I was in your shoes a few years ago. I barely ate and struggled sleeping for longer than was healthy. My therapist recommended me the book: “Sophie’s World”, which is a both a story and also a crash course in philosophy and its history at the same time. Reading that slowly and reflecting on each chapter has personally helped me a lot in being more okay with existing.

Don’t ignore the whole other stuff with the failed bombing etc.

From wikipedia:

At 10:10 am,[75] Franz Ferdinand’s car approached and Čabrinović threw his bomb. The bomb bounced off the folded back convertible cover into the street.[76] The bomb’s timed detonator caused it to explode under the next car, putting that car out of action, leaving a 1-foot-diameter (0.30 m), 6.5-inch-deep (170 mm) crater,[75] and wounding 16–20 people.[77]

Čabrinović swallowed his cyanide pill and jumped into the Miljacka river. Čabrinović’s suicide attempt failed, as the old cyanide only induced vomiting, and the Miljacka was only 13 cm deep due to the hot, dry summer.[78] Police dragged Čabrinović out of the river, and he was severely beaten by the crowd before being taken into custody.

Just the mental image of him chucking himself into a river after the failed bombing and then also failing his suicide on two fronts…

The train of thought that leads to that belief is usually along the lines of: We’re the only sample we have. It’s more likely than not that what our planet and ecosystem has produced is not an outlier but the norm.

That being said, of course I strongly believe those to be fake and also assume that there is a huge amount of variance in what intelligent life with potential to develop spacefaring technology could look like. Therefore we’re probably not an outlier, but the possibilities within non-outliers are still so vast that our first contact would likely look a lot different.

Angela Merkel is a famous example of someone who has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and was a researcher before turning to politics.

Everything is a poison.

I don’t think that:

The tool embeds a digital “watermark” directly into the image that can’t be seen by the human eye but can be picked up by a computer that’s been trained to read it.

Is gonna be helpful for keeping AI generated images out of training sets. It would require the people who make the model to actually implement that tool into their model.

I don’t think most researchers not affiliated with google will chose to do that.