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.

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.

Tbf, I don’t often talk to children about work, and I don’t think most adults would want me to talk to them like a child.

Plus, talking to children doesn’t come naturally to everyone. It’s certainly not fair to describe it as “very easy”.

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.

Fundamentally, no. It doesn’t matter if the copy is identical in every way, it’s physically separate.

The fact that one is the “original” and one is the “copy” doesn’t matter. The fidelity of the copy doesn’t matter. It’s literally just the fact that it’s different meat.

The copy will believe it’s me, and will for any outside observer be identical to me, but I will still exist as a separate entity. Up until the next instant, where the clone-and-kill machine enters the next phase, kills me, and I’m gone, and there’s a new copy of me out there with a new consciousness, living my life. But the version of me who was me is dead.

What happens if it doesn’t kill me instantly? What happens if I get to look my transporter clone in the eyes? We won’t have the same consciousness, we’ll have two separate copies of the same consciousness. And then it kills me. And I watch myself die.

I don’t think this is true. Even if consciousness is only a product of our physical bodies, there’s still the issue of who’s experiencing it.

When this body dies, I’m dead. I don’t care if there are a million other perfect copies of this body or my mind out there, if this mind won’t be the one to experience it.

A copy of me can be fundamentally perfect, but simply as a product of being physically separate meat our consciousnesses will be separate. If instead of teleporting, both perfect copies stayed alive and had a chance to talk to each other, this would be apparent. I will continue to experience life from the eyes of my old body, not the clone. We could then go on to live our lives separately, and we would diverge. Because we’d both be separate simply by the physical nature of our existence, we’re not interchangeable, and it wouldn’t make sense to kill one of us and assume that now it’s “teleportation”. We didn’t see out of the other’s eyes before, so why would we see out of the other’s eyes when we’re dead? No, we’d just die.

The only way I can see this not being an issue is if the awareness somehow transfers, which requires some sort of technomagic beyond our comprehension, or outright rejection of the existence of consciousness, which is a bold claim.

The “make a fork” thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there’s this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that’s good advice to some extent, it’s great to encourage more people to volunteer and it’s great to discourage entitlement.

But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to “make it yourself” is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don’t usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that’s not their skillset, and it’s unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

Even among technical users, there are reasons they can’t contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that’s especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.

Google destroys their own search engine by encouraging terrible SEO nonsense and then offers the solution in the form of these AI overviews, cutting results out of the picture entirely.

You search something on the Web nowadays half the results are written by AI anyway.

I don’t really care about the “human element” or whatever, but AI is such a hype train right now. It’s still early days for the tech, it still hallucinates a lot, and I fundamentally can’t trust it—even if I trusted the people making it, which I don’t.

Just because you can work with one monitor doesn’t mean multiple monitors isn’t more comfortable though. You can have multiple windows open at once, at full size, and glance between them freely. No need for them to share the limited real estate of a single monitor.

I run Sway on my laptop because it lets me take full advantage of my single monitor, but on my multi monitor desktop setup I use a regular floating DE.

Systemd does a lot of things that could probably be separate projects, but run0 is an example of something that benefits from being a part of systemd. It ties directly into the existing service manager to spawn new processes.

It definitely encrypts the traffic, the problem is that it encrypts the traffic in a recognizable way that DPI can recognize. It’s easy for someone snooping on your traffic to tell that you’re using Wireguard, but because it’s encrypted they can’t tell the content of the message.

Not familiar with the game or the publisher at all, but this definitely feels like engagement bait.

This works because block devices like /dev/sdX are just files. If you cp a file onto another file, it overwrites the data of the destination with the source. A block device represents the device itself, not the filesystem; if you wanted to put the ISO inside the filesystem, you’d have to mount it first.