???

Yes, but that's because it motivated them to strike. That's basically the less violent version of a riot.

Simulate one human life, from beginning to end, in a way that allows unethical experiments to be dismissed as recurring nightmares by the individual, and not cause permanent damage to this simulated person. When their life ends, I'd arrange to talk to them, explain everything, apologize for the necessity of the experiments, and offer him immortality and/or freedom with no strings attached. He can get a biological or robot body, or stay virtual, but it's not up to anyone but him/her/? at that point.

I'd be fine with my life being an experiment under those circumstances as long as the results were put mostly to saving or improving lives, but I'd never be willing to put someone else in that position if I didn't; if you couldn't find a person like myself in real life with that opinion on the possibility, it's unjustifiable. If, however, you engineered their life just enough to strongly encourage that level of altruism, and made it comfortable and not dehumanizing when not involved in an experiment as well as having a ban on cruelty and gaslighting in doing the experiments, and apologize for having to resort to these measures at all, I could see the person not being overly upset.

Whether it meets the code of ethics for scientific research is another matter.

Notepad++, because I mostly program OpenTTD mods.

Change.org petitions to not deport people from Canada, who either would be killed by their own government or hurt by other people due to endemic homophobia and transphobia in their culture after being deported to their home country, or, in one case, because he turned 18 just before his parents and younger siblings were granted citizenship.

Worst part is why; I'm half-European (my family were farmers and possibly feudal landowners at the wealthiest, political upheavals forced them to expatriate themselves a half-dozen times in the early 20th century so my dad's nationality is vague) and half-Colombian (and my mom's family tree is itself very mixed race), so I know how important immigration is for both the immigrants and the recieving nation. I've never held anything against anyone that they were born with since around 2007 and I have never tried to justify that dislike of severely mentally handicapped people from back then at any point, then or now.

Finally, I live in Western Canada and have a lot of empathy. It seems that, while I'm not going to hold it against all French Quebec residents, there are some Québécois who are fucking cruel when it comes to deportation. I've talked to a guy, Caucasian as paste, who has been illegally reported to Immigration twice because he's from Ontario and lives in Quebec, and that's just how Immigration - which is HQ'd in Quebec for no good reason - treats people who look similar to themselves, let alone the dozen different times an upstanding potential skilled worker migrant from a "person of color" background has been nearly deported despite a clear-cut case of being in life-threatening danger if they are deported.

Fortunately, most of the petitions succeeded in putting pressure on Immigration Canada to hand out exceptions to rules because of the circumstances and because most of the country is all too aware of how much bigotry has taken hold in Quebec.

I mean, I don't want to generalize and I've never known much about Francophone history, but I somehow can't help but wonder if French aristocracy both on the other side of my country and over in Europe have always tended to be sociopathicly narcissistic. Hearing about some of the things the French government has just tried to enact has me feeling like we're in some sort of home stretch of the end of the world, or at least a historical turning point that will go down in the history books of the 23rd and 24th century the way Napoleon's reign or the American Revolutionary War is portrayed in modern media.

Also, before anyone says it, I know every country has had corrupt leaders throughout history. It just seems to take a special kind of arrogance among leadership for "The rich bitch thinks we weren't allowed to eat cake without permission, when we can't afford the bread?!" to be a plausible accusation at multiple points in time and space with the only common thread being the language spoken, but since that could be said about English easily I apologize if that feels accusatory. You're not the language you speak or the flag you fly, just please don't let power go to your heads everyone.

Digimon World 2003. I never owned a PlayStation (was a Nintendo-only fanboy for years until I bought a PS2 in the mid-00s a year before the Xbox 360 was announced) and tried to run an emulator of it for over a decade before it was fully supported. I also had trouble because I found out the only English version that didn't have that stupid "once you start fighting the final boss, you can't explore the game world anymore" thing they used to do in JRPGs was the European version. Now I can actually play it, even using gameshark codes, easily... if I could only find the time to play it!

Unless they have a reason to lock him up to protect their own interests, the Supreme Court is probably not going to do shit. That's WHY Trump picked them, as an "insurance measure", and unfortunately it seems to be working.

And they were nice enough to leave the unit they gifted to us locked inside, safely and visibly trapped in the bars of a cage where they can't stab us with the pointy fork they invented!

Dude, I get it, but I don't have anything against you and I'm not demanding you learn English to cater to me.

Please stop assuming I'm racist or selfish for only knowing the language my parents spoke most when I was a baby, I probably could have picked up Spanish from my mom's family but sending a teenager with Asperger's like me to stay with relatives in South America in 2007 like my normal-brained brother did as a foreign exchange student would have been infeasible.

I just want to write speculative fiction in my own language and in return be grateful to people who are willing to learn a trade language, not be told I'm a monster just for speaking only a language that's commonplace, is that too much to ask?

Well, at least you actually want to have a beneficial legacy. That's better than we can say about Zuckerberg, Trump or Musk.

Only if I get to live in a treehouse that's bigger on the inside, become my persona character, and dress like 9/11 never happened and Y2K aesthetic continued until '08 or longer.

Calculating... 404, problem "Entropy" not found. Please check the new information from the James Web Space telescope for possible reasons.

(look up "Trillion Year Old Universe" and realize that if true, that's just how old the currently observable universe is, and reality as it is could be eternally going through cycles of stellar death and birth and would have always existed with no beginning)

The US military has, in all likelihood, been already capable of this for the past 15-30 years. Google has no market other than the public, and there's no way to stop it from tagging rich people as "that asshole who owns what used to be twitter" but also the general public (us) would just end up flagging people we hate or envy or who we want revenge on to ruin people's reputations.

There is no upside for a tech like that in the hands of big money, not even for big money; done the way Google would do it, it would fracture society like nothing before it and that includes utterly destroying the economy before leading to some sort of nuclear exchange.

Maniac (2023) is a series you might like. Despite the name, its more of a cassette futurism cyberpunk world with a scary amount of dystopian parallels to our own.

This. I appreciate everyone who has learned English, but more so than that I think having to learn it before moving to an English speaking country like mine is like expecting a baby to walk before it has been born. Take it from a half-Colombian who can't understand a word of what my mom says on the phone to family members and friends, if you want someone to learn a language, the easiest way is complete immersion into a society that speaks it.

Worst of all is any asshole who, say, goes to Mexico and thinks "because I'm an American and we are nationally owed $$ by Mexico I am entitled to be so arrogant as to think people should have to speak English when I go to Mexico on vacation". It's not just America to Mexico obviously, I could say Quebecios to Western Canada or Englishman to (insert country here) or Chinese to (insert country here) but I'm sure you get the general formula. Arrogant wealthier-than-average tourist, different culture with less material wealth, inevitable offensively bigoted comment.

In such a case, I would absolutely tell the arrogant tourist that just because they're rich and live in Nation X, does not make them entitled to being catered to, albeit with more colorful language because somehow idiots like that tend to realise they've gone too far and either apologize and stop or give one last angry quip and storm off to ragequit the conversation.

The meme feels too accusatory, but I understand that language-wise I got lucky and most people have to work up to knowing a language with critical user mass. I will never expect anyone to HAVE to speak my language for any reason.

I mean, with the specific caveat that if it's an emergency and they know some English, ANY at all, we should probably go as far as we can to speak each other's languages in a temporary pidgin until nobody is hurt or in danger. Aside from such time-sensitive situations, I'm definitely willing to learn from them as long as they acknowledge I hope they try to learn some English from me, but no obligation should be involved either way.

It's only recently been proven untrue... IIRC... because it apparently turns out crude oil is actually the poop of a particular ancient microbe that is still around and that's partially (along with Oil Fracking) why we still have fossil fuels and why a far future non-human civilization will have plenty of fossil fuels to work with.

You're right, though, we have 5x more fossil fuels than have been burnt since the beginning of the industrial revolution. If we DO use the rest, the climate would be so unrecoverable that 99% of multicellular life will die, but even the most corrupt oil executive would be dead years before the last animal because most - especially the wealthiest - humans need agriculture to eat, and if shit hits the fan the poor outnumber the rich and the crop-killing pests outnumber the poor.

I would sign up for this if it's opt-in and either decentralized or local storage-based. Otherwise I hope the fuckers who would ruin this idea for greed crash and burn.

Fair enough. I meant that there's two "realistic"s out there. There's what's scientifically proven, and there's what pop-culture has led us to believe; they overlap but the latter is significantly less required to tell the truth.

How childlike are teenagers? More than you think thanks to Dawson Casting. Why do Aluminum Christmas Trees exist in the Peanuts universe? Because that was an actual ugly fad back in the 1960s. Why do cars always explode when they crash in movies? Because it looks cool and reminds people that the Ford Pinto was a death trap and so could their Tesla be.

Pop-Culture is art, not science, but most of us (myself included) take it for granted that what is and isn't fictional is easy to spot because real people sit on chairs but only action movie heroes can survive jumping out a plate glass window to escape an explosion. Sadly, fake news exists because fiction has never been 100% clear on what is fake in movies and books, and since 2016 neither is reality for some odd reason (Life imitates art, go figure).

If every Aluminum Christmas Tree was just a wry commentary on the commercialization of a Christian holiday, World War One would never have happened. If the poles for traffic lights weren't designed to shear off and fall to the ground if a car drives into them, there would be a lot more road fatalities, yet people deride Grand Theft Auto, American Truck Simulator, Crossout and other games with drivable vehicles and destructible environments for unrealistic traffic lights that you can push over by driving into.

Science, as accurate as it is due to only trusting the verified and being willing to de-verify whatever turns out to be misinformed, is not the default coding language of our brain; We are usually very emotionally-motivated, so people believe in everything from a flat earth conspiracy to "science is my one true god because my parents abused me and were constantly going on about Jesus and sinners to cover up that they were bad people, therefore all religions must be evil" to "capitalism is inherently good because I saw my neighbours dragged into the night to never be heard from again by the Soviet secret police" (for the record, I hate both systems but monarchy and anarchy don't appeal to me one bit either so... eh).

So yeah, tl;dr, take it from a fiction writer that people will often believe anything that speaks to them, and therefore our definitions of "realistic" were quite different.

I really did mean "realistic-looking, but not reality" as much as you meant "scientific consensus", and I get why that's easy to confuse... sometimes I just forget when posting on social media that most people don't have a good memory or the desire to memorize things from fiction as disparate as Aboriginee mythology, Hypnopspace Outlaw, the Backrooms, Paprika and Inception, all well enough to remember every single one of them (and many others) involves dream magic/super-tech of some sort. My apologies for forgetting you probably don't write fiction for a living.

Honestly this is yet another reason to distinguish between photographic images/live video of a minor, and the disgusting but necessary evil of fictional material. With scams like this and new AI generation capability, I'm scared that even kids younger than 13 who haven't even been forced to be involved in that photographic/video crap will be blackmailed using only their face and black market image AIs that draw on dark net CSAM.

By making fictional content legal while conversely increasing penalties for adults who exploit or attack REAL children in ANY way, not just sexually (because let's be honest, this scam, kiddy porn and a lot of physical non-sexual violence towards children by strangers is about exploiting kids for the money and nothing else) you deprive the black market of material for an AI-based extortion plan.

The only other option is to make it illegal for anyone under 18 to post content on the internet at all, which would kill Lemmy and the fediverse, big tech, VR, online gaming and modern education.

That's a fair assessment. Sorry if I was over-reactive.

I tailored my answers to that assumption. It's a reality, even if a heavily-manipulated one, and the person(s) inside the simulation are as real as we are, given the description of "perfect simulation".

Was going to mention this, I see you beat me to it.

I like both, but Spotify has far more tracks available these days. I've found songs on Spotify that just aren't on iTunes at all.

So you'd created a clone slave of yourself. Ehrm... I'm not sure how to tell you this but...

I swear they should have run a virus scan or CCleaner or something on that thing. Even the Glitch Techs don't have a holodeck THAT buggy!

Or breaks the glass on the Brownian flux capacitor.

...actually, what is the flux capacitor for, really? My theory is that it IS a real capacitor and thus related to energy storage/discharge.

The one that led to McBling and Reality TV. I wouldn't try to force fashion to remain shiny bubblegum pop grafittipunk/shibiyapunk futurism to stick around or anything, I just think it had more staying power under normal conditions that was lost solely due to the nature of life from 2001-2008.

People don't change fashion at the drop of a hat for financial crises, that just strengthens counterculture and futurism. They change their tastes suddenly when innocent people die in a new and unexpected way. That's why art from the time period just before and during the Black Death is filled with more cynicism than even the past 7 years (roughly since Trump was elected), why an Oriental symbol of peace was ruined by the Nazis, and why the climate crisis has made FairPhone the only smartphone brand that survives without shoving ads down your throat.

Or at least, so it seems to me, I'm not a sociologist. What I also am not is petty or authoritarian, I'm not trying to make everyone wear 30 year old clothes or check their emails on an iLamp computer. I just know I'd like to see a world where people don't have to rely on mass production to provide the things we need to live, because then you're required to change your stuff out the moment it's broken or obsolete.

My point is, I was trying to say your idea would make planned obsolescence and obsolescence in general themselves a relic of early civilization, so limiting such a world to one genre or style of product that only remains popular for ~10 years before becoming nothing but zeitgeist and nostalgia feels needlessly restrictive. I can see how it could be taken the opposite way, sorry about that!

NO! That poor kitty! 3 :<

Why? They have dump trucks and dams in Africa, you know. Or did you think this was before Africa became the world's fastest-growing and biggest market for cell phones?

I'd upload everyone. I'd also give them something for their trouble, since apparently all religious people and all hardcore atheists hate the sci-fi story I wrote where humanity's descendants resurrect everyone who ever died that was ever part of the Homo genus; the body their heart truly desires would be their VR avatar, though with delicious ironic caveats because if what your heart truly desires is money or power or fame over all other aspects, and that's been detrimental to others, deserves to be trapped as a virtual solid gold statue or somesuch forever for being a selfish fuck.

Basically, what if heaven and hell were not places, but literally whether being your true self truly makes you happy? That hell is if you needed to rethink your shallow, fake or otherwise hollow-feeling lifestyle but didn't do so soon enough and now you're stuck looking and feeling like what you slowly come to hate about yourself or at least who you were when you died.

I wish I was making this up or delusional or cynical. I want more than anything for souls to be immortal. I would have no problem living in my dreams forever, but I'm not the one who said it (or if my unconscious counts as being me, I'm not able to type a fediverse post using the part of my mind which is more aware of why there's no afterlife).

If anyone can post scientific evidence disproving how I've come to interpret what I experienced, I'm content to let that have the final say rather than make any attempt to dispute it. For now, I know it sounds insane but this is literally a Cassandra Truth, so at least recognise that I don't expect you to believe it's the truth, only to recognize that if ascending to the astral plane could be done, I would be persuing doing so at this very moment.

I'm sorry, but I know what happened between me and my unconscious mind, and I'm not just relying on my memories but also my now-decade old dream logs. I asked it for the honest truth. It said the truth is what I feared, death is not (yet?) followed by anything but oblivion.

To be fair, if you're not happy about that concept, neither am I because fuck the Atheists and screw the guy who wrote His Dark Materials. I'm just one poorly-recieved sci-fi writer, though, I never even got to go to university. I am not qualified or capable of building an afterlife, or determining whether souls are singular entities unto themselves or merely a process that our minds use as "the third rail of the subconscious train of thought", or testing if continuity of self across time is real or illusionary.

Aside from that, I will say one thing; I have never ingested hallucinogens, at least not to my knowledge, and I don't go to parties or have any IRL friends. So no, you don't get to say I'm high when the only way I got OUT of the maddening despair I experienced in 2017 was because my dreams helped pull me out of a complete mental breakdown. Fight me, I don't care if you think I'm telling the truth and I don't need you to believe your unconscious mind is somehow independently acting on your behalf, but don't fucking tell me I'm not sober when I've been completely sober of everything including tobacco and alcohol my entire life.

Ah. Alright, fair enough, thanks for correcting my mistake.

But I remember we did it. "Okay, Brian, the record's five. The record's five... Okay ready? Go!"

Because nobody made a Steam Deck until 2020. Everyone plays video games now and have for years, and unless you have a console, the only way to play 99% of video games is using Steam's windows version or a specially adapted Linux .

Don't get me wrong, the moment that Windows 11/12/etc. outright requires logging into a Microsoft account (Protip: As of this writing, using the email "no@thankyou.com" and submitting a blank password forces Windows 11 to let you make/log into a local user account) to use it, I'll be installing Steam OS on my OneXFly, and it's why I don't use my "free" upgrade to 11 on my Windows 10 gaming desktop. I just don't think you realize how big a deal compatibility really is for gaming.

Their kids didn't target that school. You know damn well I fucking didn't mean the Hamas' kids should die.

If that is gross revenue, I have bad news for the EU. "X" is, IIRC, operating in the red since Musk bought it.

I call bullshit. You know why?

I literally had a dream that predicted the worst year of my life, 5 years in advance, by having a friendly dream character tell me I died and went to a dream afterlife.

The catch was that I am autistic and I acted and act much like I did when I was 10 years old, and that was reflected by me taking the form of the kid sidekick in the fictional world that I was trying to write a story about at the time. I was told I was adorable and intelligent-looking (I was not the smartest kid but I was well-read and paid attention to what was in my textbooks) and not particularly unlikeable, and all of that was because that dream afterlife was a place where your personality determined your appearance. Yet despite the fact that I did not look monstrous or untrustworthy and that people who died quickly realised that in the dream world people are exactly what they appear to be, I was warned people would discriminate against me anyway, and there was nothing I or my apparent dream friend could do; said dream friend told me they thought I at least deserved to know it would happen and to just try and enjoy eternity, since I would never wake up, but that it would be hard because people would hate me unfairly.

I woke up anyway. That's not why I call BS. I recorded that dream in a text file and I keep backups of all my unique files.

I'll finish editing this soon but my phone is at 2% battery...

5 years later, sure enough, everything I value became critic-repellant in the writing industry; "you have to grow up", "dark and edgy is realistic and realistic is mandatory", "escapism is evil", "children are spoiled little shits", etc.

I now am extremely certain the dream characters who talk to me are avatars of my unconscious. I know that sounds really weird and I have no proof, so believing me on that detail can be taken with a grain of salt. As for my sanity, if I was crazy, I'd be seeing or hearing my unconscious while awake, I swear this is just in dreams that this being talks to me and it gives advice like "don't worry about the average fictional character, they're just inanimate puppets, it's the ones who are people's favorite hats to wear that - like you - are important because some hats are helmets that keep the wearer alive" rather than "KiLl EvErYoNe It WiLl Be FuN!!!11!1!" so my best guess is my unconscious mind is trying to communicate with me on a level my conscious and subconscious mindstates can understand.

I damn well know there's more to dreams than they appear, that's WHY I call BS, because a year ago, a dream character that was the first character to appear in two different dreams of mine since ever, and I asked it "Is there really a dream afterlife?" and it said "No."

I also asked it in another dream to be sure, even broadening from "dream afterlife" to "any afterlife at all", this time using an old red landline telephone and voice contact. In a snooty french accent, it confirmed and warned me very strongly and angrily not to ask again. The only upside is it said it didn't know for sure whether it is possible to create an afterlife using technology and/or biology.

I'm sorry but unless someone builds one, there is no afterlife or ascension to another plane. I literally have the info directly from the source.

I want these "Hama's" bastards fucking DEAD. Do NOT target people's kids, end of story.

Fair enough. Just know one thing. The unconscious mind seems to be not just incredibly powerful, but reality-defying to the point that myself and my dad have gotten information related to events we would not experience until years later in dreams, and in general lucid dreams are often stranger than fiction.

You don't have to believe anything, I'm just pointing out oneirology (study of dreams, and in an actual scientific manner rather than something shady like astrology) is both a real field of study and like trying to catalogue all the different ways lightning can be put in a jar; frustratingly resistant to the scientific method.

And that's just in anthopological and psychological fields, what about the bottom of the ocean or the depths of space? It's unlikely there's anything truly alien or magic on other worlds or in deep ocean water but so is the presence of life at all. In short, we might also be living in a world which isn't as realistic as we've been led to believe reality is.