Oceans Yet to Burn

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

The people crawling all over Apple, like purring cats trying to get a promotion at the fish-packing factory, over ripping the headphone jack out of the iPhone would call me a luddite, but they are fools.

I love technology.

I’m just not quite so naive about it.

I (generally) don’t trust devices that I can’t manually cut the power to.  

I don’t need a “smart” off switch.  If I have to cut the power, the “smart” layer has already fucked up (because software does that sometimes), and I need to cut through that UI layer entirely to perform a simple function.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Been hanging onto my 3yo phone for environmental reasons and because I like having a removable battery.

Now I’m worrying if I won’t be able to get an upper-ish-tier Android phone with a removable battery if I wait too long, just like I wasn’t able to get one with a keyboard…

[thathopeyetlives]

Any battery is removable if you try hard enough. What’s the motivation for that?

[mitigatedchaos]

What, having a removable battery?

Aside from that I’m considering ordering a replacement battery for only like $10 + shipping, which would probably double my phone’s battery life again,

and environmental concerns, including opposition to planned obsolescence on these things that we’re paying so much for and spending so many resources on, which are not easy to recycle,

I like having the ability to turn turn a phone COMPLETELY OFF if it starts screaming and fucking up, or if I just want it to be completely and totally off, and my experience has been that the hardware switches to force this are apparently not hardwarey enough or something.

If the phone is not responding and has locked up while I am stranded somewhere, or I get into a social situation where the phone must be off now, I can literally physically remove the battery and force the issue whether the phone wants to turn off or not.  No waiting 12 hours for the battery to die.

rustingbridges: oh are they getting rid of removable batteries, why, why is that good

Supposedly, to make phones thinner or more waterproof.  In actuality, to limit phone effective lifespan.  I’d consider putting a luxury goods tax on it, and on all methods of planned obsolescence if I were in charge of things.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Been hanging onto my 3yo phone for environmental reasons and because I like having a removable battery.

Now I’m worrying if I won’t be able to get an upper-ish-tier Android phone with a removable battery if I wait too long, just like I wasn’t able to get one with a keyboard…

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.

I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.

I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals.  You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.

If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.

My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.

…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.

[cultureulterior]

What about sleep?

[mitigatedchaos]

It’s the same physical hardware, and I think that makes a difference.

[its-okae-carly-rae]

Does that apply to your hypothetical digital copies as well, do they have to go through elaborate protocols of continuous operation to transfer from one datacentre to another without dying, or is it just the flesh-to-silicon transition that has this problem?

[mitigatedchaos]

do they have to go through elaborate protocols of continuous operation to transfer from one datacentre to another without dying,

I would think so, but I am less likely to believe that consciousness is purely classical these days.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

Other thing that somehow features all three: the Back To The Future trilogy

I admit, I focused on doing time travel, not watching time travel, so I haven’t seen all of them.  It was more of a one-time thing, too.

Actually my knowledge of late 20th century movies is pretty selective.  It was all considered pretty bloody problematic at the time, for most of them.

Anyhow, it’s kinda complicated, but the third way is the most, uh, accurate, I guess?  There’s like a 50-50 chance I’m being chased by the Temporal Enforcement Bureau, but eh, I can live with it.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[whisperwhisk]

and somehow homestuck manages to feature all three

because of course it does

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

You Can’t Have It All (even in communism)

[thathopeyetlives]

In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible. 

Today things are… different. 

It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution: 

1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody. 

2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment

3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology

I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on. 

Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last. 

(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)

If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure. 

I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags. 

[rendakuenthusiast]

Endorsed.

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

Anonymous asked:

It's okay to fear death if you don't let that fear control you. We should be pushing the spare capacity for risk we've generated, not resting and letting our potential go to waste. The same applies to any future capacity medical advances generate. To put it in the crudest possible terms, immortality is for pussies. Choose instead to die gloriously.

The grand irony is that all the other medical technologies acquired along the way as part of the general pattern of technological development necessary to achieve enhanced lifespans would very well allow me to achieve much more of my potential.

…to have energy, to have focus, to have executive functioning, for all these to be much less of a battle, why did you think I wanted to live so long in the first place?

There’s a lot of art to make, way more than can be crammed into a single human lifetime, much less a single dysfunctional human lifespan.

The “but living longer will remove meaning from human life!” arguments were always somewhat bizarre to me.  Making a book, or a comic book, or a movie, it takes a long time!

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[mitigatedchaos]

Anyhow, we’ll set the rest of that discussion aside for now, since I want to clarify how I differ from some of the others.

I don’t believe in the purely mind-pattern definition of self.

I don’t see uploads, if possible, as being identical people to the originals.  You might be able to Ship-of-Theseus something to cross that causal barrier, but then you have to actually Ship-of-Theseus it to get the appropriate causal entangling.

If I get shot, and you re-instance a brain backup into the blank nervous system of some sort of empty clone doll, I don’t wake up - the clone does.

My suspicion has only grown greater on this with the whole quantum stuff.

…not that having a near-identical clone go on without me isn’t at least somewhat comforting as an idea, but then, so is a nice grave compared to naught at all.

[discoursedrome]

Now I’m very much in the Stop Picking On Death camp and we’ve had it out on that subject before, but, as you say, setting that aside: something that people who aspire to immortality tech need to grapple with, I think, is that any technology that pushes the boundaries of human survivability is going to change our concept of what “death” is. This has already happened to a limited extent: concepts of what death is and when it occurs have been pushed back by medical advances, while those same advances have also pushed back our concept of what life is, in cases like brain death. Insofar as radical life-extending/life-expanding technology is possible, our present notions of life, death and identity will have completely broken down long before those technologies are perfected, simply because they’ll be obsolete. In a sense this is comforting and in a sense it’s not, since this also means the end of our present notions of what a person is and what it means to say that a thing exists, because those notions are not designed for the kind of pressures that immortality tech would place upon them. You can already see hints of this in the extreme, unbridgeable disagreements over partial-continuity thought experiments.

It seems to me that insofar as there’s a generalized intuition of death, it’s that death is when something changes irreversibly in such a way that you can no longer recognize it as having the same “identity”. This isn’t just a function of the degree of change, though, it also has something to do with smoothness – when you get into situations where the end result is still clearly a living person rather than a pile of topsoil, people’s intuition about “is this death” seems to be almost entirely based on whether they sense an abrupt discontinuity in something they consider central to identity.

Obviously, you get radically different results depending on how you define change, identity, smoothness, and so on, which is why once you start talking about hypothetical futuretech, concepts of death diverge into unrecognizeability. It’s also why the question of whether you’re dead or not depends on who you ask. It’s a fortuitous coincidence that the normal way of dying where your body stops working and disintegrates and isn’t replaced by anything with a close resemblance happens to satisfy nearly everyone’s death formula. In a real sense I think it’s fair to say that, just like selfhood, death is a social construct, and you need to account for that element of it when envisioning a “world without death”.

[mitigatedchaos]

@discoursedrome here preparing for the discourse takes of 2507

[Oceans Yet to Burn]

[brainstatic]

I swear to god he has some kind of ancient Egyptian curse. There is always, always one of these whenever something happens. He stole an amulet from a tomb or some shit. 

[diebrarian]

it’s real