Well, yeah. Same organs, longer tubing, slightly different cell types lining the insides.

Also the scrotum is just fused-together labia majora (you can even see the seam), and the penis is just an enlarged clitoris that wraps round the urethra.

Maleness is just a minor tweak added in post-production.

deleted by creator

Yep, they’re just modified ovaries; they’re plumbed into the abdomen and all the wiring comes from there.

So, only the rest of the world gets superior technology.

The investors will love that.

Amazingly, I’m not a big fan of slavery.

Butlerian Jihad when?

The mind is what the brain does .

When the brain stops doing, the mind stops being.

There is no darkness, there isn’t even nothing, because there’s no you to experience it.

Where do the ripples on a pond go if the water dries up? There are no ripples, because there’s no longer a pond for them to be on.

I’m a sysadmin, so non-game stuff is my entire day job.

When I use my PC at home, it’s a variable split between internet, media and gaming, depending what I damn well feel like at the time :D

Always assume your data is in N-1 places at all times.

Any drive can and will fail at any time, no matter how well it was working yesterday.

I’ve had people in with their entire PhD and years of research on one single drive, with no backup - just gone.

If your data is only in one place, it will be in zero places soon enough.

Disposable or replaceable data - which honestly is going to be 90% of your stuff - meh.

But anything that you need and couldn’t replace, that shit needs backing up to AT LEAST one other place.

As for the rest - drives can fail slowly, or they can fail fast. When they fail slowly, you start getting a couple of disk errors here and there, and you may just be able to order one in time to replace it.

When they fail fast, they just drop like a heart attack.

There’s no way to know in advance. If your data is safe, then you’ll either be out a few days while a replacement arrives, or you’ll be just about able to copy stuff across. At that age, I wouldn’t trust it farther than I could spit it. It could work fine for years more, but the moment you rely on it for something important, it’ll give out on you.

It’s not black and empty. There’s no you to feel those things.

The mind is what the brain does. It’s a process, not a thing. It doesn’t ‘go’ anywhere, and it doesn’t sit there chewing on a lack of input either.

The brain stops doing, the mind stops being.

As for the point of it all: smoke 'em while you got 'em. Live your life, and try to make the world a bit better for others.

After all, there’s nobody running the universe. Nobody to take care lest a sparrow fall. No justice, no redemption, nobody balancing the books. The only thing in the entire universe that gives a damn if we live or die is each other.

You want a purpose, there’s your purpose. To do what only people can do: care about people and try to make their time on this rock better than it otherwise might be.

I think you’ve drawn the wrong borders around concepts, and are getting tangled as a result.

Regardless of how we’d like things to be, morality is just plausibly-generalised threat perception.

If people habitually went around doing that kind of thing, would you feel threatened by that?

If so, then you will feel the emotion of outrage, and you will consider the act to be Wrong.

Killing people and taking their stuff? But I’m a people, and I like stuff - I don’t want that to happen! That’s Bad and Wrong!

And that’s the reason dehumanising the outgroup (or drawing a hard distinction of kind) is the first tactic used by oppressors: Oh goodness no, we aren’t killing people and taking their stuff; that would be awful! Nonono, we’re killing :demographic: and taking their stuff; that’s completely different and can never come back to bite you or yours, so relax, it’s fine.

And of course, sometimes all your choices suck, thus the whole concept of trolley problems. Which threat makes my world less safe: a cold-blooded one-guy killer, or a useless five-guy allower-to-die standing there with his hands in his pockets? Are me-and-mine more likely to be in the big group of victims or the little one?

The choice you consider ‘best’ depends on these kinds of questions.

Threat perception is the engine that drives your moral framework. You can go and try to build a system out of words that will predict its moves, but that system is always going to be a crude imitation of the real thing, and there will always be edge-cases that throw up conflicts.

Framing things in terms of how it affects categories-you’re-in can be a bit unflattering, so most people try to bury it in their system of words.

When you do get that cognitive-dissonance feeling where your gut and your brain disagree on what’s right, it’s generally because your words are too specific, narrowing in on little details instead of the bigger picture.

It’s definitely good to pause at this point, unpick the conflict and try to derive a wider principle that gives better answers - though you could fairly argue that this isn’t really moral flexibility, just getting better at describing the morals you do have.

Real moral flexibility would be reassessing threats in their various contexts, and examining which categories of threat go where in the likelihood/severity matrix, and letting that inform your emotional responses. And yes, that’s a very good thing.

Inglourious Basterds is pretty good

Look at the weather, your whole damn country is getting raided by ice.

I stand by my assertion that personal discretion is the only approach that can’t be gamed.

Trust the mods with the banhammer, and if they do a bad job, replace them outright.

This still leaves you vulnerable to shitty admins, but you would be in any case.

There’s basically three problems:

1: Tyrannical powermods can make shitty communities.

2: Trolls and bad actors and generally-sociopathic cunts can be toxic and disruptive by sealioning, rules-lawyering and ‘just asking questions’ (aka JAQing off)

3: There’s no fixed set of rules that reliably walks a middle path between the two.

If you have no control over how mods mod, you can end up with nasty little tetanus-wound shitholes - imagine ferinstance if corpo shills took over all the news and politics subs, and banned anyone critical of Elon Musk or Israel.

If you don’t let mods mod, then for instance every support / activism community would be under constant siege from concern trolls and smug bigots with a new little talking point they want to ‘debate’ every single damn day, and we don’t need any more trans kids driven to suicide please and thankyou.

The admins decided that the former was worse than the latter, and said no, you can’t just kick out troublemakers so long as they use pretty language instead of hurling abuse; you have to humour them and allow some of their shit.

see also: the Nazi bar problem

This was a terrible and shitty approach to take, and I am (provisionally) glad it’s been suspended pending further review.

Though in this age of enshittification, I have little confidence that the next iteration won’t actually be worse.

I would have kicked ass at emergency medicine.

Unfortunately, the first lull that came along, I’d fuck up and people would die.

It isn’t fun.

Yeah, all the stereotypes of the wacky ADHD guy squirrel lol, but it’s not like that on the inside.

We are lost in the goddamn fog, chasing phantoms and mirages that disappear when you look at them too long. We are constantly running to catch up and flailing for context. What looks capricious and funny is mostly just desperation. We aren’t bursting with unlimited energy, it’s as exhausting as it looks. Taking five attempts to actually get a task done because you just forget halfway through. Forgetting where you put the thing, every time. Feeling your working memory slip away like waking from a dream. Fucking up all the time, then having to work twice as hard to fix it, and feeling like shit because you can’t get anything right.

It gets old, man.

I actually got a locator beacon recently.

I can’t really justify the cost of a two-way one given how rarely I go anywhere properly remote, but the little one-button boxes make for huge peace of mind. And honestly if I get bitten I’d likley be just as fucked with or without a conversation :D

About a decade ago, I fell and broke my ankle while out running.

It was only by sheer chance that this happened around a bunch of people, and I was able to get help immediately. If I’d been out somewhere else or at a different time, I would have been absolutely fucked.

Since that day, I never leave the house without my phone, ever.

(if I’m hiking somewhere out of range, then I map out my route and ensure that someone else knows where I’ll be)

You’re missing a critical distinction.

People can not care about (topic), while caring a lot about (disruptive discussion of (topic)).

The two aren’t mutually exclusive.

It’s like I don’t have a particular opinion about cornflakes, but if you keep waving a box of them in people’s face and hitting them with it, then i’mma ask you to stop.

It can be annoying to have to deal with someone going into excessive detail, making inappropriately-fine distinctions, or taking a strong position on one side or other of an argument that nobody’s making - since in all of those cases, nobody is willing or able to engage with the topic, and it’s just taking up conversation-space with (effectively) a monologue that they find boring and exhausting.

If someone says ‘hey look at that funny-shaped tree’ because it looks like something else, it’s usually worth a ‘heh’ in the moment and you move on.

If you start going into great detail of whether or not it actually counts as a tree, or just infodumping neat tree facts, or start ranting about which genus it properly belongs to despite what some people think… then someone will shut you down with ‘Dude. No one cares’.