buy new ones inconsequentialy, but mending them by hand gives me something, it is kind of therapeutic and a sense of accomplishment.

Im sure there are machines that could do it in a second, or a patch I could stick on it as well.

Point being that we can still find satisfaction in doing things by hand that technology can do fast/easily. We just stop doing it by hand for profit.

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I too enjoy mending my socks! I wear mostly cotton athletic socks, so sewing them up is enough. I can't darn worth a darn.

Patches I tried didn't last and I haven't found a machine that works. And it feels bad to buy a new pair of socks only b/c of a hole in the heel.


Do you use a washing machine or do you manually wash your clothes in a stream?

Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.

AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.


>Much of modern life is automating away the boring useless bits.

>AI, on the other hand, changes the conversation on what’s boring or useless.

A compression algorithm finds and removes redundancy. Simple automation is like simple compression algorithms (RLE like). AI (which even internally - at least the encoding to the representation parts - looks like compression) just like a much more sophisticated compression algorithm which finds and removes redundancy where we thought the creativity and originality were.

It does look like our civilization has accumulated a lot of cruft masquerading as creative/original/intellectual activities ("Bullshit jobs" comes to mind, also all that talk about stagnation in science, and all those huge collective collaborations - where collective there is a stagnation - and now with AI individual scientists will again be able to wield all the bleeding edge across the wide fields while digging deep in desired target research direction), and the AI is the vacuum cleaner for that cruft.




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