“Scooter - She Said” would have me go back to 13yo me chilling in a camping site with my family, listening to my mp3

“Placebo - Special Needs” is connected instead to a period of trips with friends and complex feelings, especially feeling like being alive again

I wouldn’t make a direct connection between the two. Let’s ask “security from what?”

Security from warfare doesn’t need to limit individual freedom, perhaps it just requires a certain part of people and economic activity to engage in military activity, production, and research.

Security from poverty increases individual freedom. If the government helps those who lost their job, then you don’t need to rely on having a job to survive, only to improve your economic status and living standards.

Security from crime is possibly more tricky. Less control you apply on a population, more likely it is for them to do crime. Although fighting poverty does help prevent much of that crime, especially organized crime.

But maybe you meant more on an individual level, than a system level. In that case sure, being an employee is probably the most secure option, although that’s only true if the job contract limits firing. Aspiring to a better job, perhaps moving to a country or state with better worker rights, increases both security and freedom. For example, as an Italian I earn X and if I decide to have children I’d have huge costs and issues with parental leaves. If I moved to Sweden, not only I would have about a 30% increase in salary, but as a parent I would receive much more help, both for leaves and for free nursery and such (if I’m not mistaken). Plus I would cut costs in cars, as I wouldn’t need one. So, higher security (I can save more money) and higher freedom (more free time).

I wonder what’s worse :(

What’s your favourite pizza topping?

While I am an AI enthusiast, generative AI has two issues that make it very hard to accept here

One is definitely the fact that we all know they have been trained using our data without our informed consent, not to mention it bring a typical case where copyright only applies to big companies, it doesn’t really protect individuals.

The second one is simply that we are in a social network. Social. We use it to communicate with people, not to play games or take part in experiments. It’s like using comments to a question for statistical purposes, you have to tell people they are taking part in it.

Here we want to discuss daily life, politics and hobbies with other people, forming opinions based on what other people think, and spending time and energy to explain our positions to other people. If the other end is a machine, how is this different from an NPC from an RPG game?

So, I guess the only way to go for it is to have separate communities that specifically allow AI bots, making sure people know about it so they take part if they are willing. Ofc we can expect some instances deciding to cut ties with AI filled ones, it’s up to them to decide.

Now we know what Sheldon would do with a time machine

I don’t really have a main IDE. I work with python, so on my work PC they got me a PyCharm license.

For everything else, I casually switch between Pulsar (Atom fork), Notepad++, Spyder, and I did some stuff in VSCode. If the project is small and is an aws lambda, I use their web editor

Anything goes really

That intellectual property, both copyright or patents, doesn’t serve its theoretical purpose and just acts as a legal shield for the monopolies of big corporations, at least in our capitalistic system, and it limits the spread of information

In theory, a musician should be protected against abuse of their music. In practice, all musicians need to be on Spotify through one of the few main publishers to make any decent money, and their music will be used for unintended purposes (intended for their contract at least) like AI training

In theory, patents should allow a small company with an idea to sell its progressive product to many big corporations. In practice, one big corporation will either buy the small company or copy the product and have the money to legally support its case against all evidence, lobbying to change laws too. Not to mention that big corporations are the ones that can do enough research to have relevant patents, it’s much harder for universities and SMEs, not to mention big corporations can lobby to reduce public funding to R&D programs in universities and for SMEs.

And, last but not least important, access to content, think of politically relevant movies or book, depends on your income. If you are from a poorer country, chances are you cannot enjoy as much information and content as one born in a richer country.

I never had a reason to trust them to begin with, tbh.

I’m not sure what the meaning of this statement is. As i see it, you have to trust your community at some point because as a child you’re not self-suffucient on a basic level. You need care from your family, schooling from your community, and if you take higher studies you need institutions to invest in your potential (be it by public funding like in most European countries, or by a loan). And that is just on the first level. Secondarily, the school in your community needs institutions too, and your family needs a job from the community, which probably also rely on institutions. You rely on them, they rely on others, so you rely on those others too.

In order to do all of that, before you even really have real life choices, you have to trust your family, your community and your institutions (thus, your Country).

Once you start having a real choice on what to do, then I can accept you might lose trust even if still having to rely on some of these. And you can work in a job that has very little to do to your community. Which is close to the situation I am living, actually.

So you lost that trust that allowed you to grow up to adulthood, because now you have a choice and you don’t like what you see. Which is fair, we are all caught up in individualism, we know that we need to have a way out of situations by ourselves. That’s why money is so central in our life: if things go wrong in our community, we will need money to convince others to grant us services and goods to cover our needs.

But that has more to do with material needs, not with “purpose”. Nothing really stops us from trusting our community for non-material things, such as a sense of purpose. We just decide not to do it out of habit of being individualistic.

Well the further you go on, the more likely it is that you find there is no point in anything, we are but a phenomenon in the universe

But if you look closely you realise many have needs, many have desires, many want to enjoy company and experience many things, they feel a purpose in what they do

There is a cute plot point in my fav anime, Hunter x Hunter. While the main protagonist Gon has a goal, to find his own father that left him as a baby, his best friend Killua is initially pretty nihilistic. He told his feelings about this to Gon, and he replied that, until he finds his purpose, Killua’s goal will just be to be at his side. So, basically, the friendship itself will be his purpose.

I think the general point is that our potential nihilism is part of our personality. We were never supposed to live an individuals and be self-sufficient. Finding a purpose as individuals might not be a solvable problem! We might need another person to get that purpose.

So while “scientifically” we don’t have a purpose, as life itself is a phenomenon and our consciousness is a happy accident of that phenomenon, some people feel a purpose, they feel they want something, and others could simply tag along and find purpose in helping others with theirs.

At least that’s my answer so far 🤌

Your single existence might be ephemeral, but humanity isn’t, your community isn’t, and possibly your family either

Individualism breaks that sense of purpose, and it teaches us that happiness is made by personal enjoyment of often exclusive activities

If we lose trust in our community or in humanity in general, if we imagine the next person to only care about themselves, basivally if we expect individualism from others, we lose hope of feeling a more community-oriented form of happiness! And unfortunately in many places that situation is expected, because people are often indeed individualistic

QC was such a fun ride… I encountered it pretty late in the story, then I got on par and I unfortunately dropped it, now it’s hard to go back

I think it’s the Star Trek of web comics: incredibly progressive, ethical dilemmas everywhere, starting it now is hard for many because of the early graphics!

The most amazing thing is how real its characters feel

There’s a time travel one that I’ve seen tons of times. and also a Christmas one I remember the song of. Sorry I can’t remember the titles

Ouch xD

Actually last time I checked apple did their keynotes mentioning the environment and stuff, greenwashing their choices… I’m curious what they’ll do now.

Just like Tesla, they might have saturated their liberal userbase, I wouldn’t be too surprised if they took a more “neutral” stance

Actually about Gates, does anyone know about his stance on the current fascist takeover?

Absolutely not, I did not imply that, the post is about digital reproduction/ownership of music (if I haven’t misunderstood it)

And that is, basically, free, a very “low” cost of copying bytes. What we pay on Spotify and Apple Music are not the artists, not their instruments or recording hardware or mastering software.

We pay the intermediaries.

Concerts, museums, theatres, etc, have high costs so I’m completely fine for them to cost money to the visitors.

(Oh and I believe Bandcamp is a close second)

Ideally one wouldn’t need to pay to experience a form of art

Rather, one should first experience the art, and then if they want they could make a donation

I think that buying a CD directly from the musician at their concert or event is the only truly direct way that doesn’t end up giving most of the money to monopolistic intermediary