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Not without someone getting a ban.

H.P. Lovecraft entered the chat

You know, I don’t even disagree with that sentiment in principle, but expecting people to suffer when they could benefit from a technology because they only see the threats and dangers makes them no different than antivaxxers.

It is possible and logically consistent to urge caution and condemn the worst abuses of technology without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

But no… I guess because the awful aspects of the technology as far as IP theft are - rightfully - the biggest focus, sorry, poor people, you just have to keep sucking it up and powering through! You want empathy, fork over the $100 an hour!

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Look, if you can afford therapy, really, fantastic for you. But the fact is, it’s an extremely expensive luxury, even at poor quality, and sharing or unloading your mental strain with your friends or family, particularly when it is ongoing, is extremely taxing on relationships. Sure, your friends want to be there for you when they can, but it can put a major strain depending on how much support you need. If someone can alleviate that pressure and that stress even a little bit by talking to a machine, it’s in extremely poor taste and shortsighted to shame them for it. Yes, they’re willfully giving up their privacy, and yes, it’s awful that they have to do that, but this isn’t like sharing memes… in the hierarchy of needs, getting the pressure of those those pent up feelings out is important enough to possibly be worth the trade-off. Is it ideal? Absolutely not. Would it be better if these systems were anonymized? Absolutely. But humans are natural anthropomorphizers. They develop attachments and build relationships with inanimate objects all the time. And a really good therapist is more a reflection for you to work through things yourself anyway, mostly just guiding your thoughts towards better patterns of thinking. There’s no reason the machine can’t do that, and while it’s not as good as a human, it’s a HUGE improvement on average over nothing at all.

Found the non-European.

I think we already have a term for leasing a girlfriend…

We’ve got a term for the middle-man gatekeepers who collect the money too.

I hope everyone learns the lesson from the Japanese dude who married his hologram just to watch her die when the service was shut down…

If your girlfriend isn’t running on your air-gapped hardware offline, she’s not your girlfriend.

In this case you happen to be right on both counts.

Separating the message from the messenger is a key skill. A right answer doesn’t become wrong because it comes from a jerk.