This is tough to read but I feel sympathetic about the honest way you shared this.
I have heard this from others too. One of my most traumatic memories from childhood was seeing someone do something to one of my favorite kinds of animals that I will spare readers here the horror of imagining. It haunts me to this day. That colors my perspective.
Children have incomplete brain formation. I’m not sure it’s an excuse, but it’s context to understand. On the flip side, a parent would need to be helicoptering to an absurd extent to detect a child messing with something as small as most common insects (at least in most US places).
I had tremendous difficulty navigating to read this. For whatever reason I could only visit page 1 and 10, so I wasn’t able to form any assessment of the article you posted.
So it is without that background or knowing exactly where you stand that I offer:
The lack of a commonly understood mechanism that can be used to communicate about pain with a lobster doesn’t mean that lobsters are incapable of feeling pain any more than it means that humans are incapable of feeling pain because we can’t talk to lobsters about it.
This applies to any other creature.
The lack of a common language doesn’t hold water as an argument that experiences can’t be shared.
It may be that you and I agree with this, or not, but it is difficult without having read the article.
It's a pretty well known essay--you should be able to find out in PDF format pretty easily by googling. It's very much on the non-lobster-eating side and touches on both physiological and philosophical arguments.
Correct. I used to work alongside folks who did research and operations at places like JPL and JHU’s APL. They very much cared about things like UNIX. (They also really enjoyed having computers that ran Mac, Windows, and Linux back when that was much more a given for someone to do.)
There’s this idea floating out there, and it’s been out there for a long time, that serious academic/research work isn’t to be found on the Mac, or that you can’t run whatever software you want (you absolutely can). These ideas do not track reality.
> If we step out of the echo chamber of HN and Reddit he is immensely popular. I was actually shocked around the holidays seeing many friends and family that are not internet junkies have a very strong overall opinion of Musk.
This has not been my own experience. In most of my offline circles he is regarded poorly, or at least as a joke.
A lot of folks in that demographic are what you might call “cloud natives”. Their hard drives are used for storing the software that connects them to Google Drive or OneDrive or what have you.
We grew up in a time when understanding file systems in terms of “a system for organizing your files” was not optional. Gen Z has grown up in a time when their data was a Google Drive search away from their fingers.
The number of “believe them when they say they will do…” articles over the past year contrasted with what happened in November and now, is a sobering picture of the state of things.
Not a single person has any license to be surprised at anything that’s happening.
At best we can say “this will be variously slowed down at points due to legal battles,” and hopefully even infighting with the broligarchs. But none of this is a shock.
At this point I believe those kinds of people are much like Joe Rogan. Hiding behind the old “just asking questions”-style guises. I’m not sure what they get from that, but they are either intentionally not paying attention at this point, or simply do not care about anything that doesn’t affect them directly and negatively.
At this point we might as well print out Project 2025 bingo cards. Perhaps that will be the only way we “win” something in all this mess.
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