Melmi

Yeah, fair enough. To my mind I guess I don’t think of array indexes as an example of actual zero based numbering, simply a quirk of how pointers work. I don’t see why one starting from zero has anything to do with the other starting from zero. They’re separate things in my head. Interestingly, the article you linked does mention this argument:

Referencing memory by an address and an offset is represented directly in computer hardware on virtually all computer architectures, so this design detail in C makes compilation easier, at the cost of some human factors. In this context using “zeroth” as an ordinal is not strictly correct, but a widespread habit in this profession.

That said, I suppose I still use normal one-based numbering because that’s how I’m used to everything else working.

Picard is definitely the worst for this. It’s woefully generic and miserable.

On the other hand, SNW feels like it has much more of the TOS-era vibrancy, LD is pretty similar to TNG in terms of setting (plus modern humor of course)… Prodigy even takes the novel approach of seeming like generic sci-fi at first only to become probably the most similar to 90s Trek out of all the new shows, albeit in kid’s show format. Still, it’s really fun and is all about the hope the Federation represents.

And for that matter, while early Discovery is pretty dark, I feel like Discovery gets more hopeful. Sure, the 32nd century has kind of a “fallen utopia” thing going on, but it very quickly turns into rebuilding and by the end they’re looking hopefully to the future as they’re expanding their borders again. It’s different from the previous eras of Trek, but it’s still hopeful.

Indexes start from zero because they’re memory offsets, but array[0] is still the first element because it’s an ordinal number, not an offset. It’s literally counting each element of the array. It lines up with the cardinality—you wouldn’t say ['A', 'B', 'C'] has two elements, despite array[2] being the last element.

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When done correctly, the banner is actually a consent banner. It’s a legal thing, not necessarily trying to discourage criminals. It’s informing users that all use will be monitored and it implies their consent to the technology policies of the organization. It’s more for regular users than criminals.

When it’s just “unauthorized access is prohibited”, though, especially on a single-user server? Not really any point. But since this article was based on compliance guidelines that aren’t all relevant to the homelab, I can see how it got warped into the empty “you no hack” banner.

I agree that democratic socialism is probably the closest IRL system, I just think it’s fairly vague about it and any assertions are easily glossed over or disregarded as fiction, or attributed to the advanced tech.

It comes back to the disconnection of tech, the vagueness, the allegory. You don’t see queer people, you just see allegories for queer people that are either safer to accept or just aren’t acknowledged as allegories. You don’t see Federation imperialism being questioned that much, they’re pretty much always right. The only meaningful people who question it are the Maquis, and Sisko loses himself in his vengeance and pursuit of them (but is never humbled for it—from the audience’s perspective, he’s right). And then there’s S31, which is fascist to begin with.

And I’m just talking about canon here. Not the books or anything like that.

Technically money was abolished prior to the invention of the replicator, but we never hear any details about that. The most detail we get is a one off line in Voyager about a “New World Economy”.

They don’t flesh out what the economy actually looks like, or how we got here without replicators. The “without replicators” is an important bit, which might seem like a random thing for me to be focusing on but I’ve talked to conservative fans who will often cite replicators as something that would be required for the Federation’s socialism. Even liberal fans often think that. The message of the show is about post-scarcity, not workers owning the means of production. It’s not socialism in the ways that it exists on earth, and so conservatives don’t hate it.

Okay, but that’s capitalism. There’s the classic cope of “this is simply a requirement because scarcity exists.” They think it’s necessary and unavoidable.

The conservative read of Star Trek is that feeding all its citizens is a sign of the Federation being so rich that it can feed all its citizens without the need for capitalism as we know it. True post-scarcity.

It doesn’t challenge their belief that starving citizens are required in the modern day. If anything, to a conservative techbro like Musk, it reaffirms their beliefs because it’s all about how rich the Federation is and how feeding the whole world would require massive advances in technology like replicators. It’s even a common plot point how other civilizations want access to Federation replicators and other tech.

But all of this is either compatible with a conservative reading, or requires more analysis than most conservatives are putting in. I mean I doubt Musk read the Picard books.

But then you go on to mention stuff like family tradition, which is literally a key value for conservatives, especially when it involves joining the military.

Or people being well fed, or valuing self-improvement? Think about all the rightwing grifters who go on about self improvement all the time, or how they claim that communism killed 15 vigintillion people from starvation and only CAPITALISM can feed the world. Conservatives don’t want people to be starving, starving citizens are the sign of a poor society. It’s okay that the Federation doesn’t use money because it is post-scarcity thanks to replicators, a technological solution to the issue of feeding the poor. This is perfectly compatible with the techbro mindset that tech is the solution to all our problems, and isn’t challenging to those who believe that socialism is impossible without advanced post-scarcity technology.

What I’m trying to get at is that all the aesthetics are there for a conservative to read it in a way that is compatible with their ideology, in much the same way that a liberal will read it as a triumph of liberalism or a leftist can interpret it as socialist. It isn’t challenging to those ideologies, because it’s vague enough and alien enough to not map 1-to-1 onto any modern political system.

I mean the Bell Riots happen in 2024 in the Prime Timeline. The 21st century sucks in Star Trek. Eugenics wars, Sanctuary Districts, WWIII, fascist dictatorships using soldiers addicted to drugs…

It’s only after a nuclear holocaust that humanity is reborn into their “hopeful era”. I mean hell, they literally had to retcon the timeline because the 90s weren’t actually as awful as the show claimed and they had to move the Eugenics Wars. The 21st century is dark in the Prime Timeline, and it’s fully believable that it was just as bad as our real 21st century or worse.

So no, as easy as it is to cave to doomerism, I think the message of Star Trek is that this too shall pass. Stuff sucks, no doubt, the world is in a dark place right now, but that doesn’t mean it will stay that way.

I like to rewatch DS9: “Past Tense” sometimes because it really hits home how bad things are, but also gives hope for how maybe there’s a future in which we look back and wonder how things got this bad.

I can kind of see where he’s coming from, but only if you’re weighing it against an assumed future where we’re going to die out tomorrow. That’s a low bar for hopeful, and certainly not “100% positive”.

I have a hard time seeing I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream or even worse, All Tomorrows, as “hopeful”. I’d honestly rather just die.

Plus, not all sci-fi involves humans, and not all sci-fi is in the future. There’s scifi with no humans in it, there’s scifi set in the past or in an alternate present, and none of those qualify as “hopeful by default” in the way he defines it any more than any other fiction does.

But how will you get a “universal” view of the fediverse? No single authoritative view exists.

You yourself acknowledge that this is complicated, but I honestly don’t understand what appeal a hacked together fake centralized system would have for people if they don’t care about decentralization in the first place. Any such solution is almost inevitably gonna end up being janky and hacked together just to present a façade of worse Reddit.

Lemmy’s strength is its decentralization and federation. It’s not a problem to be solved, it’s a feature that’s attractive in its own right. It doesn’t need mass appeal, it’s a niche project and probably always will be. I don’t think papering over the fundamental design of the software will make it meaningfully more attractive to the non-technically minded.

I don’t think the relevance of the TLD matters. It’s worth being aware of whether you’re using a ccTLD, especially in the case of countries like Afghanistan, but you also used .io as an example which is overwhelmingly used by non-British Indian Ocean Territory sites and is proven reliable. It’s even managed by an American company.

Then .app isn’t a part of the original TLDs, but actually a part of the new wave of modern gTLDs. And if you’re considering .app, there’s no reason not to consider the thousands of other generic TLDs out there.

Like with the ccTLDs, the only thing you have to consider is the trustworthiness of the managing org.

Yes, but only if your firewall is set to reject instead of drop. The documentation you linked mentions this; that’s why open ports are listed as open|filtered because any port that’s “open” might actually be being filtered (dropped).

On a modern firewall, an nmap scan will show every port as open|filtered, regardless of whether it’s open or not.

Edit: Here’s the relevant bit from the documentation:

The most curious element of this table may be the open|filtered state. It is a symptom of the biggest challenges with UDP scanning: open ports rarely respond to empty probes. Those ports for which Nmap has a protocol-specific payload are more likely to get a response and be marked open, but for the rest, the target TCP/IP stack simply passes the empty packet up to a listening application, which usually discards it immediately as invalid. If ports in all other states would respond, then open ports could all be deduced by elimination. Unfortunately, firewalls and filtering devices are also known to drop packets without responding. So when Nmap receives no response after several attempts, it cannot determine whether the port is open or filtered. When Nmap was released, filtering devices were rare enough that Nmap could (and did) simply assume that the port was open. The Internet is better guarded now, so Nmap changed in 2004 (version 3.70) to report non-responsive UDP ports as open|filtered instead.

Weirdly, we see it happen in the 23rd century before replicators were invented, so it was a “synthesizer”, not a replicator.

WG uses UDP, so as long as your firewall is configured correctly it should be impossible to scan the open port. Any packet hitting the open port that isn’t valid or doesn’t have a valid key is just dropped, same as any ports that are closed.

Most modern firewalls default to dropping packets, so you won’t be showing up in scans even with an open WG port.

Maybe. We might be getting into the weeds of unknowable philosophical questions here.

My belief is that my consciousness now is more or less the same as when I was young. But then, there’s no way to know that, as we only exist in the current instant. It’s possible I sprung into existence when I woke up this morning.

And yet I think that the claim “there’s no continuity of consciousness, the You that existed yesterday is not the same You that exists now” is just as unprovable and thus unknowable as the claim that I am the same Experiencer that I always have been. We have no understanding of what consciousness even is.

To be honest I’m not really sure what consciousness “changing” means. I’m curious what you mean by that. In my mind, either it is or it isn’t the same. It’s just the thing that experiences my identity, my body, qualia. It’s awareness itself.

I think some of the difficulty here boils down to the impossibility of defining consciousness itself.

Exactly. Even as a new me lives on, with the same identity, it isn’t the same individual. The Me who walked into the teleporter will die, and never wake up again.

I don’t care about the continuity of my identity, I care about the continuity of my consciousness. My identity changes over time, but it’s always Me who experiences that identity.

I would rather have my identity radically change, but continue to be the one to experience it, than have my identity continue, but have it be a part of a different consciousness.

It only matters in that a person died. A person with their own subjective experience that they no longer get to experience. It doesn’t matter that in this case I inherited their memories, and it doesn’t matter when it happened other than out of curiosity. I’d mourn them the same.

And as for how I would know… If I’m the clone? Obviously I would never have any way to know, short of someone coming up to me. On the other hand if I were the original, I would “know” because I would be dead. (Or rather, I wouldn’t know anything, because the dead don’t experience or think)

Edit: It matters that I inherited their memories in that it might influence the way I see the world, my identity, and their death, but it wouldn’t change the fact that I mourn them. I am a distinct person from other versions of me, regardless of whether I’m a clone or they’re a clone, and if they die it’s just as much a tragedy as any other human death.

Except the person who died is dead, and they stay dead. The person who died’s final moments will be seeing their clone standing over them, and their memories will diverge.

They’re clearly different meat, different consciousnesses in that moment. They won’t know what the other is thinking, they will have to speak to communicate.

How are they not separate people in that moment?

Of course I wouldn’t know. But the former me who got dragged off is dead. That’s the whole point, the clone has no way of knowing and simply continues on life while the original dies.

And because we only exist in the present, we rely on our memories of the past to tell who we are. Our memories tell me I’m me, so I think I’m me.

Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but the reason I don’t want to die is because I want to be aware. If I am never conscious again, but a copy of me is, good for them I guess, I wish them the best, but it’s not what I want. I’m not conscious of waking up in the morning, even if they’re me. I’m dead.