So you hate women and don’t want them to have bodily autonomy? You see how that sounds? It’s the same logic as your argument.

If both of them support genocide, but one also supports banning abortion, the ethical choice is to vote for the one that won’t ban abortion.

If you’d rather wait until a candidate arrives that agrees with you on every issue, that’s fine, but you’ll probably never vote, and in the meantime, by not voting, supporting whichever candidate you like less.

While there’s no honor in the presidency, there is honor in doing what you can to reduce harm, and if you can’t reduce harm to the Palestinians, at least you can reduce harm to American women and girls.

My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.

(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)

Did i mention that i use arch?

More importantly:

fucked up all my data with no backup.

One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.

Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.

Me: Oh, I get it, this “Lemmy” website – it’s like The Onion but for nerds?

My fellow lemmings: No, they’re serious. run0 is real.

Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.

The enumeration on the losing side of that debate is probably correct. But as a person who was in my early 20s in 2000, I’d like to offer what I will characterize as The Historical Context and Definitive Conclusion to This Debate.

No one actually gave a shit about that debate. Sure, it came up, but it did not alter anyone’s party planning. We weren’t actually celebrating the changing of the millennium, we were celebrating because we had a permission slip to do so. Any attempt to withdraw that permission was unwelcome.

In Paris on December 31st, 1999, at around 11pm local time, someone threw themselves in front of a metro. The trains were free that night (because it was the 100 year anniversary of their opening iirc), but because of that suicide, at least one of the train lines was substantially delayed. The streets from the center of the city to the north side were crowded well toward dawn as everyone chose to walk home instead of wait indefinitely in a stinky train station.

That person, who chose to end their life on the tracks that night, holds the core truth of the debate within his death: it’s a ridiculous debate and those who would fight for it should just stay the hell home and let the rest of us drink a lot and dance.

I intended to write that just as an intro paragraph to a critique of enlightenment philosophy, since I feel like, while the goal of objectifying the human experience was the natural predecessor to the eventual subjectification of the exterior universe, their confidence in their interpretations of their experience – or maybe just in the universality of their interpretations – makes their entire project a bit sus

But then life happened and I just said the thing about coffee.

Did you know that Kant used to criticize people who drank more than one cup of coffee per day. Also, he would refill his own coffee cup before it was empty, so he never had more than one cup.

You’re right, I’ll concede that – but only because BSG is an amazing show and very few characters can be reduced to “good” and “bad” – even the “antagonists” (in the traditional sense of those characters working against the stories’ progression) have pretty valid reasons for doing what they do.

Gaius (sp?) is one of the closest characters to “bad” – but not because of the bad things he does, but because of the bad things he is – ie, vain, selfish, etc – and the fact that he lets those negative characteristics drive his actions.

All the characters have flaws, but the “good” characters do their best to mitigate their flaws, and let their positive traits motivate them. For example, Adama often acts before he thinks, a trait that is awesome in combat, but can be less positive other times – and he (as best he can) seeks advice and counsel from the people he trusts (eg Saul Tigh) – he knows he can be impulsive and he knows his “instant judgement” decision making isn’t perfect.

Cavil (that’s his name I think) is close to “evil” but he does have reasons for his actions – preservation of his “species” (though really it’s just himself) – but he’s evil because of the fact that he doesn’t listen and acts with disloyalty and dishonor.

(There’s an amazing comeuppance for the titular character of the show Nathan Barley that epitomizes this idea: Barley doesn’t actually do anything wrong, but his motivations are repugnant, and his motivations are what’s revealed… Shit I should write a whole essay on that…)

Are there contemporary shows that are as good as BSG? I kind of gave up on TV after Firefly.

Cylons being manipulated by other cylons doesn’t absolve them of guilt.

BSG did have a few instances of the reverse of OP’s question tho – where the “good guys” turned out to be bad" – trying to say this without spoilers; it’s a 20 year old show but ffs of you haven’t seen it, go see it now.

• the (temporary) new admiral
• several main characters during the part where they live on the dirty planet
• a very specific set of seven main characters (wink wink) … .and more,…

And there’s one specific example of the full 360 – a character that starts good, turns bad, but turns out they were actually good all along. I won’t give the name, but they were passing messages to the resistance.

That show was awesome.

One note tho, on the topic generally: flipping character alignments is a frequent pre-shark-jump thing, and is often bad writing. In BSG, tho, all of the “flips” are pre-planned, or at least 100% true to their character (eg the 360 example above).

Yeah, the Serenity Prayer context might help.

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference

You’re being downvoted because people people think you’re being obtuse, but, as a person that overuses logical thinking to a diagnosable degree, my suspicion is that you’re doing that. Also because your tone is kind of…not good.

The whole point of the Serenity Prayer (“accept the things I cannot change”) is that it includes “change the things I can” – so the things Davis is changing are things she CAN change, by definition.

But her point is that she is reframing what she believes she can and cannot change. Recategorizing, if you will.

She’s invoking the third part of the Serenity Prayer: the wisdom to know the difference. As we grow and learn, our wisdom increases, so the things that belong in the first two categories will shift.

Things that used to be things that can’t be changed are becoming things that she can.

To understand the quote, you just have to give it some space to breathe, and not be so logical about it.

It’s a code editor with no Linux version. It can go on the shelf next to Arc, the browser “for tech people.”

Person doesn’t want to date person with OF

Person with OF doesn’t want to date person

It seems the universe is in harmony.

I like this take - I read the refutation in the replies and I get that point, but consciousness as an illusion to rationalize stimulus response makes a lot of sense - especially because the reach of consciousness’s control is much more limited than it thinks it is. Literally copium.

When I was a teenager I read an Appleseed manga and it mentioned a tenet of Buddhism that I’ll never forget - though I’ve forgotten the name of the idea (and I’ve never heard anyone mention it in any other context, and while I’m not a Buddhist scholar, I have read a decent amount of Buddhist stuff)

There’s some concept in Japanese Buddhism that says that, while reality may be an illusion, the fact that we can agree on it, means that we can at least call it “real”

(Aka Japanese Buddhist describes copium)

You seem very upset about this. I doubt this will help since it doesn’t seem like your reasoning is influenced by logic, but, the fact that there are fraudulent doctors and diagnoses doesn’t mean science isn’t real.

You don’t have to crack it to make it but you have to crack it to determine whether you’ve made it. That’s kinda the trick of the early AI hype, notably that NYT article that fed Chat GPT some simple sci fi, ai-coming-to-life prompts and it generated replies based on its training data - or, if you believe the nyt author, it came to life.

I think what you’re saying is a kind of “can’t define it but I know it when I see it” idea, and that’s valid, for sure. I think you’re right that we don’t need to understand it to make it - I guess what I was trying to say was, if it’s so complex that we can’t understand it in ourselves, I doubt we’re going to be able to develop the complexity required to make it.

And I don’t think that the inability to know what has happened in an AI training algorithm is evidence that we can create a sentient being.

That said, our understanding of consciousness is so nascient that we might just be so wrong about it that we’re looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong thing.

We may understand it so badly that the truth is the opposite of what I’m saying : people have said (“people have said” is a super red flag, but I mean spiritualists and crackpots, my favorite being the person who wrote The Secret Life of Plants) that consciousness is all around us, that every organized matter has consciousness. Trees, for example - but not just trees, also the parts of a tree; a branch, a leaf; a whole tree may have a separate consciousness from its leaves - or, and this is what always blows my mind: every cell in the tree except one. And every cell in the tree except two, and then every cell in the tree except a different two. And so on. With no way to communicate with them, how would a tree be aware of the consciousness of it’s leaves?

How could we possibly know if our liver is conscious? Or our countertop, or the grass in the park nearby?

While that’s obviously just thought experiment bullshit, my point is, we don’t know fucking anything. So maybe we created it already. Maybe we will create it but we will never be able to know whether we’ve created it.

Things that are scientifically provable are valid.

If I can interject - I don’t think the OP is showing an unpopular opinion. The people they’re talking to aren’t mad. It looks to me like an opinion whose wisdom isn’t generally accepted - and there’s a difference.

Unpopular opinion: pedophilia is a mental disorder; child rape (including “statutory” rape) is an act of violence, cruelty, and power - or, in arguably the worst case, crimes of opportunity. Not all child rapists are pedophiles and not all pedophiles are child rapists. Pedophiles should be treated; child rapists should be imprisoned forever. (Those that are in the overlap can be treated in prison.)

This opinion is (I think) probably true, but if you go around talking about it, you will be unpopular.

Unaccepted opinion: well, there are a lot of them here, but this one - about teachers - could be tweaked into one: the only way we are going to see changes that would actually benefit our society and country, the things the news and politicians say are “luxury expenses” - aka health care, teachers’ salaries, rent and real estate regulation, etc - is with a general strike. The propaganda and gaslighting and victim blaming are so deeply entrenched that they have become the most profitable sectors of our economy.

This opinion is - again, in my opinion - probably true, and there are a lot of people who agree - but not enough. If the crowd in that picture represents a country of 350 million, then that one person represents maybe 0.5-1 million people? Which is way more than the supporters of a general strike.

Why did I say all that? Mostly because I’m bored - but I think it’s a neat distinction to make.

This whole open AI has Artificial General Intelligence but they’re keeping it secret! is like saying Microsoft had Chat GPT 20 years ago with Clippy.

Humans don’t even know what intelligence is, the thing we invented to try to measure who’s got the best brains - we literally don’t even have scientific definition of the word, much less the ability to test it - so we definitely can’t program it. We are a veeeeerry long way from even understanding how thoughts and memories work; and the thing we’re calling “general intelligence” ? We have no fucking idea what that even means; there’s no way a bunch of computer scientists can feed enough Internet to a ML algorithm to “invent” it. (No shade, those peepos are smart - but understanding wtf intelligence is isn’t going to come from them.)

One caveat tho: while I don’t think we’re close to AGI, I do think we’re very close to being able to fake it. Going from Chat GPT to something that we can pretend is actual AI is really just a matter of whether we, as humans, are willing to believe it.

Donkey Kong wishes! No, Dead Kennedys