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So this is the male version of the trophy spouse stereotype. Focuses on lifting and courting, has an education just to check off a box, writes pseudointellectual drivel to pass the time.

Just as likely to be replaced by a fresher model in a few years.

I'm actually not pushing for anything, and since I wasn't following antivaxxers this is all new to me. I guess this was my 10000 moment for the day (https://xkcd.com/1053/)

OK, I'm probably going to burn a bunch of karma on this comment, but this is very interesting. For example, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4516275/ looks like a legitimate piece of research.

Isn't this exactly what we are doing with the current COVID vaccines? How does one explore this question without being labeled a crazy antivaxxer?

Not an anti-vaxxer, but comments like this are even better antivaxx fodder :)

I understand where you are coming from, but the ultimate goal is to stop COVID, not get everyone a jab in the arm. If the jabs (legitimately) stop working we should stop the jabs. Compliance with COVID rules isn't a goal unto itself.

Vacccinating mice is a fun idea to think about, but you'd have to develop vaccines for squirrels, raccoons, and pigeons shortly after the mouse one. Also think about all the unintended consequences (your food vaccine getting into waterways, for example). So yeah, this is the kind of idea that makes antivaxxers look sane.

True. This one hit close to home for me personally, but I can say with confidence that therapy can make things a lot better.

There's a tendency to either coddle a person with these issues, or try to get them to change through tough love. The reality is that neither of these things is helpful - what is really needed is a good therapist.

P.S.: In case someone is reading this and nodding along: you have likely spent years on the roller coaster of trying to prove yourself through pathological self-sufficiency interleaved with breakdowns and "failure to adult". It's OK to seek help. Even pro athletes use coaches and personal trainers if they are stuck in a rut. This is no different. Oh, and you are far from alone in this.

And if you look at that particular prosecutor's record, there is a clear pattern of "overkill".

And it sounds like he was perfectly aware of this. This feeling of being "not really a man" can be overwhelming, and I feel like this is an incredibly toxic thing perpetuated by our culture.

It's possible to spend an entire lifetime trying to prove the opposite of this statement to the world, and most importantly oneself, and fail at this impossible task. But the saddest part is that because the majority of people think in these "man/boy" terms it's easy to start thinking that all people do.

The next step is to consider oneself hopelessly broken and unworthy of affection, and dismiss any real friendship as a pity party. And yet: there was an outpouring of love and sadness following aaronsw's suicide. So perhaps living up to the stereotype of manliness is not the most important thing in the world.

No, vei nid to do al the saim drujeri bicoz ze jenerashon befor vem had to :)

Olso, zis kaind of speling luks strainj to old pipl.

If your birth country isn't India or China, a masters could significantly speed up the process of getting a US green card. For India or China you'd wait a decade anyway.

There is also a pretty well-made show on this topic, and it's even on Netflix: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fartsa_(TV_series)

There are even to this day quite a lot of houses in Russia with this exact setup. My grandparents old house had an oven stove and radiators. They replaced the oven stove with an electric boiler sometime in 2000s but kept the radiators.

Americans lost two skyscrapers and still talk every year about how the country was scarred. Yes, it was terrible, but imagine a country literally burned by fire from the sky, and future generations continuing to suffer through birth defects. The sheer magnitude of the suffering perpetuated in the name of "freedom" and proper values is staggering.

You and people like you are sickening.

But, to play devil's advocate, isn't this exactly what we should want, long term?

I think the end goal is for Black and autistic people to be thought of as people first and foremost, and their differences would take a back seat. This is the only way we can be one big happy family. Wouldn't the best way to accomplish this be for the rest to realize that they actually have something in common with the marginalized groups?

Imagine a white supremacist who learns they had a Black ancestor. That would transform their whole world view.

Same with autism: neurotypical people being able to relate to quirks that cause social exclusion isn't something to shut down. We should be celebrating the normalization of these things because that is how they stop being markers of the "other".

Sometimes I wonder what the people who are up in arms about being "not properly" Black, autistic, etc. have as their end game. Perpetual exclusion of the marginalized groups for sympathy points? I think many would gladly trade those points for greater inclusion.

Fun is maybe not quite the word I'd use. The juxtaposition of all the wording about "defense" and menacing-looking characters that would definitely be the villain and not the hero in any comic book or movie is... unsettling. Even if it's a self-aware joke about their public image (like the squid giving the whole Earth the hug of death), it's maybe gone a bit too far?

Won't we figure out at some point how to input the fun into the brain directly, bypassing the usual senses? At that point, what's the use for galactic colonization? Math/fun can be maximized most efficiently by plugging into the Matrix instead.

Artificial bodies. Our deep-seated bias towards compassion has led us to subvert natural selection through medicine (and I say this as someone who likely would not survive a few centuries ago). We will continue to decline physically as a species and require more and more interventions immediately after birth. At some point we'll probably do away with old-school reproduction altogether.

But what about Plato's cave? You say that a mind arises from a healthy brain, but let's say we put a perfectly healthy brain into an environment where it cannot experience the same kind of stimuli that the brains riding in our bodies do. Would it still be healthy? Could we relate to this intelligence, and would we consider it to have a mind?

I'm no expert, but I wonder just how much of the distinction is entirely artificial and the only fundamental difference between our intelligence and what we call AI is the set of input data, and the rest of the difference can be attributed to scale. After all, scale has an effect on cell-based wetware too. Does a cat have a mind? Could one pass for a human?

I think our sense of right and wrong actually has a lot to do with evolution. Indeed, it's one of the things that drives our evolution as a species.

Self-preservation is very important, and anything that puts it in question tends to elicit a very negative visceral reaction. However, I do think you mischaracterized what I said. Not putting one's survival first and foremost is not always horrific in the grand scheme of things. We tend to call people who sacrifice their life to save others heroes. In the end, continued survival of the group outweighs the survival of an individual in human societies.

So far we have a working method for maintaining and evolving culture by way of knowledge transfer as well as replacement of the bodies that run this "software". And yes, it is absolutely "co-designed": our neural patterns shape the way we think as much as the collective knowledge does. With immortality the author is proposing to do away with a significant driver of cognitive evolution, and it's unclear to me what the benefit of this is, other than pandering to a selfish desire of self-preservation.

I also agree that if immortality was a thing humanity would still continue to evolve. It would just be a very different path, and it's not clear that it would be better.

There are basically two viable next-gen messengers: Telegram and Signal. One has an open encryption protocol and a founder who is much better connected in Silicon Valley.

I have to ask: but why? The author correctly concludes that the human mind is software, but then their survival instinct gets the better of them and they don't carry this thought to its logical conclusion. And that is: death is a feature, not a bug.

The planet-wide human computer happens to run its computation by transferring some state from the current generation of humans to the next via a mixture of lip flapping, squiggles on paper, and backlit screens panels. In doing so it performs pruning of the state: every detail is not transferred.

In essence, a person pushing for immortality is a single selfish genome with a singular purpose: replicate to the detriment of maximizing the global utility of the system. The system by design will try its best to thwart this effort.

Isn't this "doctrine of the foregone conclusion" exactly how the west operates? Not too long ago there was an invasion of Iraq over some WMDs that unnamed "intelligence sources" were absolutely certain were about to be used for some horrible things. These were never found. Now these same "intelligence services" are the only source of information that Russia is preparing for an invasion. If you were Russian, hearing this would make you very scared indeed (and it does).

Annex territory? Turkey, NATO member, 1974 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_invasion_of_Cyprus)

Your parents were alive during that time, so it's not that old school.

There are a lot of Russians who don't support Putin yet will fight to make sure another one of these peaceful transitions doesn't happen in their home. Rampant crime, addictions, brain drain, internal wars - no thank you, please keep this peaceful transition.

I think Egypt was the last place that was gifted one of these. I hear it went well for them /s

It's interesting that we had a back and forth discussion here. If we were talking in person, this kind of error correction would be natural (me: "it's random", you: "this is not what random is", me: "oh yeah, I'm using it in the colloquial sense, how silly of me, my main point...") but comments don't have that immediate feedback. At the same time they are not essays: one cannot spend as much time editing and forecast every small negative reaction.

Thank you for an interesting discussion!

You are right, it's not really random, but it can certainly feel that way.

I can throw the pedantry right back at you though: I didn't quote a percentage of randomness so I made a true statement. Some degree of randomness is present (if nothing else, it would be the percentage of readers having a bad day at that moment). So there :P

I was actually half expecting some downvotes and thought it would be a cute bit of post-irony to downvote this to near-background color.

Downvotes on HN are basically random.

I've had well-written comments downvoted into oblivion in threads that also included another comment stating the exact same opinion slightly differently. I've had zingy one-liners upvoted to 100 or so. I've had discussions where the back and forth statements alternated between negative and positive karma.

I'm treating it as a study in human behavior around communications. So far my takeaways are:

- a zingy one-liner that agrees with the zeitgeist will be upvoted to the sky

- the same type of comment expressing a contrarian view will be buried

- timing matters: if you get a few downvotes early on, the downvote brigade will help ensure a continued slide

- downvoting to disagree is natural (meme theory and all that). What's interesting to me is how can one overcome the impulse to downvote and potentially seed a new idea in someone's brain.

You are so certain of this! Why not use this kind of information to make a killing on the stock market?

The free market works the other way too though. If lab techs were in high demand (as they are), and your friend's employer was demanding an unreasonable schedule, she'd be free to jump ship to a better job. Right now software engineers have that kind of market power, so why not use it? If tomorrow the market decides we are overpaid, we'll either accept it or change jobs like your friend did. What I don't get is not using the power the free market gives you because?...

Not moral, practical. The majority of places that do on-call do it because it's the default.

That's the problem with on-call: it somehow took on moral undertones. And as a result it does not feel safe to speak out against it.

If on-call was widely seen as a negative (that a few people like because it gives them a sense of importance, more power to them) then there would be far fewer companies pushing for it as the default. As it stands, most people suffer silently for lack of an alternative. And the first step towards change is to make it OK to publicly say that on-call's a negative, a health hazard, and other options exist (though they may cost more).