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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • I don’t know, I think cultures can definitely be rated by and advance in the category of how well the people living in it are treated. It’s interesting though, because the phrase “an advanced culture” doesn’t really feel natural to me, and I would interpret it as “a culture that’s progressed through time” rather than “a culture that’s objectively better”. I don’t know, I think it’s ok to think of, for example, Afghanistan’s culture as barbaric compared to more developed countries, based on their treatment of women. Though I think this is also starting to cross into a culture vs government discussion, it’s not like I have reliable information on how the average Afghanistan male feels about the role of women in their culture. Anyways, I think you’re absolutely correct that technological advancement is not equivalent to cultural improvement, I just think that some aspects of culture, most importantly to me how people are treated in it, can be relatively objectively rated, and personally I judge/rate cultures by that aspect.

    On another note, to me, primitive is not the same as barbaric. I think some technological advancement is needed for a more “developed” culture, but being more developed certainly doesn’t mean better. For an extreme example, if you have a culture that hasn’t invented writing yet, I would say it’s less developed than one that has–while oral storytelling is still existant, I think some way of more permanently recording information is crucial to developing widespread, long standing culture.

    I don’t know, I’m rambling at this point and I haven’t reread your comment in like a paragraph and a half so I have no idea how on topic I am. I hope this is something thought provoking and welcome your thoughts on how I see things.

    Addon edit, written just after I hit submit–As this relates to the prime directive, I think even without the concept of cultural advancement, I think it’s still advantageous to let cultures and their technology change and adapt without external influence, from an interstellar perspective. For a planet to develop the technology to join the interstellar community and presenta planetary presence, to me, it implies that their culture has grown unified, and the fact that they haven’t driven life on their planet extinct in the process is basically a qualifying factor in their cultural… maturity? If you were to accelerate their technological development to speed their ascent to the interstellar community, it might make it more likely to still have… barbaric? tendencies that could be disastrous for them or other planets. However, trying to weigh that against the potential suffering you could mitigate by advancing them technologically… I don’t know, it’s certainly not black and white to me. In an extremely primitive analogy, giving a caveman a laser rifle might well result in the eventual extinction of their community. Not the greatest analogy, super oversimplifying, but that’s the gist of how I see it.


  • Sure it is. My current specific conciousness won’t get preserved, but guess what, I lose consciousness every night. From the perspective of the me that arrives on the other end, it’ll be just like waking up. They have all my memories, mannerisms, personality, there are no differences between them and me besides the fact that my conciousness doesn’t continue. From their point of view, they have continuity of existence. From their perspective, and from outsiders perspective, there’s no difference, for all intents and purposes they are me. Why would I feel bad about them living our life? “You are dead”. When I go to sleep, my conciousness ends, and in the morning someone who has my memories and personality and mannerisms gains consciousness. I really don’t see the difference.









  • Yeah, and I completely understand that. Just from a logical perspective though, lets say the process happens after you fall asleep normally at night. If you can’t tell it happened, does it matter? I’ve been really desensitized to the idea of dying through suicidal ideation throughout most of my life (much better now), so I’m able to look at it without the normal emotional aversion to it. If teleportation existed, via this same method, I don’t think I’d have qualms about at least trying it. Certainly wouldn’t expect other people to but to me I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I wouldn’t do a mind upload scenario, but moreso due to a complete lack of trust in system maintenance and security, and a doubt that true conciousness can be achieved digitally. If it’s flesh and blood to flesh and blood though? I’d definitely try


  • I mean, if I die instantaneously and painlessly, and conciousness is seemingly continuous for the surviving copy, why would I care?

    My conciousness might not continue but I lose consciousness every day. Someone exists who is me and lives their (my) life. I totally understand peoples aversion to death but I also don’t see any difference to falling asleep and waking up. You lose consciousness, then a person who’s lived your life and is you regains consciousness. Idk





  • We had an all hands on deck, world is ending bug one time. Like, basically the entire org got pulled onto it. In our product is a spreadsheet of activities, with dates and durations. Our customers can run a scheduling algorithm to adjust dates based off of durations and activity dependencies and relationships. This is super important. This broke. We have to make sure that activities don’t have circular dependencies, or otherwise scheduling will loop infinitely and fail. So, we basically dfs looking for a loop before scheduling, and fail it with a not really helpful error message. That loop checkimg got updated so it could properly provide helpful info in the error message. This change caused most real world schedules to have false positives for loops when checked, ergo, no ability to schedule. I found the cause of the problem but not the dependency structure that caused the issue, and ultimately decided it would be faster, cleaner, and overall better to rewrite the feature myself than to fix the original. So, I wrote the most beautiful damn depth first search of my life! Learned about the bug monday morning, had the fix good to go tuesday night, so that qa could test wednesday thursday for the hotfix merge deadline friday. Two days isn’t a lot to cover testing it, but I figure with every tester in the org pretty much available to pound on it itd be good enough. While I was working on the rewrite, other devs and qa were hunting down all the details of what happened to cause the bug, data structure wise, and coming up with good test cases. So, by the time it was ready, they knew what happened and had a much more thorough test plan. Well, it came down from on high that the fix would go into the next major release, not a hotfix, so it didn’t actually go out for 3 weeks after the monday the bug came in. Sigh. Well, I had fun writing it, and I consider it the cleanest, most beautiful and elegant code I’ve ever written. It used a stack of stacks! When I’m feeling shitty and useless at work, I go back and look at it tbh.