Um, has there ever been a time Sony, the rootkit DRM company has not called for state intervention to enforce IP laws regarding Sony holdings? (All the while Sony pirates anyone else’s stuff.)
This is like the news that Comcast objects to municipal areas opening up Comcast monopoly regions to new ISPs. Sony is almost as bas as Nintendo when it comes to their franchises.
You’re not alone in your sentiment. The whole thought experiment of p-zombies and the notion of qualia comes from a desire to assume human beings should be given a special position, but in that case, a sentient is who we decide it is, the way Sophia the Robot is a citizen of Saudi Arabia (even though she’s simpler than GPT-2 (unless they’ve upgraded her and I missed the news.)
But it will raise a question when we do come across a non-human intelligence. It was a question raised in both the Blade Runner movies, what happens when we create synthetic intelligence that is as bright as human, or even brighter? If we’re still capitalist, assuredly the companies that made them will not be eager to let them have rights.
Obviously machines and life forms as sophisticated as we are are not merely the sum of our parts, but the same can be said about most other macro-sized life on this planet, and we’re glad to assert they are not sentient the way we are.
What aggravates me is not that we’re just thinking meat but with all our brilliance we’re approaching multiple imminent great filters and seem not to be able to muster the collective will to try and navigate them. Even when we recognize that our behavior is going to end us, we don’t organize to change it.
An alarming number of Hollywood screenwriters believe consciousness (sapience, self awareness, etc.) is a measurable thing or a switch we can flip.
At best consciousness is a sorites paradox. At worst, it doesn’t exist and while meat brains can engage in sophisticated cognitive processes, we’re still indistinguishable from p-zombies.
I think the latter is more likely, and will reveal itself when AGI (or genetically engineered smart animals) can chat and assemble flat furniture as well as humans can.
(On mobile. Will add definition links later.) << Done!
According to the dogma it’s a promotion. Gathered unto God. However, even within the church there is controversy regarding how heaven is attained by a person, which really comes down to which passages you prioritize and how you interpret them. If we went by the strictest standards, Heaven would be empty (contrast to Hell, which could have up to five-hundred-billion souls, mostly in the Limbo of the Innocents)
Francis himself, asserted only God knows what’s on the other side, and the true nature of divine judgement. And yet no small number of ministers and bishops presume they know what scripture is meant to say.
Here to add that this is my problem too, and I have a therapist… that I talk to by phone once every 2-3 weeks (Here in the states psychotherapy openings are impacted so anyone who doesn’t have super-good insurance is on the wayside) and she’s more of a CBT coach.
I’m trying to figure out why anyone is alarmed that I want to head to the check-out lane, given our society elected the party that regards us all as expendable, and very much wants there to be fewer Americans and more elbow room for the MAGAs.
As I’m likely to be elevated on the list of priority persons to get the CECOT treatment, I still need to arrange for a rapid exit strategy for when ICE stormtroopers blast down my apartment door. Kennedy Jr. has some serious beef with us ASD folk, and as someone who is on a fixed income (though I’ve had jobs and even have written poetry) am exactly the sort that he wants to purge.
For the moment, I am currently living for a cat and a dog. I regard them as persons and can’t trust anyone else to. And so am very reluctant to re-home them until I cannot support them any longer. I might be living so as to not traumatize my wife (we’re separated) but lately I seem to be more of an obligation and a burden. It didn’t help she went to a family Easter event to which I was uninvited. I spent the day alone.
What I don’t understand is why elected officials claim that people like me are a burden to the state are distressed by the notion that we might want to self-dispose (This is, or rather was, my only country, my only society) Indeed, the US suicide rate has soared since the Trump era began in 2016. We’re higher than Japan now, and gaining on Russia.
I don’t think it’s that anyone actually cares about me, I’m an abomination, like The Outsider in HP Lovecraft’s story of the same name. They just don’t want to process the cadaver and meager legacy I would leave.
Anyway, I go off and on suicide watch, but in these times, we’re all expendable, and sooner or later going to be removed from the new MAGA society to be stuffed into a megaprison gulag. I’ve been told by 77 million American voters they don’t want me around. I don’t understand the drama if I immolate myself in front of a state building. Is this not what they want?
PS: Wife and family are considering giving me ECT, the same stuff that Hemmingway and David Foster Wallace tried before they decided it didn’t work.
At the time for an applet it was amazing. Real artists were expected to get a design suite individually marketed full applications for copy (word processing) pixel and vector graphics separately (often then divided between design and photoediting).
Tell me this is all chocolate.
For comparison, also, Trump’s 2024 Easter message:
Happy Easter to all, including the Radical Left Lunatics who are fighting and scheming so hard to bring Murderers, Drug Lords, Dangerous Prisoners, the Mentally Insane, and well known MS-13 Gang Members and Wife Beaters, back into our Country,
Easter, the gift that keeps on giving.
…This Holy Week, my Administration renews its promise to defend the Christian faith in our schools, military, workplaces, hospitals, and halls of government. We will never waver in safeguarding the right to religious liberty, upholding the dignity of life, and protecting God in our public square…
Obviously not actually Trump, but certainly the Project 2025 / Seven Mountain Mandate faction of the current regime. May their steak knives be extra pointy.
As if someone published a book featuring this very technology…in 1949.
It was noted with memes when the ToS of one such television suggested not having private conversations in front of or otherwise near the TV screen.
Yes, In the 1970s I was just a weird kid. Super bright but eccentric. Didn’t get along with peers…or anyone really. Was often the target of bullies.
Also very very sad all the time. But that was major depression diagnosed in my twenties. I was around fifty when I got an ASD diagnosis from my therapist.
I am pretty sure I was the thesis for her PHD.
He wasn’t the first person to get in trouble with the establishment by suggesting charity and kindness.
He wasn’t the last either. And we keep exiling or executing them all.
Even if you’re not a believer in miracles, the bible tells us that this is not a new problem; The public and established authorities have been disregarding the impoverished, the foreigner, the widow and orphan since time immemorial, that civilization gets subverted time and time again to preserve old power structures that no longer serve the community (and suffer because they need a healthy community to survive)
Oh and Free Palestine, Death to Monarchists, No War But Class War
Though the compromise of privacy rights and protections against unreasonable search, seizure and surveillance usually follows the terrorist and child-predator to activist and protestor pipeline.
NSA and FBI have always taken an interests in left wing activists critical of the current regime.
This is why you block the camera with a little diorama that shows a single white male viewer…frantically masturbating.
I very much appreciate the offer. Part of it is that I’ve been wailing like Cassandra about the rise of autocracy since the CIA torture thing in the aughts (and hippies older than I have been noting the rising police state since the 1960s) so I’m kinda taking CECOT and the dismantling of federal institutions personally. But then a lot of personal life stuff happened about the same time, so here we are.
I’ve got a few friends left, a rugged protocol for when I am triggered,and I am rebuilding a support network. It’s not my first rodeo, but (to mix metaphors) I’m definitely playing hard mode now.
As Blue from OSP, an early example of self-insert fanfic.
I’m in the middle of a psychotic break (since November 2024, and yes, the collapse of the US is a factor) and off and on suicide watch.
Here’s an exchange I’ve actually had (more or less, paraphrased) more than twice these last three months:
🥼📋👓🩺: In the past week, have you been having thoughts about killing yourself? (Another version is “How recently have you thoght about ending your life: a) less than a year, b) less than a month, c) less than a day, d) today.”)
🐰🎩🫖☕: Oh sure. Every day. Hourly.
🥼📋👓🩺: What!?
🐰🎩🫖☕:Yeah. For me this is Tuesday. The brain is always considering heading to check-out. I have a numerical scale of one-to-ten for suicidality the way we do pain assessments.
🥼📋👓🩺: I…see?
🐰🎩🫖☕: It’s fine! Ambient unlife stuff is at a S-3, like “shit I need to get to bed so my boss can scream at me early tomorrow. If that bus careened through this crosswalk, that problem would be so resolved.”
🥼📋👓🩺: …This is normal for you?
🐰🎩🫖☕: Routine. At S-5, I may look around for wandering death opportunities. I don’t talk to anyone about it until about S-6 and start having fantasies of getting proactive, at which point I might tell my therapist if she isn’t squeamish. (A lot of therapists are hair-trigger and will start threatening involuntary committal with any noise of suicidal ideation)
🥼📋👓🩺: Maybe you should…
🐰🎩🫖☕: It’s gotta be an S-8 or S-9 before I’m going to inconvenience a hot-line operator or crisis counslor. By then I’m looking at chemistry sets on Amazon. A fun game is trying to cross a hundred busy intersections in two hours. I’ve won so far.
🥼📋👓🩺: You can’t just…
🐰🎩🫖☕: You can’t just charge death head on. A million years of evolution will drop you before you commit. You gotta sneak up on Death. Icarus, not Heracles.
🥼📋👓🩺: < 🎩 gibbering noises >
I get to enjoy that the reverse happened, when he made mocking jokes about Islamic jihad and the promise of 72 virgins, and I got to school him about the Houri and the more general (and often pacifistic) notions of jihad as a personal quest.
(I’m not Muslim, but researched them during the war on terror in order to separate functional culture from violent movements. It’s complex and valid criticisms intermingle with harmful stereotypes, like Christianity and vampirism)
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There are, actually, a whole lot of defenses under the umbrella of necessity, although after Dan White’s acquittal, judges don’t like it.