In the puzzle game series The Talos Principle, intelligent robots (who were made to outlive humanity after a species-ending global pandemic) seem to have the exact same kind of affinity for caring for cats that humans do. It's actually really sweet and cute.
As someone who once came extremely close to death and was unconscious for days after eventually receiving medical care, my take on death is that it's probably similar to what you're saying about going under for surgery. I'm somewhat neutral to mixed on having been revived, but I no longer fear death. I still have a fear of suffering and having painful final moments, but death itself seems peaceful if nothing else.
In terms of something happening after death, my only real thought on that is that it really troubles me that I came into existence in the first place and that I experience anything at all. I sometimes wonder if that was truly a one time thing or if it's something that could happen again.
Well. Good that you were revived and shared your experience with us!
Being born can be compared to a one in billions lottery win. We're given this time. "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us". I hope you get to feel more positive about being around.
My belief is, when you're gone, you're gone. All this religion and quantum mechanics speculation about coming back is wishful thinking (it's one reason religion is so powerful. It's very hard and scary to comprehend our non existence. Religion provides a nice candy wrapped solution to all that.)
I'm not negative on it exactly, but the idea of not being revived doesn't really bug me. If that had happened, then it's whatever, I guess?
But I agree with your sentiment about using the time we're given. I don't put much thought into what happens after death other than in a purely self-entertainment, "oh that'd be a cool what-if scenario..." type of way. My goal now is to minimize my suffering and maximize my happiness to whatever extent I can. If I can make others happy too in some way as I do that, that'd be neat too.
My fears of death have nothing to do with my death and everything to do with the people I leave behind. I certainly don't want to suffer, but more so I don't want my loved ones to suffer.
The latter is basically how it goes with Counter-Strike 2 which doesn't have kernel level anti-cheat.
Well, maybe not "everyone" is cheating, but there's very little punishment to cheating in that game for those who do. Do it too blatantly and get reported an cordoned off into "low trust" matchmaking, or just closet cheat with total impunity.
I suppose this then drives people to third party matchmaking services like FACEIT that do use kernel level anti-cheat (which has its own separate game culture issues to replace the cheating issue).
I can't speak for the above person, but what the OP of this comment thread said also tracks with my own experience of schizoaffective disorder: when I'm psychotic, the pattern matching part of my brain goes into overdrive and not only does my brain erroneously fill in the blanks in sensory input (causing hallucinations), it does the same thing on an abstract or logical level with ideas and people. It's easy to fall into the trap of paranoid delusion when you feel like you're seeing connections between so many otherwise benign, disconnected things and events.
I think what really gets me is that despite my constant vigilance and skepticism toward my own thoughts, I simply cannot talk myself out of how truly real those delusions feel when they happen. I can even acknowledge how absurd they are, even in the moment, but I can never shake the feeling that they're still very, very real. It's so maddening. The best I can do is to just not act on those thoughts.
Maybe the above person's family is actually unearthing valid insights, but if they're prone to psychosis, in that state they'll be prone to finding connections, associations, patterns, and so on between things in a way that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. It'll feel very real to them in the moment, but when they exit that state (if they do) they'll likely be on the same page as others in thinking those ideas were a stretch.
Stimulant induced psychosis is very common. One of the major side effects of those medications, just like their street cousin, is paranoia.
I don’t really believe in the dormant/latent argument because once you shift down to the underground (as in, entertain all possibilities, even the possibility that you share something in common with drug abusers) where people abuse drugs, there you can see just how common psychosis is.
The drugs fuck people up. Interestingly, after many years of laying off the substance, many do find their way out of the psychosis.
Many people are actually caught in this trap and don’t tell anyone because they are struggling between reality and their delusions and trying to present a calm face to the world. It’s often directly the result of the substance, but it’s allowed to fester in the person due to all kinds of reasons (”hey, I’m really going to confess this is the crazy shit that feels believable to me?”). By the time they are done wrestling with reality and unreality, often they are left extremely damaged from the ordeal psychologically.
I can't say I've experienced psychosis due to stimulant use personally, but I see what you mean. For me it's maybe brought on instances of hypomania a few times, but I get how it could trigger issues in others, especially in high doses.
My instances of psychosis outside of depression/mania tend to be triggered by stress. I don't use drugs or take any stimulant medications, but they still just happen sometimes. It sucks. I'm thankfully not in an active episode at the moment, but I do suffer on a daily basis from the "negative" symptoms of schizoaffective disorder (i.e., the symptoms that take away function, like anhedonia, avolition, alogia, etc).
My brother has schizophrenia. He has never met or interacted with any jewish people, and lives in a part of the world where they have no influence. He still fell entirely for online antisemitism and will text me insane messages about the typical theories.
You misunderstood. I meant that they thought that they were superintelligent people who should teach others and lead the world, but they had schizophrenia.
The continual lack of police action wasn’t super surprising, but as someone who lives in SF, it does bum me out. The supposed inability to enter based on reasonable suspicion or make arrests in certain situations also baffled me.
I definitely wouldn’t want an unnecessarily brutal police force, but I wonder if we could empower them to do just a tiny bit more and be more generally useful to those who live and work here.
If the issue is that they need a warrant to enter someone's house, perhaps they should simply get one. I'm not a lawyer but it seems to me that find my iPhone reporting that someone's phone was in someone else's house would constitute probable cause.
My gut reaction is to agree, but after a deeper thought I'm not sure. Let's say you wanted to weaponize this. How would you do it?
You could follow someone with a nice bike, throw an airtag on the roof and claim that the bike was stolen from you. Most people don't have specific enough proof of purchase to refute this.
You could actually commit a crime, as happened to the author, and then throw her keys on the roof of the house of someone you didn't like, framing them.
These both seem like inevitable outcomes if the policy was reversed.
From my 25 year old civics class, I seem to remember 4 reasons police could enter a home:
1. They have a warrant
2. They are invited in by an occupant
3. Reasonable belief that someone's life may be in danger
4. Reasonable belief that they may intercept a crime in progress
I certainly don't know California's law well enough to say if #4 would apply; the theft has already happened. If the owner asks for their property back you might be able to justify "withholding stolen property" but that seems like a stretch.
> The supposed inability to enter based on reasonable suspicion
I think this is an issue where the courts and police have not caught up with technology. Two decades ago geolocation technology in-use with cell phone triangulation was so obtuse that you could maybe get to the block where a stolen thing was. A decade ago with GPS you could get within meters, enough to know if it was in a specific house given enough separation, but, not nearly enough for an apartment building with vertical considerations or row housing / townhouses.
Today, with AirTags at least with Ultrawideband stuff, you can fairly definitively say that an AirTag is in a specific apartment and even more precisely. I think many cops and courts still have a view of geolocation as it was 10 or 20 years ago. If something is geolocated with an AirTag and Ultrawideband it should meet probable cause requirements for a proforma search warrant application able to be issued over the phone by a judge.
Are we certain that they aren't empowered? I suspect the police department refuses to do their job to put pressure on the public and gain leverage for things they want, whether or not those things are necessary to address specific cases they're ignoring.
Sam Ruby puts relevant icons in each post on his blog. I find it a nice break from text, and it serves as a convenient summary of the topic of the post.
I started off with MacPorts' Emacs 22.3 package and just used it on the command line. Eventually I moved to a portfile that tracked Emacs CVS, and finally settled on Aquamacs.
I've tried Cocoa Emacs from CVS, but it has one major problem that makes it unusable for me: no fullscreen support. The latest version of Aquamacs does this perfectly. I have an entire space dedicated to Aquamacs, and I send files to it from Terminal with emacsclient.
I too have capslock bound to control. I don't have any other keyboard modifications. I'm used to option/alt working the same in Emacs and every other OS X application (try alt+left/right/backspace/delete in an input box).
My ~/.emacs doesn't have a lot of OS X-specific settings. My favorite thing about my setup right now is having Pyflakes automatically highlight errors in my Python code as I write it. Flyspell in strings and comments is also great.
If you're interested, my ~/.emacs is here: [link redacted]
But who knows, maybe even 17 year old accounts are being hijacked by AI now too.