dreadgoat

The determining question for whether or not it’s the same is this: Are you the physical matter of your brain, or the electricity running through it? In the first case, sleep isn’t death. In the second case, it is. I would argue that you’re closer to the electricity than the brain matter, since an unpowered brain is how we define death.

But REALLY it ultimately doesn’t matter, if you think about it. An exact clone of you created after any kind of destruction of consciousness is no different than the original you had the destruction never occurred. We just intuitively really do not like that idea.

You don’t need a distant science fiction MacGuffin for this. Every night you lay down and “die” for 8 hours or so, then your consciousness turns back on and you simply trust that it wasn’t altered too much in the interim. We know very well that the way we think can change from one day to the other, so who’s to say you’re really the same person?

I’m a bloodsucking corpo dev and honestly my read of this was very sympathetic to the FOSS dev.

Pretty much all of my FOSS contributions have been to software that I’ve integrated into my for-profit projects. I will find a nice helpful tool, see it doesn’t have all the flexibility or functionality that I need, I’ll improve it, write tests, submit a PR, and do my best to fulfill the requests of the maintainer.

INEVITABLY I will start getting messages from MY COMPETITORS saying “hey we saw you added this feature to this tool, that’s great but doesn’t quite integrate with our software, can u plz fix?” It’s comical. Like, I’m already leveling the playing field by making my improvements to the FOSS tool freely available to you, and now you want to pay me zero dollars to improve your competing product? This happens all the time, it’s a funny nuisance to me, and I expect a massive headache for popular maintainers. Nobody is under any obligation to help you with integration problems - you can ask, but you aren’t entitled. Fix it yourself, adhere to the maintainer’s standards, and put it out for everyone to benefit from.

I agree that most species surviving mass extinction events were just lucky, but I think that also says something special about the ones that survived MULTIPLE events (ants), or those that effectively re evolved into existence after extinction events (crabs)

I think that’s been narrowed down to about 2 million years. But that got cut short by a mass extinction event, so it’s hard to say how long they would have lasted otherwise.

Also what’s the definition of “passing?” The dinos we are talking about are extinct, they didn’t “pass” for long. A+ creatures things like alligators, ants, and crabs. On average a given species survives around a million years before going extinct. How long do you have to exist before you’re considered a successful species?

This is a tale as old as time. Oppressed groups are naturally conditioned to be hyper-defensive per the oppression they face, which results in lashing out against neutral parties, which comes back to haunt the oppressed group as oppressors can now point as their “inherent evil” and sometimes even the neutral parties will say “hmm maybe they ARE all crazy” and become oppressors themselves. In this case it’s not even a neutral party, but someone who is part of the oppressed group theirself, being ostracized by their own community.

I’m reminded of the time that Contrapoints (Natalie Wynn, a veritable transgender icon) got cannibalized by the very community she seeks to advocate for because she confessed that the pronoun dance that happens in inclusive spaces can feel like a step backward for a newly passing trans person who wants nothing more than to be supportive of others, but simultaneously wants nothing more than to naturally and intuitively be referred to by their preferred pronoun without needing the dance. If even the champions of the community are going to be eviscerated for not treading lightly enough, what hope is there of recruiting allies from normie-space?

1. Area 51 - a real USAF research facility where cutting edge aircraft were tested in the mid 20th century. People in the area truly did see Unidentified Flying Objects, in the sense that they saw aircraft the likes of which they had until then believed were impossible.
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Lazar who single-handedly reinvigorated the UFO conspiracy theories long after Area 51 had concluded most of its Cold War era secret tests.

Ada has been fairly aggressive in shaping her community on blahaj, so I think we’ll see some splintering soon.

Logically there are two positions one can hold as a public LGBT (or any marginalized group) community:
Either we are first and foremost a safe space for our members, and will moderate aggressively to keep it that way
or
We are first and foremost the public face of this community, serving as a place for us to stage the culture war for our own safety and acceptance

Both of these are cool and make sense, but blahaj kind of fell accidentally into the second role due to the massive popularity of 196, while Ada really seems to want to cultivate the safe space instead. I’m sure the community is split, but time will tell just how deeply.

My unqualified prediction is that blahaj will intentionally obscure itself, get out of the limelight and try to focus itself more as a community of internal discussion and camaraderie for LGBT folks, and those who are unhappy with that will attempt to build a new 196 on an instance that is less curated.