Formerly /u/Zalack on Reddit.e

Also Zalack@kbin.social

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  • 57 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • 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.



  • My point was that Star Wars has been tied to the same characters for personal and business reasons, not inherently creative ones defined by the setting. The difference IMO is mostly down to who the creators and executives involved in the process of each IP have been, not the actual merits of the respective IP’s worlds.

    If Gene Roddenberry has decided that Next Generation had to be about Kirk and his crew, and then Paramount also mandated all it’s other Star Trek projects to be about TOS crew, we’d be having the same discussions about “why can’t Start Trek get away from the original series?” even though it has nothing to do with the setting.


  • No offense meant, because you raise a lot of good points on why Star Trek works as a setting, but I fundamentally disagree with the Star Wars take here. Historically, Star Wars has centered around the Skywalker saga for Personal (George Lucas) and Business (Disney) reasons, not creative ones.

    Star Wars offers an excellent setting with a framework to discuss ethics and morality baked directly into the universe. Stories like Knights of the Old Republic have shown that you can get away from the main Saga and still tell an engaging story rooted in the universe that Saga created. Tons of old Legends content didn’t tie directly into the original films and were excellent.

    Andor has also shown that it’s also just that bad writing is what leads to IP burnout. I couldn’t finish Book of Boba Fett or Mandalorian season 3, but have watched Andor 3 times.