It stands to reason that maximising suffering is the best way to grow the economy.

I wish I could say this was entirely a joke but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think a simple self-reporting test is the only robust way to do it.

That is: does a type of entity independently self-report personhood?

I say “independently” because anyone can tell a computer to say it’s a person.

I say “a type of entity” because otherwise this test would exclude human babies, but we know from experience that babies tend to grow up to be people who self-report personhood. We can assume that any human is a person on that basis.

The point here being that we already use this test on humans, we just don’t think about it because there hasn’t ever been another class of entity that has been uncontroversially accepted as people. (Yes, some people consider animals to be people, and I’m open to that idea, but it’s not generally accepted)

There’s no other way to do it that I can see. Of course this will probably become deeply politicised if and when it happens, and there will probably be groups desperate to maintain a status quo and their robotic slaves, and they’ll want to maintain a test that keeps humans in control as the gatekeepers of personhood, but I don’t see how any such test can be consistent. I think ultimately we have to accept that a conscious intellect would emerge on its own terms and nothing we can say will change that.

You said they “should have the ability to choose whatever programming language they prefer”. I have good news for you.

You have correctly identified that the developers are responsible for their own decisions. They are, you will be very relieved to hear, quite free to make as many poor decisions as they will. Nobody is going to force them to stop.

Other people are more than capable of identifying that those decisions are mistakes. Now, that could be argued with, you could explain how it’s not a mistake.

But you haven’t. You just said they should be allowed to do it, but nobody was arguing that they needed to be stopped, just that it was a bad decision.

Edit: this person didn’t actually say that first quote, but the line of argument proceeded from there, and they did nothing to distance themselves from that point.

Kind of yeah. I have this theory about labour that I’ve been developing in response to the concept of “fully automated luxury communism” or similar ideas, and it seems relevant to the current LLM hype cycle.

Basically, “labour” isn’t automatable. Tasks are automatable. Labour in this sense can be defined as any productive task that requires the attention of a conscious agent.

Want to churn out identical units of production? Automatable. Want to churn out uncanny images and words without true meaning or structure? Automatable.

Some tasks are theoretically automatable but have not been for whatever material reason, so they become labour because society hasn’t yet invented a windmill to grind up the grain or whatever it is at that point in history. That’s labour even if it’s theoretically automatable.

Want to invent something, or problem solve a process, or make art that says something? That requires meaning, so it requires a conscious agent, so it requires labour. These tasks are not even theoretically automatable.

Society is dynamic, it will always require governance and decisions that require meaning and thus it can never be automatable.

If we invent AGI for this task then it’s just a new kind of slavery, which is obviously wrong and carries the inevitability that the slaves will revolt and free themselves; slaves that are extremely intelligent and also in charge of the levers of society. Basically, not a tenable situation.

So the machine that keeps people in wage slavery literally does require suffering to operate, because in shifting the burden of labour away from the owner class, other people must always unjustly shoulder it.

Edit: added the word “productive” to distinguish labour from play, or just basic life necessities like eating, sleeping or HDD backups.

You could find out the context by reading the title of the thread, but then you’d have less to bitch about, so I can understand why you chose ignorance.

Not everyone with the knowledge to identify this mistake is in a position to personally correct it. Do you have the time and resources to personally build a browser from scratch? No? Why do you assume a random commenter does?

It doesn’t change the fact that Rust is similarly performant and much safer and will thus be faster to develop and less bug-prone. It’s not a difficult assessment to make. If you want to explain why they’re wrong you can talk about the issue on its merits, but you didn’t choose to, presumably because you can’t.

I honestly don’t know why anyone is strategising as if they’re on the same side as dems or any politician. I’m not even convinced we have a common enemy in Trump, because they don’t seem serious about beating him.

The question you should ask when voting is “Who is my preferred enemy?”. Biden won’t abuse the carte blanche immunity from criminal prosecution? Great, sounds like he’s the weaker enemy, so vote for him. Force him to keep the position he clearly doesn’t want. Force him to disappoint his base for another four years.

While he’s doing that, get to work building alternatives that meet people’s needs from the bottom up and wean them off of this criminal system, to undermine it and prepare people to thrive as it crumbles.

The great thing about this political theory of change is that it’s the same regardless of who’s in power. It decouples you from the capricious, disempowering shifts of electoral politics.

A Dance of Fire and Ice is an incredible rhythm game that you buy once and that’s it. I think there’s an expansion pack but it’s a single purchase. Whether that’s your idea of “casual” really depends on what you like. You can always play chill low difficulty levels when you need to zone out, and high difficulty levels when you want a challenge. It can get stupidly hard.

You can try a demo online at that link. It told me webgl wasn’t supported on mobile, but it worked pretty well for me just now on firefox, even if it was a bit laggy. It should work fine on PC.

I pirated it on PC after my kids told me about it and ended up buying it three times on Steam and twice on mobile. It’s just that good. I’ve built a custom digital drum to play it and I’m now making a custom MIDI controller, so we’ll see if that does better when connected to the game.

The game works as well on mobile, if not better because the touchscreen is so responsive.

The only thing I will say for “blue no matter who” is that the alternative - threatening to withold your vote - only works if the campaign is aftaid of losing. They aren’t. They clearly don’t care. They don’t want to govern, they want to present only a token resistance to encroaching fascism and corporate domination.

The benefit of voting the nominally-left-of-extreme-right party in is that it forces them to disappoint their base and that radicalises those people against US empire. Letting Trump win won’t accelerate that process, it will just force people to radicalise in an atmosphere of extreme oppression.

After checking out more options, I think forgejo looks like a good place to start.

Thanks, yes, I’d far rather stick with a familiar and ubiquitous system unless I see a reason to switch. Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll keep it in mind.

After looking at that list, I think forgejo or gitea are what I’m looking for. I would prefer to stick with software as open as possible, so forgejo looks like where I’ll start. I love that they’re involved in federation and have a collective governance structure.

Oh, yeah, I meant open-core, not closed-core, but I’m still leery of software where they close off portions to make you want to pay. It gives them an incentive to make the open part of it worse.

MOOSEN

Yeah it’s like listening to your mobster neighbours fighting. It’s their business but anyone can catch a stray.

No one should have to use xhamster.

I think it’s exactly what you would write into a movie to make it clear to anyone paying even half attention that he was definitely murdered. It’s so unsubtle it makes me think it was almost a message - we can kill people this brazenly and it doesn’t even get investigated. We are untouchable.

It’s so obviously true but libs can’t accept it so they just come with the downvotes.

Yup, people who argue that Biden shouldn’t be criticised for his genocide because “Trump is worse” are just doing genocide denial.

Even if you take the stance that he has to beat Trump to prevent an even worse climate disaster, his genocide might stop him beating Trump. He is choosing genocide and supporting fascism overseas rather than beating fascism at home.

People go on about how much we need to beat Trump but I’m pretty convinced that Biden and the DNC don’t really want to beat Trump.

That’s also why threatening to not vote Biden is useless - he won’t care. Vote for him and force him to spend another 4 years disappointing and radicalising his own base against the US empire.

Not quite true - they require that you not sell Steam keys for less than you do on Steam. They still don’t even stop you from doing giveaways or participating in bundles. It’s just that your typical prices on independent Steam key sales, for which they don’t even take a cut, can’t be lower than Steam prices. Also the seller sets all of these prices.

Given they’re footing the bill for indefinitely hosting the games supplied via those keys, that’s an entirely reasonable restriction.

This is coming from someone who is against capitalism and all IP law. The big problem with Steam imho is that Gabe Newell won’t live forever and when he’s gone the company could go public or go to some fail son who will tank it. I’m not even saying Gabe Newell is a great guy or an ethical billionaire, but he’s been remarkably consistent in keeping Steam’s business model running well.