balsoft

If it was unusually selfish to care about how you were honored after you die, then nobody would be buying grave monuments or fancy urns.

I wouldn’t say unusually, but yes, people are known to be selfish and immature sometimes. Especially when faced with something scary and unavoidable, like death, and backed by culture and tradition.

I imagine it makes them feel like their child doesn’t love them as much as they thought they did.

People receive and express love in different ways. Not understanding and engaging with that is immature. Trying to manipulate another person into doing something uncomfortable after your death for no material reason at all is selfish.

Sometimes we bear little burdens for the people we love, and that’s totally normal, in my opinion.

Maybe the father can bear the little burden of not doing anything and not being materially affected in any way, then.

The reasons to visit a funeral are:

1. If it helps you process your own grief
2. If you can/want to help others process their grief

If, when your father dies, you feel overpowered with emotions, you should consider going, because a ritualized, socialized process like this can really help you process the sadness in a healthier way. If you care about your mother or other relatives and think your attendance will help them process the loss, you should go. Don’t let your annoying aunts ruin your mental health or relationships with people you care about.

If neither of those applies, you are fully justified in skipping the event.

As for what to tell your father: I would say a white lie is justified in this particular case, whatever you decide to do in the end. He will not know whether or not your attend. Yes, this is treating him like a child; however, by manipulating you to attend an event which definitionally will not affect his life in any way, he is already being childish. Unfortunately this is how some people are, it doesn’t mean you can’t love or respect them in other aspects.

On the other hand, it is immature and even selfish to care about the details of your own funeral. Your funeral is specifically an event for people who loved you, to process their grief. You will definitionally not be around to care about any of it, let your loved ones process their grief however they want.

Yes, fair.

Computers could make cars a lot more reliable and moddable. It’s proprietary/locked-down software and hardware that’s the problem.

I would hope that the Switch falls under “Tablets”. Because that’s exactly what it is.

Video consoles are either desktop computers with proprietary parts, or tablets with proprietary parts. There is nothing especially difficult to repair in them compared to the rest of their categories.

In that case, what are they doing to college for?

But also the problem is that they cheat.

Using AI is easy, as you note. You don’t need to go to college to learn to do that.

College can give you many useful skills, mostly related to gathering and processing information, and applying it to solve various issues. If you just copy-paste every question into AI and then copy-paste the answer back, you will learn absolutely nothing.

LLMs hallucinate and there’s nothing we can do to stop them. No amount of QA will fix that fundamental issue of “the LLM is somewhat likely to confidently produce incorrect information”, if you need the answer to be correct you have to do the research yourself, maybe based on the sources the LLM provided, not just sanity-check the output. This is a very useful skill to have for many jobs involving thinking or finding stuff out.

And even if we fix the hallucinations at some point by switching to a different tech (LOL), I do think it’s useful for people to keep some mental skills. Otherwise we will end up with a stupidity and/or dementia epidemics, similar to cars causing an obesity epidemic.