dpig_

I only read it once, in 2016. So the details are fuzzy. Hal's dad cooks his own head in the microwave, right? And Hal comments on how it smelled good or something?

Not sure, but his dad's got a microwave for a head.

At about page 300 it starts to pay off hard and you fly through the rest. I definitely recommend giving it another go.

I don't know how a materialist could answer anything other than no - you are obliterated. And if, despite sharing every single one of your characteristics, that individual on the other side of the teleporter is not 'you' (since you died), then some aspect of what 'you' are must be the discrete episode of consciousness that you were experiencing up until that point.

Which also leads me to think that there's no real reason to believe that this discrete episode of consciousness would have been continuous since birth. For all we know, we may die little deaths every time we go to sleep, hit our heads or go under anesthesia.

I don't doubt that their claims are fantastic rubbish, but you're verifying this by.. feeling the difference with gloves on/off?

I really don't understand what mechanisms could exist in an ideal free market to stop monopolies. What is a monopoly other than a hyper-successful agent on the free market? What kind of a free market is one that would restrict such a monopoly? It's incoherent.

In Warhammer we call it Fall Back in Good Order.

Because art is the futile attempt by a conscious subjectivity at expressing their subjective experience. It's fraught and impossible and really beautiful. Meanwhile GenAI is not a subjectivity, cannot express anything.

Like laptops, you can sometimes interface directly with them via touch, but it's usually not worth the trouble.

In the sense that my cat communicates by meowing at me when it's dinner time, sure. But so far I don't think apes are signing about remembered events, future plans, or descriptions of non-immediate reality.

In my experience the Y is often the even more profound disagreement between two people, and explicit discussion of Y could be enough to obliterate a relationship completely.

I use Virtual Desktop over home WiFi. I don't even really tweak it beyond that, but I'll sit at an empty desk with a wireless kb+m and a few virtual monitors. Works well!

In a restaurant with no menu, name a soda you'd ask for.

What software were you using, Virtual Desktop? I find it super clear in a Quest 3 and I often work for hours in it.

In the cancellation process, take the offer to switch to an alternative Adobe product, then you will be able to cancel that cleanly within a roughly 30-day window as it is considered a new transaction.

Publishing an AI-written novel is about as thoughtful as a doctor sending you an LMGTFY link with your symptoms.

I'd take that as an indictment on those podcasts. All the stuff I listened to / watched that used them in the past has dropped them for more than a year by now.

I think Johnny Harris may still run adverts for them? But I watch him mostly because he's such a suspicious character to begin with.

Forgive me if I'm wrong about this, still trying to get my head around ECS concepts, but isn't the whole point that data and behaviours are uncoupled? Whereas Unity's Game Objects both hold data and are composed of behaviours (rather than being data-only objects that are operated on from with-out by systems)?

I'm learning a language, and I'd love to be able to filter Netflix titles by language, but they absolutely refuse to do it (I assume because allowing users to filter content would expose how bare the offerings are).

Well you misquoted the person you responded to by cutting their sentence short. They specifically said that computers don't have the human right to copyright. As in - the right that a human has under copyright law.

I had been learning my target language mostly from books (and then watching/listening to media for osmosis) for years before I discovered Pimsleur. I can confidently say that Pimsleur increased my skills by orders of magnitude. Being forced to 1) speak out loud, 2) create sentences under time pressure and 3) absorb language rules implicitly rather than explicitly was a major game changer.

My only disappointment is that Pimsleur only created 2 levels for my target language, so after I had repeated them a number of times I had to look elsewhere for other (less effective) materials. Recently, I've been using the ChatGPT Voice Assistant to try and approximate the Pimsleur experience - it works to some degree, and it's novel that I can ask it questions during learning, but it can't really offer a curriculum in the same way.

India actually stands out as never having undergone much of a western colonization.

I don't think I'm understanding the sense in which you're using 'colonized' here?

Seems to me like you're the one tilting at windmills unprovoked. Capitalism doesn't decide what gets made, it decides how profits are distributed. Believe it or not, things were invented and produced prior to the capitalist era.

Studies will also no doubt be done on the currently unfolding Maha Kumbh Mela in India, which has to be breaking some records for largest human gathering.

I don't know, I think that would still require people to change their assumptions about glasses. Currently, I don't assume someone is talking to their sunnies.

Trying to make transcendental work out of alienated labor feels a bit wet and sad.

Love your work! Thanks.

Yep, I remember. It was nice to play regularly on a server with names you came to recognise. That will never be the norm again though unfortunately. It still exists in the indie space, however, like for example on VR games such as Pavlov where the playerbase is too small for formal matchmaking.

I also miss the server browser. That said, there is no world in which it could ever become the norm again. It essentially died in the same wave as personal blogs and other casualties of Web 2.

That would be awesome, cheers.