Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

Also Zalack@kbin.social

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  • 59 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • I think the short episode count has also forced them to make some episodes ensemble episodes when they would have been better served being more focused.

    For instance, the musical episode really suffered from spotlighting so many characters rather than picking one character and making them the protagonist of the musical. My SO pointed out that it was just a string of “I want” songs (the song that comes in the first act where the character sets out their deepest desire) rather than an actual story. The episode really should have been about La’an or Uhura and constructed a full narrative around them.


  • This is mostly about normalizing “impeachment” so that Trump’s two impeachments don’t look as bad. This is a classic Republican tactic: when your guy gets caught doing “thing” start slinging “thing” around at your enemies until it loses all meaning.

    Similar tactic to co-opting “fake news”, “woke”, “feminism”, and “critical race theory”. All were terms that threatened to undermine the conservative ideology, and so were quickly hurled around as insults until their original meaning was completely distorted.


  • Why shouldn’t we, as engineers, be entitled to a small percentage of the profits that are generated by our code? Why are the shareholders entitled to it instead?

    I worked in Hollywood before becoming a programmer, and even as a low level worker, IATSE still got residuals from union shows that went to our healthcare and pension funds. My healthcare was 100% covered by that fund for a top-of-the-line plan, and I got contributions to both a pension AND a 401K that were ON TOP of my base pay rather than deducted from it.

    Lastly, we were paid hourly, which means overtime, but also had a weekly minimum. Mine was 50 hours. So if I was asked to work at all during a week I was entitled to 50 hours of pay unless I chose to take days off myself.

    Unions fucking rock and software engineers work in a field that is making historic profits off of our labor. We deserve a piece of that.




  • I actually think the radio signal is an apt comparison. Let’s say someone was trying to argue that the signal itself was a fundamental force.

    Well then you could make the argument that if you pour a drink into it, the water shorts the electronics and the signal stops playing as the electromagnetic force stops working on the pieces of the radio. This would lead you to believe, through the same logic in my post, that the signal itself is not a fundamental force, but is somehow created through the electromagnetic force interacting with the components, which… It is! The observer might not understand how the signal worked, but they could rule it out as being its own discreet thing.

    In the same way, we might not know exactly how our brain produces consciousness, but because the components we can see must be involved, it isn’t a discreet phenomenon. Fundamental forces can’t have parts or components, they must be completely discreet.

    Your example is a really really good one.





  • At a sketch:

    • We know that when the brain chemistry is disrupted, our consciousness is disrupted

    • You can test this yourself. Drink some alcohol and your consciousness will be disrupted. Similarly I am on Gabapentin for nerve pain, which works by inhibiting the electrical signals my nerves use to fire, and in turn makes me groggy.

    • While we don’t know exactly how consciousness works, we have a VERY good understanding of chemistry, which is to say, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism (fundamental forces). Literally millions of repeatable experiments that have validated these forces exist and we understand the way they behave.

    • Drugs like Gabapentin and Alcohol interact with our brain using these forces.

    • If the interaction of these forces being disrupted disrupts our consciousness, it’s reasonable to conclude that our consciousness is built on top of, or is an emergent property of, these forces’ interactions.

    • If our consciousness is made up of these forces, then it cannot be a fundamental force as, by definition, fundamental forces must be the basic building blocks of physics and not derived from other forces.

    There are no real assumptions here. It’s all a line of logical reasoning based on observations you can do yourself.



  • I think the problem is that there is less often something to be said if you agree. Every now and then you might have something to add that fleshes out the idea or adds additional context, but generally if I totally agree with a comment I just upvote it.

    On the other hand, when you disagree with something your response will, by logical necessity, be different from the parent comment.

    So if you want to prioritize “adding something novel” there’s a logical bias towards comments that disagree since only some percentage of agreement will tick that box.

    Otherwise you end up with a bunch of comments that literally or figuratively add up to “this”.