SkavarSharraddas

Scientists cite climate change, habitat loss, pesticide use, varroa mites, and poor handling as potential causes.

Probably there’s not one main cause, it’s all of those and possibly more “small” causes that all need action to counter them.

Free speech abolitionist.

I’d call it “implausible deniability”, everyone knows what it was, but people can weasel around and deny it and pretend it meant something / nothing / whatever instead of actually doing something useful.

Even if Musk came out and said it wasn’t a nazi salute I’d have a hard time believing it after he unbanned nazis on twitter, pushed their rhetoric, cozied up to right wing parties… and his face looked more like he was ripping his heart out than giving it to someone. “The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Well, now you can tweet wherever you like and don’t have to invent a silly new verb for every new platform.

It’s a belief in Techno-Jesus that will solve all our problems so we don’t have to solve them ourselves (don’t need to do the uncomfortable things we don’t want to). Just like aliens, the singularity, etc.

“You” is just a thought pattern, a bit of software if you want to use a crude metaphor. Your body and mind are just the substrate that runs that software. And in principle that same pattern could be run on a computer.

I don’t think biology is that simple, the body influences the mind (e.g. https://www.sciencealert.com/pooping-before-you-exercise-has-an-incredible-effect-on-performance) and isn’t just a vessel for it. But even if it was…

Who says you need physical continuity?

I don’t think putting a copy of your mind somewhere else will transfer your consciousness as well, so it’s not a suitable way to ensure your continued existence (unless you believe in an immaterial soul that’s independent of your physical body).

You could do the slow piecemeal upload process. But again, that scenario is just trying to preserve the illusion of the continuity of consciousness.

No, as mentioned before, it’s the continuity of physical existence, which I believe is crucial to the continued existence of “you”, otherwise even if a copy thinks it is “you”, the original is dead. Which is no use to me, even if a simulacrum continues to exist it would be only for the benefit(?) of others.

I don’t think existence of the original matters unless you postulate the existence of something non-physical like a soul that can transfer over to the familiar copy if the original is destroyed, or split into two when both exist. Physically, a copy is a copy which might feel like “you”, but if the original is destroyed, the original “you” dies.

I think that’s a bad comparison. When you wake up, your consciousness uses the same physical brain as before (conversely, if the brain changes due to e.g injury the “you” might also change). When you “upload” “yourself”, the result is a new brain, there’s no physical continuity (same with sci-fi transporters). Even if the end result is a perfect copy of “you”, I don’t think it is you. Maybe a slow process that adds a computer part to your brain and kills off your biological brain bit by bit so your thought processes slowly migrate to the computer might work. But there are indications that “you” are determined by more parts of your body than just your brain, so even that might result in something other than the original “you” though it is a continuous process.

From world police to mafia protection racket.

He meant “free speech abolitionist”, easy typo to make.

EU warning against advertising on X

… and Musk supporting anti-EU parties.

It’s so dumb as well, they want a domestic economy so they don’t need imports, but don’t want to invest in the education necessary for that economy to be able to compete with those countries that have good public education… Well, some like Musk want foreign visa slaves instead, but while the past USA had some appeal, the new government Musk helped create destroyed that.

At this point it’s not “dog whistling”, we’re all hearing it loud and clear. It’s “implausible deniability”.

Your stance sounds like “too many people are assholes, this world is not worth living in” - arguably true, on the other hand, that gives the assholes all the power.

Also why they (Musk especially visibly amongst them) try to destabilize the EU - the possibly most effective consumer protection organization that messes with their bottom line.

edit: Just saw another example: https://www.politico.eu/article/zuckerberg-urges-trump-to-stop-eu-from-screwing-with-fining-us-tech-companies/

It just matters that it’s consistent. The transactions that are put into the blockchain just have to follow the rules of the blockchain and be the same for everyone who reads the blockchain. That’s all that “correctness” means as far as the blockchain is concerned.

Still useless for anything that depends on external data, since there can be no guarantee that what has been entered is correct. What’s the point of a consistent record of garbage?

But blockchain at its core is just a distributed database. One that has no central authority, can not be tampered with, cannot be altered, nor taken down if parametrized accordingly.

Which is completely useless if the data that goes into that blockchain isn’t guaranteed to be correct. And if there’s money in it you can bet your ass that someone will try to game the system.

You’re also glossing over the existing grid that needs money to be maintained while complaining that energy companies want money. Yes, there’s a general problem where society allowed (and partly encouraged) sociopaths to be unrestrained greedy assholes that needs some kind of solution, but not all companies are useless leeches, it’s “just” an all-pervading corruption that needs to be dealt with - and as long as that hasn’t happened, every idealistic solution faces the threat of being corrupted itself.

It’s usually pretty easy to tell which new theories can be discarded because they don’t explain all the observations that lead us to the dark matter theory in the first place (like e.g. the Bullet Cluster). Or it would be easy if media wasn’t full of uncritical clickbait fluff pieces like this that rather make sensationalist claims than contextualizing how a new study fits into the existing science.

Audiobooks have a simple workaround if you can find a version of the book in text format to download, just index that.

Calibre can create a full text index to search through everything (well, for files that actually contain the text, and it needs a lot of space).