Allero

60-year-old man who had a "history of studying nutrition in college" decided to try a health experiment: He would eliminate all chlorine from his diet

Oh well, it started before ChatGPT even had a chance to make it worse.

Everything I do is wrong

Changing workplace, if possible

Nothing really matters

Meaningful activities outside work

I'm sure you heard it already, but both are complicated, which is why people often stick with what they hate. But both are so important and true you need to find ways to achieve it.

For me, I found meditation to be the easiest point of entry into shaking my life up. It takes 10 minutes a day, requires near-zero willpower to execute (unlike, say, exercises, which are otherwise great), it helps me ground, relax and find out what I really think of stuff when I'm not pressured by a concrete wall of stress.

After that, YMMV. I found out I can safely gear down and live a better life with less load for a while, even if it means less income (not that I was rich to begin with, but one thing even worse than poverty is living at work you hate). I've found inspiration in nature, long walks, and finding small things that matter. I also found it in people and joined some local activism. And from there, I looked for ways to get back to higher income without compromising my integrity.

I still struggle with exercises and sometimes healthy diet, but I fuck off myself and do what I can, and know I do my best. Now I wake up with purpose and get to bed without regret. It's not sunshine and rainbows, but way better than it was before.

Oh, and I restored my previous income, but with less pain and misery, doing what I like. I'm sure I could again pick a better paying career and earn twice as much as I do now, but screw it, it's not worth it.

Yes.

During prolonged and extensive stresses, a brain temporarily loses some of the ability to pay attention and remember.

When the stressful part is over, your memory will restore. I would not advise to strongarm through it, though - find a way to unload yourself and find better rest before your body forces you to by introducing stress-induced health issues you'll have to address.

Been there, lost a lot of health to it, don't recommend.

Also, agree with others saying you need to sleep well. Sleep is essential at sorting your memories and preparing you for the day. During the periods of stress and processing a lot of data it is more essential than ever.

All kidding aside, support for self-hosted server or just a local program to store and visualize your data would be amazing

Alright, we generally seem to be on the same page :)

(Except numerous great books and helpful short materials exist for virtually any popular major, and, while they take longer to study, they provide order of magnitude better knowledge)

While I don't fully share the notion and tone of other commenter, I gotta say LLMs have absolutely tanked education and science, as noted by many and as I witnessed firsthand.

I'm a young scientist on my way to PhD, and I get to assist in a microbiology course for undergraduates.

The amount of AI slop coming from student assignments is astounding, and worse of all - they don't see it themselves. When it comes to me checking their actual knowledge, it's devastating.

And it's not just undergrads - many scientific articles also now have signs of AI slop, which messes up with research to a concerning degree.

Personally, I tried using more specialized tools like Perplexity in Research mode to look for sources, but it royally messed up listing the sources - it took actual info from scientific articles, but then referenced entirely different articles that hold no relation to it.

So, in my experience LLMs can be useful to generate a simple text or help you tie known facts together. But as a learning tool...be careful, or rather just don't use them for that. Classical education exists for a good reason, and it is that you learn to get factually correct and relevant information, analyze it and keep it in your head for future reference. It takes more time, but is ultimately much worth it.

Modern LLMs can serve you for most tasks while running locally on your machine.

Something like GPT4ALL will do the trick on any platform of your choosing if you have at least 8gb of RAM (and for most people nowadays it's true).

It has a simple, idiot-proof GUI and doesn't collect data if you don't allow it to. It's also open source, and, being local, it does not need Internet connection once you downloaded a model you need (which normally takes a single-digit number of gigabytes).

Just...do both, and keep some parts of your life separate. Have a public face, talk to regular folks etc, and then have your hidden community of privacy enthusiasts that you manage accordingly.

If they're all gone, all the expensive protection measures are not necessary anymore, so it's a very pragmatic question.