Anomander

I’m always so torn on him; he makes interesting videos about compelling topics that are reasonably well researched … but as nitpicky as it is, I cannot deal with his accent for very long. I’m completely willing to believe it’s actually genuine, but it sounds like an American doing a bad impression of a posh British lordling.

There’s the necessary info, thank you! - I’ve heard horror stories about hosting exit nodes, and was immediately spooked this would result in the same issues.

Yeah, I had to un-quit Whatsapp when my siblings-in-law moved to Argentina - because Whatsapp is the main communication platform for a lot of Argentina and that’s where all the various family chats moved to once the in-laws no longer had local phone numbers or reliable SMS service.

The person you’re responding to is basically making the, “steal a loaf of bread to feed your family” argument. It’s complicated by the fact that loaf of bread was already reserved for saving others,

That’s a spurious argument here, though. This is like not buying groceries for two months, having the cash to buy groceries, then stealing a loaf of bread to feed the family.

These people shouldn’t be there, they’re on evacuation order, and they have safe routes to leave. Not one of their lives is in danger that they haven’t chosen. But they did choose - to put their property ahead of their own lives, and in stealing fire equipment they’re putting their own property ahead of the lives of fire response teams and ahead of all the other properties in the same area. They’re willing to have the whole neighborhood burn around them, to cut off safe evacuation routes, all to try and save their own home.

but it’s stupid to act like they’re a deranged person without a point.

They’re engaging in sophistry and misrepresenting the situation to try and make hindering firefighting efforts into something personally justifiable. It isn’t.

Could kind of see how someone facing down an impending roaring wildfire, then stealing from the same people they want help from, might be counterproductive. The people telling them not to steal fire equipment are there. They’re the ones fighting the fire.

No private resident needs that equipment “to save their own life”. They’re on evacuation order, there are safe routes out, they should not be there, and they chose to stay in order to protect their property. The bridge that sprinklers are getting stolen from, for instance, is protected so there will be a safe passage out of the area consistently even if the fire shifts in that direction.

This is about wealth - not health. Stealing that equipment is choosing to fuck over the entire region and everyone else who needs fire protection, just to better preserve their own home, is selfish and stupid.

I remember the G4 with great fondness; my dad’s G4 was what I did homework and gamed on as a highschooler, and then when he retired it I brought it to college and it served as our living room ‘jukebox’ for another five years.

Shocking news: people are people everywhere, not just on ‘rival’ platforms.

Edit: if you’re downvoting me without a rebuttal, you’re part of the problem that I’m referring to – a complete dismissal of dissenting opinion on the war. If you disagree with what I’ve said, please comment why

People on the internet don’t owe you a debate.

Especially when the prompt is a somewhat sanctimonious effort-dump sealioning “we should let Russia have Ukraine” as if its a reasonable liberal imperative, all in response to a stupid one-liner.

UPS is being UPS here.

They’re abandoning packages, then sending her a bill for COD as if she accepted the package but didn’t pay.

The fact that if she digs in and fights it she can eventually dispute each charge is somewhat separate from UPS and their collections contractors harassing her about the ‘debt’, or the new packages that keep showing up.

This would make excellent satire, but it’s pretty dismal journalism.

Ever since that day, I’ve consistently correlated success with the fluctuating number in my follower count. In fact, I would argue that every millennial who works on the internet has internalized the belief that resonance on Twitter is the only way to unlock progressively more illustrious opportunities—it somehow seems more relevant than your degree, your scoops, and even your endorsements.

Speak for yourself, please.

Many millennials who ‘work on the internet’ have understood in the past that Twitter follower counts did constitute a sort of abstracted measure of relevance, like pop culture equivalent of how often an academic article is cited by other academics. There was quite a while where that was, unfortunately, true: for example, your measure as a PR professional was tied to your ability to use your professional skills to boost your personal accounts. It was far from the only thing that counted, but it was certainly an excellent networking tool and having impressive high scores would result in more opportunities, better opportunities, and less hunting for them. There absolutely was an expectation that communications or marketing people would leverage their skills for their accounts, that they would show off what they could do for potential employers within the confines of their own internet footprint.

You could still get work without that, I still got work without that - but work would come to you if you had an impressive social portfolio, not just on raw follower counts but on things like content and engagement as well. The total sum of your social media and online presence was the portfolio of communications or media field, same way designers are asked to provide examples of past work.

And that’s still true - it’s just less and less likely to include someone’s twitter in that assessment.

I think that’s why Elon’s reign of terror has been so bitterly ironic: Everything we’ve been taught about Twitter—and, frankly, social media in general—has proven to be an enormous lie. It was always volatile, and regrettably, we made it the locus of our careers.

Things can be true in the past and false in the present. What this particular person was taught in the past was true at the time of teaching. And then this crazy thing called “change” occurred and it’s no longer true. Except, what he was taught - that conventional wisdom holds that journalists need their own personal brands - remains true. The secondary coaching, that a Twitter presence is part of that branding, is not necessarily true but also not abstractly false either.

That the author struggles with the very concept of change, feels they were promised that Twitter would be permanent, and seems to believe that people who are successful now because of twitter activity then are somehow going to wind up on the streets is hilarious, if perhaps in a not particularly kind way.

Everyone he talked to has a secure career or market position. Sure, they got there via twitter, or they feel twitter helped them achieve that - but they will be fine. Some of them might take earnings hits or need to make some uncomfortable pivots to off-twitter platforms, but none of those folks are teetering on the edge of a cardboard mansion lifestyle after sinking clearly-fruitless hours into twitter boosterism.

Lorenz predicts something of a “Great Clout Reset” on the horizon—everyone emerging from the rubble, starting over at square one—and frankly, she can’t wait to see what happens. […] Maybe that’s the silver lining. Twitter might be dying, but maybe afterwards, we can try to become superstars all over again.

Oh look, we can see how the author wound up thinking that Twitter was all-important and utterly permanent. They’re doing it all over again; and in ten years we’ll get the exact same article about whatever platform they think is actually the Real Deal right now, complaining about how it inevitably failed and Lorenz steered them wrong with bad career tips.

Honestly, I take the opposite view - to me that’s one of the best changes they’ve made in ages and I’m glad it propagated to old.reddit as well as showing up in new reddit; it’s been an occasional frustration to hit ‘hide’ by mistake on something I wanted to see, then need to navigate to the far corners of the profile just to un-hide it again was always extra-silly. Next up maybe they can turn off auto-hide when reporting a post.

I feel like there is space for talking about games besides actually playing them, similar to sports.

To refine further, I think there exists demand for a “middle ground” of games discourse that is talking about games as a whole, or as entries into their genre, in detail and with consideration - but without being a hyper-focused discussion of one specific game by it’s die-hards. We have both poles - there is lots of relatively superficial discussion of games, or game reviews, that aren’t giving a particularly detailed discussion of each game … and there’s lots of posts in a specific games’ space with ultra-specific and supremely detailed discourse from a highly-invested players’ perspective.

But there’s not been a successful venue or single leading voice that’s really filling that niche. TB did for ages, and I don’t think anyone has come close to filling those shoes since.

I personally want the kind of insights that come from putting a week into a game and playing a lot of other similar games, but not necessarily being a hardcore fan or hater of the game or the genre. Like, I’ll get a week into a game and start noticing that the core gameplay is good, but the economy seems off, or that gunplay is just a little jank when playing near obstacles - deeper than “better/worse than GAME1, while slower not as twitchy as COMPETITOR”.

In similar sense, talking about games as a media and as offering within a media landscape - in that sense you talk about asking “what is fun”; looking at game systems and mechanics from a lens of media critique and systems design. How does this work, how do competitors solve this problem, what other problems does it introduce - how does the sum picture mesh and how cohesive is the end product.

Tumblr remains impressively Not Dead given its ownership and finance history.

If you are in fact a doppelganger you have no way of knowing and neither does the Anomander who died. And that is why I wouldn’t risk teleportation.

Which, conversely, is also why I don’t care about teleportation. If I have no idea before and I have no idea after and for all intents and purposes I am still me in the new location … all the parts that I can engage with, all the parts I care about - they’re all coming up fine. I might as well have fallen asleep on a plane, or blacked out after a few too many at the pub. When consciousness returns, I am in a new location.

In that explanation you quoted, I fall firmly into the former camp. I don’t think we have special-ness that transcends the meat, but that the consciousness is wholly rooted in it - and so I think that moving the meat from one place to another achieves the result of moving the consciousness from one place to another.

My main difference is that I don’t believe a “soul” transported or transplanted - or exists to be lost. The consciousness that is my sense of ‘self’ is the sum of my meat and my memories, and those are preserved.

But trying to make you understand.

Yeah, there’s your problem. You’re trying to make me understand it your way and criticizing me for not doing so, instead of trying to persuasively state your own viewpoints standing on their own.

It’s an approach that I can imagine would feel frustrating when I already understand your views and am talking about them.

To me it has nothing to do with souls, it’s about continuity of experience. […] If I don’t get to continue to experience life because I’m dead and some clone with my exact thoughts etc is now me, it’s only the rest of the world who experiences that as me continuing to live. But I don’t get to.

I think that distinction is artificial.

My continuity of experience is interrupted every night, among others - and I don’t worry that my experience as being me is somehow invalid now, or fear sleeping lest a doppelganger take my body overnight and wake up ‘as me’ the next morning. The idea that this would be different is resting on the notion that there is something other than mere meat and electricity that would be lost when the teleport interrupts consciousness, and I think that assumption is something that needs direct challenge.

I think you would experience life continuing from the moment consciousness resumes in the new location, the exact same as how you experience life ‘continuing’ when you wake up each day. All the ways that you experience your own consciousness would simply have relocated. Without assuming a soul, there is no subjective distinction between pre/post teleporter any more than there’s a distinction between pre/post nap.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”.

That is ridiculous.

So you do see my point.

People aren’t computers, so getting all worked up about how software models instances still isn’t a valid modelling for human consciousness.

When you kill a process and you re-run a program, even if you saved the full state of the memory elsewhere, you don’t say that it’s the same process. Is another process with identical content. There’s no need of a metaphysical entity. It’s another instance.

But this is so hair-splittingly pedantic it’s almost doubled back to be incorrect. If you ask 99.999% of the world, they’ll be like “yeah I closed outlook and then I opened outlook” - to them, it’s still the same program. They’re launching the same software again. No one is like “oh well once you quit Skyrim it’s all over because even if you reopen it later, it’s a new instance and the old one is dead” … no. That’s ridiculous. It’s the same program, the same save file, resumed from save at a later date.

Your focus on “Process” instead of “Program” is making the soul argument. The “process” you’re arguing for is a soul. Something intangible and irrelevant to the end user, that does get terminated on shutdown, that cannot be restored from save. Consciousness is the software, not the process itself. Memories are the save file. There is nothing in OP’s model of teleporting that suggests “process” itself is the sacred portion - when the hardware & software of “Dave” gets paused and resumed flawlessly.

You’re deeply, sorely mistaken. Even in a deep, unconscious state, the mind keeps working, even if the degree of consciousness is different. That we’re not 100% certain of what the brain does in those moments doesn’t mean that it stops working.

Not at all. Consciousness is interrupted. Unless we’re assuming that the “process” itself is sacred - what happens to consciousness is all that matters in either case. If your ability to perceive yourself as a conscious being stops - it doesn’t matter to your experience of your own consciousness if the ‘process’ stopped or went to sleep during the gap.

That’s absolutely the issue.

Your body is copied as a file.

Your mind is a process running in a body created from that file.

When the process stops, you are effectively dead. Another copy of your body runs another process with an identical content. He has your body, but he’s not you.

This presumes that there is something special in this model that doesn’t resume when your mind resumes running in it’s new location. Or, in other terms, “a soul”. The idea that an identical consciousness in an identical body is “not you” is based wholly on the assumption that “you” is something other than the consciousness.

And your mind, or my mind, are both “processes” that stop regularly already - are you claiming that old you dies each night and a completely new but otherwise identical person lives each morning?

or in a real teleport where you are disassembled, you’re gone the moment

I love how this was said completely unironically.

We’re talking about something that only exists in sci-fi stories and you’re trying to argue about souls as if one outcome of teleports is clearly more real than another.

you’re gone the moment you teleport and the “you” that remains is another different person with exactly your thoughts, feelings, motivations, memories, etc

Ship of Thesius, though. If it’s exactly my thoughts, exactly my feelings, exactly my motivations, my memories, my body … That’s me. There’s no other parts that got left out.

But consciousness was interrupted briefly when the transport happened? That happens to me every night - except in the morning I wake up in the same place instead of a different one. For all worthwhile intents and purposes, everything tangible and real that makes a person a person is relocated and the person remains. Getting lost in whether or not “you” “survive” is wasting angst on the existence of a soul.

You’re repeating what OP said.

Thing is, the idea that an “old you” has “died” is a modern soul conceit. If “me” is just the combination of meat, electricity, and memories - then for all intents and purposes I was simply taken apart in one place and reassembled in another. Continuity of all three is maintained when I am reassembled on Mars with my body and memories intact. There is no “old” and “new” me - because what you or OP think defines “me” isn’t something that dies when the meat stops working briefly.