Removed by mod

I bet that anon texter practically jizzed himself to see how much chaos a few words could create.

It’s not about having a serious alternative, what twitter does can mostly be written by like 10 people in 3 months. The problem is scaling it to be big enough while eating that cost until enough people start using it.

AND the advertising budget.

There’s no real way to break into that now without a ridiculous amount of investor capital which investors are gunshy in offering for shit like this right now.

We don’t need an alternative, we need the next generation and I hate to say it but it might just be Discord if they get their shit together.

Social momentum is a hell of a thing

China has other problems right now which is why they are playing nice, they’re heading into a population collapse and it’s gonna be real messy.

They already fetishize the military and are nationalistic AF, but they also have leadership more invested in the status quo than becoming the dominant military, so their new weapons are finance and trade instead of bombs and bullets. That said, they have a FUCKTONNE of bombs and bullets and MILLIONS of people willing to use them.

A lot less of them now Covid is here, bada bum tisss

Yes this is true but there is nothing you can do to fix gullible people so no action can be taken to mitigate their idiocy.

I don’t care about blame, I just want to stop our nation from falling into fascism.

They’re going to be dead soon from old age, I’m more worried about all the gamergaters and magapedes that will be old enough to vote this year and all the elections afterward.

This is exactly why we have stagnated in most of our social development this last half century, people deliberately misunderstanding the point so they can feel justified in arguing it.

So fucking done with that kind of thing.

I have responded to every reply with nuance and detail, and expounded on every facet of my position, but you want to pretend that I haven’t.

Intellectual dishonesty. I came here to get away from that so onto the block list you go!

If the force were directly inverted, my laziness would transform me into the motherfucking Flash on adderall.

The Land from the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Most people will dismiss it as being a Tolkien-esque immitation (The Ravers as Ringwraiths, the BBEG is very Sauron-like), this is more a fact that there WASN’T much other fantasy writing out there to draw inspiration from.

The real deal is that there are so many amazing and unique fantasy races, the Bloodguard, how giant culture worked, the vile and ur-vile cultures.

Magic also felt like a part of the landscape, and had an essence of good or evil that could affect the very land itself.

The main character is super annoying, full of self-loathing and a sense of powerlessness for most of the series so to me it was more 'putting up with Thomas’s self indulgent whiny uselessness until he observes the next cool scene.

But the cool scenes are so amazing that I can forgive just how terrible he is as a protagonist.

but they lack depth.

Read the mangas, both of them are absolutely packed with a ton of detail that never made it into the animes.

Naussica especially, there’s a whole worldwide ancient apocalypse buried in there on top of a VERY unique and well thought out ecosystem.

IT professional here, cheap initial purchase means that when I go to my boss with the required ‘3 options’, DESPITE me detailing why HP is super terrible and expensive long-term, they will ALWAYS insist on the HP.

Add onto that brand recognition and it’s basically impossible to convince any site I work on to switch to Brother unless they directly experience just how unreliable and expensive HP actually is. Even then it’s still a 50/50 if they’ll make the rational choice.

Fascism of course, just like we are heading towards.

To be clear, I violently oppose fascism, just that it seems to be to historical outcome of socially disconnected youth about the time they hit adulthood. Those disaffected youth become the audience that charismatic dictator-wannabes can manipulate.

China MAY be able to avoid this as their social controls are far more strict but with the internet and how tech savvy the disaffected Chinese youth are, this isn’t a guarantee.

Did you not see my earlier comment about tidal spaghettification?

Sure there’s no disassembly but nothing living can survive that deformation and same with most materials. Basically the only thing you can send through wormholes are raw materials or anything you don’t mind ending up seven hundred times longer and commensurately thinner.

If you don’t understand the dangers of mistaking metaphor for wisdom then you are not worth talking with.

AI is an approximation of how humans think cognition works, a metaphor written in code, but is not equivalent in recapitulating human cognition. I am not saying this is a limitation of hardware or software, but rather a limitation of our currently primitive understanding of our cognition.

It is too easy and a path to misdirection to just say ‘Well the cholesterol and nerve bundles are the hardware, and thinking is the software!’, and is JUST as inaccurate as some 1910 hick looking at a new automobile and saying “Oh I get it, it’s a carriage! But where’s the horse?” because in the hick’s mind they think in metaphors of horses pulling things (which is why we still use ‘horesepower to rate car engines’). They could not imagine a reality in which the cart ‘pulled’ itself.

Actual scientists know the dangers of metaphors and use them cautiously, science communicators use metaphors more heavily because that is a shortcut to get laypeoples to understand in some way complex concepts. If you know Terry Pratchett, these things are called ‘lies to children’.

And don’t get me wrong, ‘lies to children’ serve an important purpose, building the foundations of understanding for later growth.

Like saying ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’, which I learned in 3rd grade.

It’s a lie to children of course, the process that the sun uses to convert hydrogen to energy is a FUCKTONNE more complicated than an 8 year old can understand, but the ‘lie to children’ that it does means that when I hit highschool and start learning physics and do the chapter on solar fusion, the framework of understanding is there while I come to grips with random electron walks and density shells.

‘The brain is the hardware and thought is the software’ is ‘lies to children’, and no more useful to the discussion than telling people ‘the sun burns hydrogen to make light’ in a scholarly discussion of stellar development. At best it will make everyone feel a little condescending towards you, at worst you derail the discussion.

Incorrect, the consciousness of the original human is gone, and the consciousness of the new human is operating under memories it did not directly experience.

No distinction from the outside, and from the inside a different consciousness, one that didn’t exist the moment before.

Um that’s a nice metaphor and all but that’s all it is. You pretend like its a profound statement when just 150 years ago they would have used the wax phonograph metaphor.

The map isn’t the territory no matter how hard you pretend it is.

Fucking finally someone in this thread that makes sense.

Haven’t read the Culture books yet but your post is the third reference I’ve seen this week so maybe I got a new series to read.