And 30 years after LASIK, you’d be incredibly lucky if your eyes hadn’t gotten worse to the point you’d need glasses anyway.

It’s called a skeuomorph, and many times the camera symbol is one too, as most modern cameras don’t look like that.

Maintaining continuity of consciousness is the only thing that would make me feel comfortable with converting myself to a machine intelligence.

Never dehumanize fascists or fascist-sympathizers (redundant but ok), it’s always important to remember that bad faith actors or their stooges are human and cannot be entirely eliminated from society, which is why people that fight for positive change have to set the rules such that bad faith actors’ actions are either quickly recognized and mitigated, or have society structured such that even those motivated solely by unempathetic selfishness can only achieve status by masking and contributing positively anyway.

Nah, you can enroll your own keys and set it up so you can be reasonably certain that your boot image hasn’t been altered, validating its integrity against the potential threat of bootkits. I do this with my Gentoo install.

Isn’t post-quantum cryptography already a thing? Probably not implemented in anything meaningful yet, but still.

Sounds painful with a high possibility of breaking bones then drowning while conscious. I’d recommend an inert gas that’s not CO2 and readily available, like nitrogen or something (CO2 buildup in the blood is what gives the sensation of suffocation). If you’re worried about people finding you and a mess, get an enema and stay a bit dehydrated first, and also ensure your body’s found within the first 2-3 days if possible (the first thing your corpse does is shit itself, and rot sets in pretty quickly).

This of course presumes you’re making the decision to end yourself while of sound mind, not in some panic, feeling trapped or completely hopeless. There’s usually a way out that’s not as permanent and can lead to future positive interactions that make continued living worth the pain. That said, I’ll never judge someone whose pain outweighs their will to live.

I’ve always wanted to try both of those.

Yep, I drink mead, i.e. honey wine. It’s really good, doesn’t give me as much of a headache as beer these days. Sometimes it’s too sweet, I haven’t found a good dry one around here though.

I played around with Gentoo a few years ago, got it working but then got annoyed with some binaries taking too long. Wanted to build a machine I couldn’t hack though, and now there’s a repo with precompiled bins if you ask portage nicely, so I figured I’d give it a shot again. Maybe it was the mead but I forgot to do that for gcc though. oops

What a coincidence, I’m drinking mead and installing Gentoo. Currently compiling gcc, always takes forever, maybe I should’ve gone with the recompiled binary for that one lol.

No ragrets.

Unlikely as it might be, maybe the 10% error rate is from gender queer people that haven’t realized/faced it yet.

Removed by mod

“What do you get if you multiply six by nine?”

• the derived question, theoretically

"There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

There is another theory which states that this has already happened."

• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (book 2 of the 5-part trilogy)

If I’m remembering right, one of the treatments for methanol poisoning is ethanol, as the ethanol metabolism supplants the methanol metabolism, or at least slows it to non-lethality. Though I’m sure they have better methods now.

I mean, being trans is perfectly valid, but I think gender dysphoria itself should be classified as a mental illness so long as it brings significant pain/distress to the individual, the solution there is just gender reassignment, surgery, hormones, etc. I don’t think there should be stigma in calling it such, it needs treatment the same as anything else. People with ADHD have a mental illness and get meds, sometimes therapy, people with poor eyesight have an ocular dysfunction of some kind and get glasses or surgery or whatever, none of it should be that big a deal. The point is it can be diagnosed and treated.

I think the response to shit like “transgenderism” being a mental disease should be “well at least their/our dysphoria can be treated now, what’s your excuse?”

All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

“So we can believe the big ones?”

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

“They’re not the same at all!”

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

MY POINT EXACTLY.

I think a high score might mean fibrillation depending on the runner, so please be choosy with your scare victim.

Yep, that’s emergence, where the models of simple systems, interacting en masse, generate complexity/‘chaos’ more easily predicted by different models within that set of parameters/scale. Basically, it’s like modeling the behavior of fractals from their appearance instead of the underlying ruleset, because what the rules generate is unexpected to our human brains, so we need to make new rules that allow us to more easily predict things, even if those rules aren’t as perfect as the ruleset itself.

My wife is my ex-girlfriend, but we’re still dating. She gets mildly amused when I point this out, but she might just be humoring me.

It’s not enough to reign in assholes, the system has to be designed in such a way that carriers of “dark triad” traits (i.e. the usual bad faith actors in a system) are still incentivized to contribute to or improve society without gradually dismantling it to increase their wealth/power/status. That’s a hard problem to solve.