Location: ~87% of respondents are from Canada

As others mentioned, this would be an interesting data point to validate. I’m not familiar with the server side of Lemmy, but does the server provide any logs which could be used with GeoIP to get a sense of the relative number of connections from different countries? While there is likely to be some misreporting due to VPN usage and the like, it’s likely to be a low enough number of connections to be ignored as “noise” in the data. Depending on the VPNs in question, it may also be possible to run down many of the IP addresses which are VPNs in the connections logs and report “VPN user” as a distinct category. This would also be interesting to see broken out by instance (e.g. what countries are hitting lemmy.world versus lemmy.ml versus lemmy.ca etc.).

All that said, thank you for sharing. These sorts of exercises can be interesting to understand what a population looks like.

My bet is on it never getting completed. It’s going to be a running grift over the next few years. There will be delay after delay after delay with multiple “independent” contractors rolling through to deal with whatever the current delay is. Those contractors will be chosen via a competitive bid process,. The company bidding the highest kickbacks to Trump being awarded the contract. At the end of the Trump administration, anything actually constructed on the grounds will need to be torn down due to engineering failures, and multitudes of bugs planted by foreign spy agencies.

It’s not just speed, CGNAT is a near complete “fuck you” to self-hosting. You can work around it with a VPN endpoint “in the cloud”, but that still means you are reliant on someone else’s computer.

Well,

An economy is really just a way to distribute finite resources in a world with infinite wants. Even the most egalitarian of systems is going to require deciding who gets something and who doesn’t (winner and losers). It’s perfectly valid to be frustrated by being on the “doesn’t” end of that equation. And we (US and other Western Democracies) could certainly do a lot more to shift some of the resources away from the few who are hording a lot of them, even without a radical “tear the system down” approach. The difficulty is the political will to do so.

Unfortunately, mustering political will for a collective good, which may come with some individual losses can be a tough sell. Especially when large parts of a population are comfortable. Not only do you have to convince people that the collective good is an overall good for them, you also have to convince them that the individual losses either won’t effect them or will be mitigated by the upsides of the collective good. And given peoples’ tendency to over emphasize the short term risks over the long term risks, this can be especially hard. But, that doesn’t mean you should give up, just that you need to sharpen your arguments and find ways to convince more people that things can be better for them, if they are willing to take that step.

If everyone bought the dip, the dip would end. Stock prices are only loosely tied to reality. They are more strongly tied to the perception that a stock’s price will increase. So, if people started pouring money into stocks (or other assets) the price of those stocks would naturally rise as they become more scarce and sellers demand a higher price for them. Assuming the reasons for the dip remain, it would just result in the inflation of another bubble.

Take a look back at the whole GameStop (GME) rollercoster. Large investors expected the stock to crater and began taking short positions. Retail investors saw the dip this was causing and bought the stock in droves, forcing the price up beyond anything it had any business being. Eventually, that bubble popped and the stock has settled to a more reasonable (if still higher) level.

Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can “fix” the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

Why can’t the U.S do the same, if Donald Trump is so bad?

We don’t have a legal mechanism for it. In the US Constitution, the people do not have a direct power of impeachment. As a Federalist system, the US Federal Government was designed as a government of governments. So, the power to impeaching the US President is given to Congress, not the people.

Impeachment is a two step process in the US. The House of Representatives (the larger of the two houses) is required to pass Articles of Impeachment which list the reasons for removal. Those are then taken up by the Senate (the smaller house) which tries the President and requires a 2/3 majority to convict the President.

While it’s easy to get a sense that everyone hates the US President, especially here on Lemmy, his popularity isn’t all that far behind previous US Presidents. Yes, he is net unpopular, but not so much that his removal is politically possible. His own party (Republicans) still supports him, and they hold majorities in both houses. As such, they are neither going to pass Articles of Impeachment, nor would they convict him (and most certainly not at the 2/3 level needed in the Senate).

Why are some Americans even supporting him?

The US is rather starkly divided, politically speaking, at the moment. And people will overlook a lot from the leaders of their own party, if it means keeping the other party out of power. Trump is the latest, and one of the more extreme examples of this. His claims that he could shoot someone and not lose any votes may be close to true. There was a special election in 2017 where the Republican candidate had credible allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor. This was for a Senate seat from Alabama, which one would normally expect to vote overwhelmingly Republican. Moore did end up losing, but is was closer than one would expect, when one of the candidates is likely a pedophile.

Again, if your only source of information about US politics comes from Lemmy, you’re getting a very skewed view. Yes, he’s not popular at the moment, but there is a large segment of the US population which agrees with him. And that means we’re kinda stuck with him until 2018.

Oh look, it’s an air mouse. But, you can’t change the battery, the licensing is all kinds of “fuck you”, and with all those gestures, I’m expecting a frustrating experience with the device constantly interpreting unrelated motions into inputs.

immediately lost my $20, never entered a casino again.

You didn’t lose it, you paid $20 for an education in why gambling in a casino is a bad idea. It could have been much, much worse.

As a species, homo sapiens have managed to adapt to every environment on Earth. We are the first species to have any measure of control over the natural forces which have wiped out countless other species. Diseases which once ravaged our populations are now gone or minor inconveniences and we continue to find new ways to mitigate the worst effect of many diseases. Should a large asteroid be heading our way, we are the only species which may stand any chance of diverting it or mitigating the long term impacts when it does hit us. While it was certainly not a “choice”, the evolution of higher cognition, problem solving and intra-species communications has put our species in a unique position of having a high degree of control over out fate. Sure, it has its downsides (we are the only species which might be able to end all life on Earth), but it’s been a pretty amazing run for us. On the balance, I think we’re in a much better position to keep going as a species than our ancestors or cousins (homo erectus, homo hablis, neanderthal, great apes, chimpanzees, etc).

So, was it a “mistake”, I think the current state of evidence is against that. While it may result in a really shit deal for individuals of the species from time to time, as a species I think it would be silly to consider it a mistake.

Short answer, no.

Long answer: We are a long way off from having anything close to the movie villain level of AI. Maybe we’re getting close to the paperclip manufacturing AI problem, but I’d argue that even that is often way overblown. The reason I say this is that such arguments are quite hand-wavy about leaps in capability which would be required for those things to become a problem. The most obvious of which is making the leap from controlling the devices an AI is intentionally hooked up to, to devices it’s not. And it also needs to make that jump without anyone noticing and asking, “hey, what’s all this then?” As someone who works in cybersecurity for a company which does physical manufacturing, I can see how it would get missed for a while (companies love to under-spend on cybersecurity). But eventually enough odd behavior gets picked up. And the routers and firewalls between manufacturing and anything else do tend to be the one place companies actually spend on cybersecurity. When your manufacturing downtime losses are measured in millions per hour, getting a few million a year for NDR tends to go over much better. And no, I don’t expect the AI to hack the cybersecurity, it first needs to develop that capability. AI training processes require a lot of time failing at doing something, that training is going to get noticed. AI isn’t magically good at anything, and while the learning process can be much faster, that speed is going to lead to a shit-ton of noise on the network. And guess what, we have AI and automation running on our behalf as well. And those are trained to shutdown rogue devices attacking the cybersecurity infrastructure.

“Oh wait, but the AI would be sneaky, slow and stealty!” Why would it? What would it have in it’s currently existing model which would say “be slow and sneaky”? It wouldn’t, you don’t train AI models to do things which you don’t need them to do. A paperclip optimizing AI wouldn’t be trained on using network penetration tools. That’s so far outside the need of the model that the only thing it could introduce is more hallucinations and problems. And given all the Frankenstein’s Monster stories we have built and are going to build around AI, as soon as we see anything resembling an AI reaching out for abilities we consider dangerous, it’s going to get turned off. And that will happen long before it has a chance to learn about alternative power sources. It’s much like zombie outbreaks in movies, for them to move much beyond patient zero requires either something really, really special about the “disease” or comically bad management of the outbreak. Sure, we’re going to have problems as we learn what guardrails to put around AI, but the doom and gloom version of only needing one mistake is way overblown. There are so many stopping points along the way from single function AI to world dominating AI that it’s kinda funny. And many of those stopping points are the same, “the attacker (humans) only need to get lucky once” situation. So no, I don’t believe that the paperclip optimizer AI problem is all that real.

That does take us to the question of a real general purpose AI being let loose on the internet to consume all human knowledge and become good at everything, which then decides to control everything. And maybe this might be a problem, if we ever get there. Right now, that sort of thing is so firmly in the realm of sci-fi that I don’t think we can meaningfully analyze it. What we have today, fancy neural networks, LLMs and classifiers, puts us in the same ballpark as Jules Verne writing about space travel. Sure, he might have nailed one or two of the details; but, the whole this was so much more fantastically complex and difficult than he had any ability to conceive. Once we are closer to it, I expect we’re going to see that it’s not anything like we currently expect it to be. The computing power requirements may also limit it’s early deployment to only large universities and government projects, keeping it’s processing power well centralized. General purpose AI may well have the same decapitation problems humans do. They can have fantastical abilities, but they need really powerful data centers to run it. And those bring all the power, cooling and not getting blown the fuck up with a JDAM problems of current AI data centers. Again, we could go back and forth making up ways for AI to techno-magic it’s way around those problems, but it’s all just baseless speculation at this point. And that speculation will also inform the guardrails we build in at the time. It would boil down to the same game children play where they shoot each other with imaginary guns, and have imaginary shields. And they each keep re-imagining their guns and shields to defeat the other’s. So ya, it might be fun for a while, but it’s ultimately pointless.

For someone who spends a lot of time alone and on a computer this will seem anathema, but go find some sort of physical activity (sport) and start engaging in it a few times a week. Not only does this get you out of the house, it creates opportunities to engage with people socially and it is good for your health.

I am very much a stay at home, be in front of my computer type hermit. I was this way most of my life and even being married didn’t help much as my wife is the same. A good Friday night for us currently involves playing Baldur’s Gate 3 until much too late. We have a very small circle of friends and don’t get out much at all. However, now in my late 40’s I am having some health issues and that finally gave me the push to get out of my gaming chair and get my body moving. I took up climbing at an indoor rock climbing gym and I really enjoy it. The regularly changing routes on the walls mean that I get to engage the puzzle solving part of my brain, and I am pushed physically as I try to get better. In between climbs I’m near other people with an obvious shared interest and can practice talking to other people by discussing the routes (social skills are like all skills, they take practice). And the exercise has made my doctor visits a lot less “you’re going to die horribly” and more “we’ve got things pretty well controlled”. I also just feel better.

So ya, go out and find some sort of physical activity you enjoy. Don’t be afraid to try new things, you’ll suck at them but that’s to be expected. The first step in being good at anything is sucking at it. Use that suckage to engage with other people and learn how to suck less. This will help you suck less at socializing. I won’t say that any of this is easy, it’s not. I know there is the hermit piece if me which always wants to fall back into just hiding out in my basement (literally, my office is in my basement). But, I’ve also made a habit of climbing 2-3 times a week and 3 years into doing that I am now looking forward to that time. I get excited when I walk into the gym and see one of the walls changed and now get to solve a new set of climbing routes. I still kinda suck, but not anywhere near as much as I did on my first day.

It’s caused by the speaker not liking what another person is doing, but being unable to articulate a real argument against the behavior. So, they call it “childish” as a way to express that dislike in a socially acceptable fashion.

Harm was going to happen no matter what you do in the trolley problem. There is no situation where harm does not happen, but there is a situation where you directly are causing harm.

Yes, exactly. By taking no action some amount of harm occurs, had you taken action that harm would not have occurred but other harm would have. Ultimately, this is analyzing the extent to which a person is willing to allow harm via inaction versus cause harm through direct action.

Almost none of them actually having a real world application…

Like many thought experiments, the Trolley Problem is an artificial situation intended to isolate certain decision making points so that they can be analyzed. Yes, reality is messy and we often have more than two options. But having this sort of analysis ahead of time can make the real problems less complex to consider. It is also useful for looking at our philosophical frameworks and where they break down.

Personally, if I could go the rest of my life without hearing about the trolley problem that’d be great actually.

The Trolley Problem is a tool for examining our beliefs. Throwing it away because it is imperfect and uncomfortable only leads to a blindness of self.

One of the issues the Trolley Problem explores is people’s differing willingness to allow harm versus cause it. And that can hold even when the level of harm caused by inaction is significantly higher than what is caused by taking action. E.g. If your personal philosophy dictates that killing someone is always wrong, does it hold if your inaction causes 5 deaths, 10, 50? What if we start tinkering with the people dying? Would you kill a 90 year old man to save a train full of children? The Trolley Problem is really just a starting point to examine that dichotomy between causing harm and allowing harm and just how permeable the line between them can be when you start changing the conditions. Attaching other moral choices to the problem is one way to use the problem to explore a set of beliefs.

Choosing not to act is still making a choice and may still result in a negative outcome. It’s the classic trolley problem. While you may not cause harm through an active choice, your inaction can still lead directly to a negative outcome.

Mexican, because life is just better with spices.
American, given that American “culture” is really just cultural appropriation with added sugar and calories, I’ll get to try something close to every other cuisine.

Well, to me, it seems pretty paradoxical, almost in the same Rousseauesque line of “I’m forced to be free”.

That’s fair, but it’s either we force all people to exist or no one ever has the opportunity to make a choice. An unfortunate fact of life is that a lot of things will happen to you, without you having a choice. Some of that will suck, some of it will be fantastic, much of it will be somewhere in between. You will never get to choose everything which happens to you, all you can choose is how you react to it. Pain and suffering is valid, but so is joy. If you choose to focus on pain and suffering, that’s up to you. But ya, that’s kinda the response of the angsty teenager.

Sorry but you distorted my words. In no moment I said “everyone needs to die”, and I challenge anyone accusing me of that to point out where I said this.

Fair enough, that was me getting absurd.

What I’ve been saying throughout this Lemmy thread is how humans are inherently evil (as per Hobbesian philosophy, not out of hatred misanthropy)

This one would be fun to expand one. Though, fair warning, I tend to dive into moral relativism and will put Hobbe’s philosophy up as an appeal to authority and his idea of some “state of nature” as just a “noble savage myth” wrapped in fancy language. Speaking of “noble savage” style myths…

No other lifeforms developed nuclear warheads, no other lifeforms shrug off when children starve.

Ok ya, we have fancier ways to kill each other, but the idea that animals don’t is complete bullshit. Wild animals which have too many young will kill or abandon the extra young to conserve resources. If you’re an old enough fart, you might recall people quoting Planet of the Apes (the one without CGI), “ape don’t kill ape”. Except, that ya, they do. Primates are known to kill and eat other groups of primates, even within the same species. Competition for resources and all the brutality that entails predates modern humans and it predates cities and agriculture by a long way. Sure, we have absolutely raised it a to terrifying scale. But, we really aren’t that different from our stick wielding forebearers.

Even Earth herself isn’t eternal, for the Sun will engulf the Earth as part of its transformation to Giant Red.

Speaking of things we have no choice about, this is one of them. Given the vast expanses of interstellar space, there’s a good chance that this really will spell the end for humanity. On the upshot, we’ve got a few million years (maybe a billion or two) before the Sun gets hot enough to make Earth uninhabitable (assuming we don’t speed that one up ourselves). If we figure nothing out in that time, we’ll be long dead before the Sun goes Red Giant. At the same time, humanity went from the first powered flight at Kittyhawk to humans walking on the Moon in the span of a single human life. We’re a clever bunch and might just sort something out. I like our chances and would love to give us a shot.

Yes. Then, Science was hijacked by capitalism, becoming something sponsored by capital goals, one which sees people as cogs in the machine because “profit must go up”.

Science has always been beholden to economics and war. Capitalism didn’t change that. Again, you’ve latched on to a mythical past. It didn’t exist. Leonardo Da Vinci invented a lot of stuff, much of it was designing better ways for one idiot with an upgraded stick to kill another idiot with a less upgraded stick. Even early hominids were working on better ways to gather resources and kill each other. It’d be great if we can ever change this, but until we sort out some sort of technological singularity (probably itself just a utopian myth), scientific work will take resources which means it’s part of whatever economic theory is currently being used. Economics is always trying to find a way to distribute finite resources in a world of infinite wants. Every economic system has advantages and disadvantages. Capitalism is just getting its opportunity to display its disadvantages at the moment.

Yes. And, on one hand, this improved quality of life (= less physical suffering). On the other hand, it empowered capitalism so people became increasingly reliant on a system that seeks to perpetuate their slavery (= ontological, invisible suffering).

Given what came before (feudalism), I’ll take capitalism and it’s “slavery” (so edgy) any day of the week. Seriously, for anyone in a first world country, sit back and look at the embarrassment of choices and riches you have available to you today. Go to a grocery store, buy a pineapple and eat it. You have now done something that would have been considered the height of indulgence in the 18th Century. Go to your bathroom, take a shit, flush. This would have blown the minds of most of humanity prior to the 19th Century (some really rich Romans wouldn’t have been all that impressed). To me, this exemplifies the weakness in your philosophy, you are quick to validate suffering but refuse to validate progress, joy or anything positive about existence. There are many, many good things in life but you refuse to recognize them, or seek to minimize them. The philosophy is so caught up in the negative, it fails to recognize the good, only calling it “less physical suffering”. And I call that bullshit. The good things in life are good, not a reduction in suffering. The default state is not suffering, you only see it that way because you choose to.

Improving human condition also means avoiding suffering from future generations: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7422788/

I’ll have to apologize, I’ve only made it to the end of Section 4 of the linked paper. It’s getting late and I’m getting pretty deep in my cups (one of humanity’s best, early inventions, booze). I do plan to pick it up in the morning, it’s an interesting read. But this is starting to sound suspiciously like the eugenicist movement of the early 20th Century. The authors also seem to recognize this and are doing a lot of “no really, we’re not those people”:

More troublesome is the realization that, as mentioned, many folks view any efforts to contain population growth as homicide, etc.

Ya, let’s have a critical look at China’s One Child Policy and then come back and tell me how great your policy is. Or, you know, what Eugenicists got up to in the early 20th Century. It might just be that the reason “many folks view any efforts to contain population growth as homicide” is because it always seems to turn out that way. But who knows, maybe the authors really do have A Brave New World planned and I just haven’t read that far yet.

Population growth is already slowing (something the paper mentions). Access to education and birth control already started bending that curve. In fact, most first world countries are already facing shrinking populations. No fancy “don’t have kids” push needed. The economic consequences of this are going to be a “fun” ride and may lead to the sort of suffering the authors are hoping to avoid. Or not, managing a shrinking population may not be an insurmountable economic problem. Japan is kinda doing OK, after all. But, so far is seems that the most effective method for long term population control is less eugenics and more first world development.

To try and sum this all up, I’d note that you seem to be arguing less about anti-natalism and more about the harms of unconstrained capitalism. I’m all on board with the latter, less so the former. We need more socialism (at least in the US). Modern capitalism is broken and that’s only going to be solved via higher taxes and greater wealth redistribution. Even people who believe wholeheartedly in capitalism should recognize that the level of wealth accumulation, rent seeking and regulatory capture have created distortions in the market which are not healthy for capitalism. We’ve entered a new Guilded Age and it’s time to break out the monopoly busting hammer. But, let’s leave the Eugenics in the dustbin of history, it wasn’t good the last time, it won’t be good this time.

Before I was born, there’s this… nothingness. No fleeting happiness, but also no suffering. There was no pain, no angst, nothing but the nothingness. Then I was pulled, without the ability to choose positively or negatively… now the blame is on me: “you really feel that existence is that horrible, there’s a solution for that at your nearest tall bridge”. Why should a person have to go through the painful to opt-out, risking failure?

Because there is no other way to determine what that choice would be. If you don’t exist, you cannot opt-in. So, the only way to give people any choice is to force them into life and let them opt out. Sure, it’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the only one which provides a choice.

Were/Are David Benatar, Philipp Mainländer, among other thinkers who extensively wrote about this subject, eternal “teenagers”?

Yup, I’m willing to stand behind that statement. It’s entirely possible to be well educated and still be stuck in teenage angst.

Are the scientists who’ve been tirelessly reporting on how human activity is endangering all lifeforms, and/or those who reported about microplastics everywhere, and/or those who tried to report about the consequences of Industrial Revolution, driven by “teenager angst”?

Ah going for the absurd now? Pointing out problems is very different from the edgy “everyone needs to die” philosophy. Quite the opposite, really. Fixing problems requires identifying them. If the goal is complete human eradication, identifying problems and putting forward solutions is counter productive. Scientific advancement is the reason we have so many people on the planet. Prior to the late 19th Century, diseases like small pox and bacterial infections were doing a bang up job of suppressing the human population. And then we came up with the germ theory of diseases and vaccines. So no, I won’t put scientists down as full of “teenager angst”. Maybe some of them are, I certainly don’t know them all. But, working hard to improve the human condition seems a pretty far cry from “why don’t we all just die?”