CarbonIceDragon

@CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Id argue that to some extent, its foundational to capitalism, such that any effort to actually abolish it would almost necessarily require destroying or significantly curtailing capitalism to succeed anyway. Virtually every company based on selling information, such as software and media companies that are some of the biggest on the planet right now, would find such an effort an existential threat, and even companies not based on such things may have patents or designs that give them an edge and that they would expend a lot on avoiding giving competition free range to copy. If you’re able to overpower them on something so important to them, in so consequential a fashion, then their grip on economic and political power would have to already have been greatly reduced, and some other basis of such power to draw on for support would have to exist.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Some of that is down to the general culture of the furry fandom I think, it tends to be a fair bit more sex-positive and less inhibited society at large, and while porn is a thing fairly common to humans in general (obviously not every human engages with it and the degree varies with the person, but still, it isnt exactly rare), if you have one group of people who have far less of a taboo about talking about and sharing it than those outside that group, thats the thing that outsiders are going to notice about them, especially if the stuff they make in that category is visually distinct from adult content found elsewhere. Its not universal of course, there are definitely puritanical furries out there if you look for them and the fandom is big enough that I cant say with certainty that the people Ive encountered are entirely representative of it, but thats the notion I get. To be honest, Ive come to get it over time, it can be nice to feel like you can just be open about every interest one has without having to think about which things are and arent suited to sharing with other people, but the natural consequence of choosing to reject a social norm is looking cringey or worse to those that still value it.

  As far as where the subculture goes outside the fetishey stuff, theres a lot of digital art made that isnt sexualized, but beyond that Id point to some of the more “irl” stuff furries are known for, like conventions, fursuits, and other related crafts like that (ive seen people with things like custom made plushies or other physical art). While some do bring adult things into those, it isnt really the norm. More or less all the sorts of creative or social aspects that you might expect of a media-based fandom, like star trek fans or such, just without any one big IP franchise behind it and instead an emphasis on making your own stuff with an informal set of shared themes and tropes.

  I wont try and point out specific events and craftspeople, since I am an extremely shy and anxious person irl and most of my interaction with other furries has been online spaces, mostly with my specific friend group that happens to be made up almost exclusively of them, but there are quite a few, especially in the US and EU. Anecdotally, that shyness is part of why I got into it in the first place, it somehow feels easier for me to make friends and generally interact socially, by creating a character that represents a more idealized version of myself that is more outgoing and less anxious, and pretending to be that character. Which is one of the things a fursona is, its partly an internet avatar and an outlet for creative expression, partly a subculture identity signifier to help find like minded people, and partly a sort of mask and social tool for self-reflection. If I had a blog, Id represent myself using mine just like the person in the OP is, get used to presenting yourself that way long enough and doing so ends up just feeling natural to you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Wait, wouldn’t it make sense for an anarchist to opposite intellectual property law on the grounds that the only way you could possibly enforce it beyond those in one’s immediate community would be with a larger state and associated law enforcement apparatus, which an anarchist would be expected to be against the existence of?

  I’m not sure that has much to do with AI, and if anything, AI companies should somewhat like copyright since what they are ultimately selling is a form of software, which is harder to profit off without such law. They just want the concept to apply selectively so as not to impede them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’d only be a fetish to the people who only like furries for the porn they make and don’t have an interest in the rest of the subculture that it comes from, which probably isn’t the sort of person to use a fursona to represent themselves on a tech blog in the first place.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tech Companies Apparently Do Not Understand Why We Dislike AI⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  We don’t exactly force other people to use one, and it doesn’t hurt anyone for us to, so why should we care?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  eh, Id say theres some pretty ugly mammals out there, at least in my opinion. most primates for instance, mole rats, some but certainly not all bats…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, while paradox games like Stellaris or the crusader kings games you mentioned, certainly have a lot of replayability (I don’t really care much for CK myself but have over 1000 hours on both Stellaris and EU4), they’re not great examples for where cheaper games by smaller companies offer more than expensive ones from bigger ones. Partly because paradox is fairly sizable and well known these days, but mostly because those games are quite expensive, just split into numerous expansions that come out over time. One can opt out of getting them, sure, but they’re where a lot of the different options that bring the replayability come from.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨aaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAA⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  yet also kind of cute

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Seriously Jesus, who was doing that for that to be added 😭⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s been a long time since I read any of the bible, but wasn’t there some story in it somewhere where some guy uses that and is immediately killed by god or something? (albiet I think the justification was some sort of tradition obligating him to have a child with a specific person, and his behavior was supposed to be exploiting that without fulfilling his end or something like that).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Do you understand how many people 350 million is? How did this worm ridden ball sack float to the top?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, the vast, vast majority were never really in the running. Were the chances anything close to even, would you expect to have so many at least somewhat well known politicians with his last name?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Believe It Or Not, Black Licorice⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  When I was a kid, a sibling and some friends of mine would occasionally play “jelly bean Russian roulette”, wherein we would get a number of jelly beans equal to the number of us playing, with one of them a black licorice, have one non-playing kid scramble them and “randomly” give one to each player, and then eat them eyes closed without seeing what the flavor was. Whoever got the licorice was the loser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Could you grind up a loaf of bread back into a flour and make a new loaf of bread?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve heard of some bakery somewhere doing “recycled bread”, where they supposedly take the leftover bread that didn’t sell that day, dry it out, grind it up, and mix it with fresh flour to make new bread, but I don’t know for sure if the story is real.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨purpose⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, has the system ever not eventually stabilized in another state? The fact that we have had extinctions, quite a lot of them even involving most species that have ever existed, and yet complex life and ecosystems still exist, would suggest that life will find a way to adapt around such a loss given time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨purpose⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  How many species of birds and bats eat just mosquitoes though, or a high enough percentage that they would go extinct rather than shift to rely more on their other prey species, even if at a smaller population? And are those particular species of birds and bats worth the consequences of having mosquitoes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Couldn't be worse than what we have now...⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If he were a chicken, he’d probably care more about dealing with bird flu, even if for purely selfish reasons.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Flushing⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Avoiding flushing the water is even harder

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨pain plant⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Every second I’ve lived so far, I haven’t died, so if we simply take that pattern and extrapolate it for each future second…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The science is divided⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  But the reasoning given doesnt apply exclusively to horses. Suppose we follow the same chain that gets us “all horses are the same color”, but replace “horses” with “colors”, we would end up with the statement that all colors are the same color. Thus, this is not a counterexample, because black and brown are the same color.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Entropy? Never heard of it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The argument is that there exist some use cases where we do not have a viable low carbon energy source yet (things like heavy farming equipment or aircraft), and one can effectively counteract the emissions of these things until we do develop one. Or alternatively, by the time that we eliminate all the high carbon energy, the heating effect already present may be well beyond what we desire the climate to be like, and returning it to a prior state would require not just not emitting carbon, but removing some of what is already there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Real⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Before bed I’ve heard, but right after waking? I thought light was good then for getting you more alert?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the difference between a hostage and a prisoner?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A hostage implies the purpose of holding that person is as leverage to extract some concession from someone, whereas a prisoner does not necessarily imply that intent and could be held for any reason?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Say it.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate to break it to people, but this universe is the one where people occasionally eat spiders.

  Consider: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fried_spider

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are dwarf planets not considered planets but dwarf stars are considered stars?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I suspect that we might not use the term “dwarf planet”, were it not that the objects we initially created the category to describe were originally classed as planets. The category labelling is a bit arbitrary, we just discovered that what we now call dwarf planets are quite abundant and that there was a clear line that could be drawn to distinguish them from the rest of what we called planets, and so decided to draw that line between them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Professional father right here⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What if I want the reverse, shoes that have nice cushion to them but look like toe shoes?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Vibes based cooking⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I just grab whatever random spices I have that sound good and add a few shakes

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it wrong to not have a disabled child solely to avoid forcing the child to suffer their whole life?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Indeed, it’s not incoherent, at some level though I’d argue that morality is at it’s core simply a tool for deciding what actions one should take, and a system that both follows a utilitarian model and makes it extremely easy for someone’s life to be negative carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side. As this is completely contrary to our instincts about what we want morality to be, and completely impractical to act on, it is no longer a very useful tool if one assumes that.

  I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it wrong to not have a disabled child solely to avoid forcing the child to suffer their whole life?⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  One could make the argument that suffering is more or less the opposite of happiness, and so that if you give the kid a good enough life, that cancels out the suffering and then some, but a lot depends on how exactly you define those things I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like just talking about the buying power of money or even the ability to effectively duplicate stuff is missing something: assuming your time travel actually allows you to change the past, and it doesn’t just end up in a situation where you can only fulfill a timeline that always existed, you can take technology to the past too.

  Go back to the beginning of civilization and give them current technology (or even the beginning of time, and found a new civilization there). Then do it again (or if you don’t, someone else will eventually) with the new tech developed off the existing stuff over time. Repeated ad nauseum, you end up with a situation where civilization has and since the beginning has always had, every single technology it is physically possible to create.

  You get the same kind of issues as “the singularity” (the concept where a super intelligent AI improves itself exponentially until it is as powerful as is possible to be). As such, our entire concept of markets and money and economy are likely completely obsolete, because find yourself in a universe populated by something as close as is physically possible to become to gods.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨JeSUS⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Dont I wish, but no, don’t even get scales…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨on topic⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Lemmy three day challenge