Not just computers. If conscious experience (qualia) is just an innate consequence of information being processed*, regardless of the substrate upon which that occurs, then e.g. a sundial must be very faintly self-aware.
*And just asserting that doesn't give any actual insight into how qualia arise or work
Corvos
4mo ago
The creed is viable, inclusion and exclusion work, the nation prospers, but the creed isn't actually western liberalism so we don't want it. I have no examples on hand.
The Amish? Depending on your definition of 'prosper'.
Corvos
4mo ago
I wonder if this is just a general human behaviour, and we would have seen exactly the same pattern discussing the Dreyfus Affair in 1894.
Corvos
4mo ago
Protestors took over a section of Seattle to create a literal militarised zone in the middle of a major city that seceded from the United States, in which multiple people were murdered. I can't find records of any associated prosecutions.
On the one hand there was no possible way this threatened the US government. CHAZ was dismantled by force after a month, once enough people had tied that police felt okay taking action.
On the other hand I can't see any viable way that Jan 6 threatened the government either. People broke into the government building for a while, milled around and then left. There's no chance they make it past armed security to the VIPs and even if they had, it would have sucked for the VIPs but not affected the US government one iota.
If your argument is that senior officials take threats to themselves from the outgroup much much more seriously than threats to vastly greater numbers of people arising from looting, burning and murder by the ingroup then I agree with you but it doesn't paint a pretty picture.
Corvos
4mo ago
I can't help feeling that once you get to the point where you're telling clear, absolutely 100% barefaced lies to public representatives in public on a question of massive public interest, you're reaching 'Here be Dragons' on the map of morals. "If such programs existed, they would be classified and I would be unable to discuss the subject" is about as far as I think you can go before you're in serious danger of losing your soul.
The traditional thing is singing in the bath(room). The tiles resonate nicely for everyone else in the building :)
A family friend was once met in the hotel corridor by a Frenchman who complimented him on his rendition of The Marseillaise; the walls had carried the notes from his ensuite perfectly but thankfully not my friend's words which were his own private tune and began:
"A French-man saaat on the laaaaavatory...!"
Corvos
4mo ago
I think you’re right. Twenty years ago, though, he wouldn’t have got away with a lot of the controversies he’s had.
What happened IMO is that the sheer unilateralness of reputational attacks (and the increasingly obvious willingness to manufacture them) became so clear that people stopped going along with it.
The same process is not quite as advanced in the UK which is one reason why Boris Johnson was brought down by IMO a largely confected scandal: Cakegate.
In an ideal world, we would all retrench and agree on what compromises we need to see and what rules we’re seriously willing to hold in common, but people don’t work like that and neither side believes they’ll gain more from peace than war.
Corvos
4mo ago
it’s yours, so you can do what you want with it
One problem is that most computers these days is basically a monitor attached to an Ethernet port. Even excluding licenses and EULAs, almost nothing important is happening on hardware you own.
Corvos
4mo ago
Yep, this is the base of it as always. Humans gonna human. Not even sure it's a bad thing per se.
Corvos
4mo ago
I think everyone here is putting far too much thought into this. The well-to-do hate and fear Trump for the same reason that others love him: because he’s been spamming I AM YOUR OUTGROUP signals at them ever since he rode up a golden escalator and announced that Mexicans coming over the border were largely rapists and thugs, and nobody has been able to nobble him for it.
Corvos
4mo ago
older than me
Double-dipping but my instinct is to say that this is correct. In the same way you would use 'He is older than her' rather than 'He is older than she'. But I see there is much disagreement.
I like this reddit post:
So, in the future, you're really better off consulting Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage for questions like this. You can see a preview here.
What it has to say on the issue of than, starting on the left column of page 892, is that "[a] dispute over whether than is a preposition or a conjunction has been going on now for more than two centuries. It is one portion of the price we pay for the 18th-century assumption that the parts of speech of Latin and Greek are readily applicable to English, an assumption that continues to gain uncritical acceptance to this day."
After describing the side championed by Lowth 1762 (holding essentially that after than comes the nominative case, except than whom), the side you're basically getting here, it quite sensibly allows for the use of than as preposition or conjunction, licensing both "taller than I" and "taller than me", citing Shakespeare ("A man no mightier than thyself or me", Julius Caesar, 1600), and several distinguished 19th and 20th century authors for prepositional uses of the phrase.
https://old.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/oig7q/my_brother_is_two_years_older_than_i_or_than_me/
Corvos
4mo ago
If anime has taught me anything, it's that any physical effort must be accompanied by
haAAH! URYAAH!! dOORYAAAA!!! or at the very least yoi-shou!
You should hear me taking out the bins on a Monday morning...
(All joking aside, I almost never make noise when lifting and it's irritating when other people moan on every rep)
Corvos
4mo ago
I’d say the good thing about python is it lets you do just about anything. Any attributes of an objects can be called at any time, you can pass anything into any function, etc.
The bad thing about Python is of course that it lets you do just about anything.
Corvos
4mo ago
This also brought me completely out of the experience. There are mods to fix it but I haven’t got around to trying them.
Corvos
4mo ago
I didn't particularly mean my explanation to be insulting to feminism, I get why they were annoyed by it - from a certain perspective, it sidelines one sex and stereotypes it at the same time. But at the same time, the gender of an unknown person is either male or female. There's no particular insult in having a conventional default, any more than it insults 1 if your binary values default to 0.
Corvos
4mo ago
I was expecting a very light buzz, not to check out. Stuff is so potent now and it's quite cheap. I'm fairly experienced with drugs but this caught me by surprise.
Just musing: is this a success for capitalism, in the way that the drive for efficiency and efficacy produced aspirin from willow bark? Or a failure, because the new enhanced product isn't actually what the majority of potential customers want, and may taint the old product? Now that the production process for cocaine is known, nobody gets to buy coca leaves to chew for their mild buzz.
Corvos
4mo ago
In the past, this would just be 'he' unless there was context otherwise in which case you guess in what's now considered a sexist, stereotyping way (if you are talking about someone at an embroidery club 'she', if you are talking about a general 'he' etc. etc.). Feminism didn't like this, creating the subsequent problem.
Corvos
4mo ago
Thank you for the detailed breakdown. I see that the letter of the law regarding child abuse is much more detailed - as it should be, given the greater importance of children and the sad ratio of corpse abuse : child abuse.
In the spirit of contrarianism, I will point out that if, say, my friend moved abroad and didn't speak to his elderly mother for years, I would consider him to have 'treated her badly' in standard parlance despite and precisely because of the lack of any positive acts. 'Treatment' may be a term of art in law and have a slightly different meaning there though.
Corvos
4mo ago
(2) The legal issue of whether a person can be guilty of abuse of a corpse by simply leaving it alone (rather than a more typical situation of fucking a corpse or dumping a corpse out of the back of a van) is unintuitive. I would not have expected it to come out this way after reading the statute.
Without knowing anything about the relevant law, it makes sense to me that you can abuse a corpse by leaving it alone in the same way you can abuse a child by leaving it alone.
Partly this is because a corpse is treated sort of like a living thing from a spiritual point of view. We treat them as having certain feelings, or at the very least as having the relatives and dead person's feelings attached to them - it is tragic if they are mutilated or forgotten, we want to lay them to rest in a nice place, etc. Like books or an abandoned teddy bear, a corpse is not just a corpse.
Partly this is because a corpse is, in a much more awful sense, a living thing. An ecosystem. Which is going to go very badly if you don't care for it appropriately.
Corvos
4mo ago
Agreed, that’s what I was implying really. So it’s only ‘sort-of’ legal in the UK.
Corvos
4mo ago
I can't empathise with this at all. I would rather see everyone happy (even in less that dignified circumstances) than dead. Obviously neither of these are my preferred outcomes.
Corvos
4mo ago
I don't have personal knowledge, but it's not quite that simple:
In Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), the act of engaging in prostitution or exchanging various sexual services for money is legal,[2] but a number of related activities, including soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, and pimping, are illegal. In Northern Ireland, which previously had similar laws, paying for sex became illegal from 1 June 2015.[3]
Taking money after having sex with someone seems to be legal, but the activities required to enable such transactions at scale are not legal. Certainly we have no red light districts that I'm aware of, and I have never heard of anything from anyone I know ever describing any interaction with prostitutes in any form.
I'm sure it happens, but it's furtive and not in the public eye.
It's complicated. They can't protect from depredations by more advanced neighbours, so in that sense no. But they aren't necessarily competing for the same type of resources. 'Produces food if you leave them alone' isn't the worst civilisation trait to have in a neighbour but it depends on whether you are Nuclear Gandhi.
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