You literally can’t be a billionaire without exploiting people. If you’re not sharing profits equitably, you’re exploiting your work force; if you ARE sharing profits, then there’s no way you’ll become a billionaire.

I like this take - I read the refutation in the replies and I get that point, but consciousness as an illusion to rationalize stimulus response makes a lot of sense - especially because the reach of consciousness’s control is much more limited than it thinks it is. Literally copium.

When I was a teenager I read an Appleseed manga and it mentioned a tenet of Buddhism that I’ll never forget - though I’ve forgotten the name of the idea (and I’ve never heard anyone mention it in any other context, and while I’m not a Buddhist scholar, I have read a decent amount of Buddhist stuff)

There’s some concept in Japanese Buddhism that says that, while reality may be an illusion, the fact that we can agree on it, means that we can at least call it “real”

(Aka Japanese Buddhist describes copium)

You seem very upset about this. I doubt this will help since it doesn’t seem like your reasoning is influenced by logic, but, the fact that there are fraudulent doctors and diagnoses doesn’t mean science isn’t real.

You don’t have to crack it to make it but you have to crack it to determine whether you’ve made it. That’s kinda the trick of the early AI hype, notably that NYT article that fed Chat GPT some simple sci fi, ai-coming-to-life prompts and it generated replies based on its training data - or, if you believe the nyt author, it came to life.

I think what you’re saying is a kind of “can’t define it but I know it when I see it” idea, and that’s valid, for sure. I think you’re right that we don’t need to understand it to make it - I guess what I was trying to say was, if it’s so complex that we can’t understand it in ourselves, I doubt we’re going to be able to develop the complexity required to make it.

And I don’t think that the inability to know what has happened in an AI training algorithm is evidence that we can create a sentient being.

That said, our understanding of consciousness is so nascient that we might just be so wrong about it that we’re looking in the wrong place, or for the wrong thing.

We may understand it so badly that the truth is the opposite of what I’m saying : people have said (“people have said” is a super red flag, but I mean spiritualists and crackpots, my favorite being the person who wrote The Secret Life of Plants) that consciousness is all around us, that every organized matter has consciousness. Trees, for example - but not just trees, also the parts of a tree; a branch, a leaf; a whole tree may have a separate consciousness from its leaves - or, and this is what always blows my mind: every cell in the tree except one. And every cell in the tree except two, and then every cell in the tree except a different two. And so on. With no way to communicate with them, how would a tree be aware of the consciousness of it’s leaves?

How could we possibly know if our liver is conscious? Or our countertop, or the grass in the park nearby?

While that’s obviously just thought experiment bullshit, my point is, we don’t know fucking anything. So maybe we created it already. Maybe we will create it but we will never be able to know whether we’ve created it.

Things that are scientifically provable are valid.

If I can interject - I don’t think the OP is showing an unpopular opinion. The people they’re talking to aren’t mad. It looks to me like an opinion whose wisdom isn’t generally accepted - and there’s a difference.

Unpopular opinion: pedophilia is a mental disorder; child rape (including “statutory” rape) is an act of violence, cruelty, and power - or, in arguably the worst case, crimes of opportunity. Not all child rapists are pedophiles and not all pedophiles are child rapists. Pedophiles should be treated; child rapists should be imprisoned forever. (Those that are in the overlap can be treated in prison.)

This opinion is (I think) probably true, but if you go around talking about it, you will be unpopular.

Unaccepted opinion: well, there are a lot of them here, but this one - about teachers - could be tweaked into one: the only way we are going to see changes that would actually benefit our society and country, the things the news and politicians say are “luxury expenses” - aka health care, teachers’ salaries, rent and real estate regulation, etc - is with a general strike. The propaganda and gaslighting and victim blaming are so deeply entrenched that they have become the most profitable sectors of our economy.

This opinion is - again, in my opinion - probably true, and there are a lot of people who agree - but not enough. If the crowd in that picture represents a country of 350 million, then that one person represents maybe 0.5-1 million people? Which is way more than the supporters of a general strike.

Why did I say all that? Mostly because I’m bored - but I think it’s a neat distinction to make.

This whole open AI has Artificial General Intelligence but they’re keeping it secret! is like saying Microsoft had Chat GPT 20 years ago with Clippy.

Humans don’t even know what intelligence is, the thing we invented to try to measure who’s got the best brains - we literally don’t even have scientific definition of the word, much less the ability to test it - so we definitely can’t program it. We are a veeeeerry long way from even understanding how thoughts and memories work; and the thing we’re calling “general intelligence” ? We have no fucking idea what that even means; there’s no way a bunch of computer scientists can feed enough Internet to a ML algorithm to “invent” it. (No shade, those peepos are smart - but understanding wtf intelligence is isn’t going to come from them.)

One caveat tho: while I don’t think we’re close to AGI, I do think we’re very close to being able to fake it. Going from Chat GPT to something that we can pretend is actual AI is really just a matter of whether we, as humans, are willing to believe it.

Donkey Kong wishes! No, Dead Kennedys

Ok I should preface by saying I think ancap is dumb and having a slight disagreement with what you’ve said does not mean I’m not defending them. They’re asshats.

But: imo, anarchist thought escapes definition. There’s no such thing as anarchism (in the sense of an agreed-upon political philosophy), only anarchists.

Readers of Rene Girard might describe coersion (insofar as it’s a natural result of hegemony), as a sort of force of nature, like violence, that, if society doesn’t find a healthy way to express, will come out sideways, in ways that are anti-social.

Hmmm. What about anarchocapitalists that leave capitalist out of their descriptors and larp like they’re contemporary versions of the DK-listening, doc martens wearing, spiky hair having kids from the 1980s. And ancaps might be slightly better than the rich people at the top that use every advantage they’ve been given as a lever to suppress the success of everyone else. At least ancaps still have the potential to change.

All of this. The reason why the “trans debate” is so problematic is because of the “debate” part. I don’t give a shit about whether gender is a performance or a genetic thing - i care that trans people are murdered at an alarming rate, and that their rights to health care are significantly under threat - or gone already. My concern is that trans and gay people still have to worry about their safety when they come out of the closet.

I care about providing safety and normal human treatment for people who aren’t getting it.

The “debates” can happen after these people stop being murdered and abused. You can tell me all about your religious doctrines and how god made Adam and Eve or whatever after we agree that humans need to be treated like humans.

Oh you mean the IBM Enterprise Linux upstream? Is that ok to use on a desktop computer?

(I’m just kidding, Fedora’s great.)

Idk if I would say it’s looks > usability, and it’s certainly not gaudy… There are theming styles that are much more unusable and gaudy than the “riced” look.

It’s an aesthetic that idealizes a kind of barebones utility, and while it often will lean towards the look over the usability, the look itself is like a “beautiful utilitarian” - minimalistic, uncluttered, etc.

Fwiw rice is a backronym, it originally comes from just “rice burners” which were the kind of cars & motorcycles that got “cosmetically enhanced”

Removed by mod

I don’t think that’s it. Mentioning the Missing White Woman Syndrome in this context implies that we should not feel disgust or concern because we’re only feeling that way because she’s white.

The point of MWWS isn’t that we should care less about white women, it’s that we should care more about non-white women; it would be more apt trip being it up in the context of the brutalization and humiliation of a non white women about whom no one seems to give a shit.

As I’ve said in a few posts on this thread: the point of equality isn’t to treat privileged people worse, it’s to treat underprivileged people better.

She was brutalized and humiliated specifically because of MWWS. To cite that phenomenon without context reads like they’re trying to shame people for being disgusted by disgusting behavior. It’s as if, because of the existence of MWWS, we shouldn’t feel concern - when, the reality is that the reason MWWS is a problem isn’t because people care too much about white women, it’s because people care too little about non-white women.

A more useful invocation of the MWWS is when a non-white woman is brutalized and no one seems to care, not when it’s a white woman and people do.

The point of equality isn’t to treat privileged people worse, it’s to treat underprivileged people better.

The politics of being an oppressed class within a class of oppressors isn’t new, and there are a lot of opportunities for white women to act in fucked up ways (eg Karens), and for people to treat white women in fucked up ways. She was probably chosen to be specifically humiliated and brutalized because of Missing White Woman Syndrome, and it’s playing out as they expected - which will embolden them to do it again.

Attributing our concern to her whiteness racializes and politicizes her humiliation but it’s still a disgusting humiliation and brutalization.

By citing the MWWS without context, the implication is that we should be ashamed for our concern, as though we only care because she’s white - a statement that is, for me anyway, and I think for more and more people these days, false - but it’s irrelevant - MWWS is a phenomenon, but she was a person. Her treatment was disgusting and trying to undermine legitimate shock and disgust is cruel.

While MWWS and the politics of white femininity are important (and specifically caused this woman’s uniquely horrific treatment), it doesn’t help to discuss them in the aftermath of specific horrors, and trying to shame people for feeling disgusted by disgusting behavior is, well, it’s why you’re being downvoted. The point of equality isn’t to treat privileged people worse, it’s to treat underprivileged people better.

This exactly. All the things they’ve bought they’ve slowly started pushing towards monetization, away from users.

Old Microsoft was specifically fighting Bill Gates’s personal crusade for IP law; now that his influence is diminishing, they’re seeing the dollar signs that are written all over the phrase “free code.”

(“So I can just… take it? And… sell it?”)

It’s so easy for you young people. Back in my day, in order to hate Microsoft, we had to understand the virus risks of Windows, we hand to have needed to go into the registry to make some minor customization change; we had to know about Microsoft’s nefarious dealings bribing game dev companies to use Directx when they saw the threat of opengl. We had to know about Bill Gates’s dark side (which he did, really well - but we have Behind the Bastards now). We had to be mad about crap like how they locked down gui customization, killing litestep and bb4win. We had to deeply care about the deep innards of your computing experience (read: ricing) to understand why Microsoft sucked so bad.

Today, you kids have it so easy - they’re putting ads in the operating system, their core software is all subscription, they’re talking about making the OS itself subscription based. These days they make it so obvious that we’re not their priority, making good software isn’t their priority; their priority is getting our money.

(I feel like I made the joke already - Microsoft’s really easy to hate these days, you get it - but I’m having fun, so I’m going to keep going.)

They used to put freecell right on your computer - I’m telling you, we had to go seriously digging to find reasons to hate M$. Freecell, minesweeper, solitaire, that weird pinball game my dad liked - we had to be seriously ungrateful shits to head over to Ubuntu dot com.

And now, with one click installers, active discord help channels, eager, excited, and friendly people all over, just happy to see the FOSS community grow - engaging in a healthy relationship with computing has never been so easy - 3 or 4 clicks! Asserting your self respect and aligning your daily experience with your ethics was never like this when I was young.

We used to have to ask on the arch forums where 99% of the time we were told to rtfm (because we hadn’t); we had to be super careful not to let on that we were asking the arch forums about our Ubuntu issues. We had to search for random forum threads that inevitably ended with “nvm i fixed it” - if there was any follow-up at all. We had men whose back sweat trickled down through their unkempt back hair before disappearing into their plumber crack; you guys today have stunningly beautiful men and women who are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be “developer advocates” - there are twitch streamers who are getting paid super well at their fancy Netflix jobs but still spend hours and hours of their day sharing their knowledge with newcomers - literally just because they enjoy helping people learn about computers.

Kidding aside Linux is pretty ok, I hope you enjoy it.