danadannecy

Is that a reasonable conclusion? Is it better to have a population of 8 billion or a population of 8 trillion where on average everyone is 1/1000 as happy? Is happiness even something where it makes more sense to measure a total rather than an average? If we value high speed in the 100m sprint, should we add more runners to ensure a higher total speed?

I'm in exactly the same boat. I got tired of waiting around for openai to take me off their waitlist and used DALLE-mini (now craiyon) to generate large batches of concept art for a project I was working on. I picked the ones that, despite being low-res blobs, conveyed the right mood or had an interesting composition of elements. I then layered my favorite elements of those and painted over, adding details wherever I wanted, and came out with something much better than I would've been able to make alone.

Would you recommend reading Flow if I've already engaged with the concept of flow itself outside of the book?

I'm glad I wasn't the only one confused by this, I was about to make the same comment!

I'm not sure what you're asking here. I have no clue where this sense of experience would be located, but my point was more targeted at clearing up that memory is not a pre-requisite for sentience, as the parent post seemed to be implying.

A person suffering from amnesia is still experiencing the world around them. Sentience is not about memory but rather the subjective self-experience of, well, experiencing things.

Does it stand to reason that other humans are sentient? The opposite view is the root of solipsism. What if an AI in the future acts in a way that you would expect from someone sentient?

By this logic you don't control anything in your life, as your choices are always defined by your past and experiences. I think it's very fair to assume room for free will in a discussion like this.

I think you may have misunderstood, by open a folder, they meant open a folder of buttons on the stream deck, allowing you to press a button to completely change which buttons are displayed on the screen.

Thanks for linking that article, fascinating read! It's incredible how much an article from 2010 (over a decade ago!) can resonate with how I feel about social media today and easily put the vague discomforts I've felt about it into words.

The poison pill prevents Musk from taking over by simply buying 51% of stock, and allows him to proceed only by giving the board an offer they agree to, in which case they'll remove the poison pill.

I see the appeal of this, but don't understand how anything like Worldcoin would be able to achieve that. People already have wealth accumulated in the real world, and there's no reason giving everyone an equal amount of a cryptocurrency would suddenly place everyone in an equal starting position.

DaVinci Resolve is one of those free gems that goes toe to toe with the paid competitors. I swapped to it from Vegas a few years ago and never looked back!

The current version of the class you are referring to actually includes an assignment to implement a lisp interpreter in python, which you might find interesting.

https://py.mit.edu/fall21/labs/lab09

I don't know much about transracialism at all, but it makes sense to me if you look at it as a cultural identification kind of thing. Both my brother and I were born in and grew up in the states, but I identify more with American culture while he identities more with the culture our parents are from, so culture at least is a mental identity thing rather than a physical reality.

If it's purely a racial/ethnic kind of thing that's about your genetic heritage, I agree it doesn't make sense to apply the same concept. It's like the distinction between sex and gender I mentioned above, trans people identify as a specific gender regardless of their sex, and I think people can identify with a specific culture regardless of their race/ethnicity. To better complete the analogy, I could definitely imagine a white person growing up in Japan their whole life and feeling a general unease about the mismatch between their cultural identity (Japanese) and their race/ethnicity (white), and in cases where that unease is severe enough, potentially being willing to go through surgery to better reflect their identity. Dysphoria over racial/cultural mismatch (if it even exists, idk) seems much less common than gender dysphoria, but I don't see why you wouldn't apply the same logic to both.

> But, in my mind, arriving to the conclusion that 'I don't identify as a male, therefore I must be female' isn't right.

I think for trans women, it isn't so much a conclusion following from not identifying as male as it is simply 'I identify as female', but this runs into the same issue that you brought up in your first comment of not actually knowing what being female is. But then again, doesn't knowing they're not male imply they know what being male is despite not being male? I think it's just too philosophical of a point for most trans people to concern themselves with when they're dealing with who knows how many other issues.

I recommend either reading or watching more stories about trans people's personal experiences if you want to get a better sense as to why people feel that way, as different people probably have different reasons. I don't personally have any recommendations (the quote I mentioned earlier was a small comment from a video on a completely unrelated topic), but thanks for the recommendation for Benjamin, I'll check him out!

In today's language (in the US at least), gender is a state of mind, precisely because talking about the mental aspect of gender/sex is very useful both for talking about transgender people and for studying how mental gender identity affects people's lives. As for "feeling" a certain gender, I get it. What you say makes sense, but humans aren't creatures strictly operating by logical principles. Sometimes, what our brains tell us doesn't make sense. But, if you spend every day of your life fighting the nagging feeling that you don't actually identify with gender you're "supposed to" identify with, are you going to trust logic, or your own experiences? You can't just say to yourself, "guess I'm being illogical, I'm gonna stop feeling this way now". I recently happened to watch a video by a trans woman where she summed up her experiences with trying to understand why she felt this way as: "And why am I a woman? Because I'm a woman. That's it. I mean, I can describe my experiences and my feelings to you to help you understand better, but I can't logically prove anything. And I'm super fucking sorry if you can't handle that mankind was set adrift in an absurd world. That must be super fucking hard for you. Tell me all about it." This was after spending years of her life trying to find a more satisfying explanation and failing to be convinced by any. As far as reinforcing the gender binary, trans women are just as able to be girly girls or tomboys as cis women are, and the same goes for trans men. On top of that, there are plenty of non-binary people, which depending on who you ask, either fall or don't fall under trans. Gender is confusing, I agree, but the fact that there are so many people feeling this way means that we can't just simplify and say "you can't really know what it means to feel like a woman" when the lived reality of these people is much more complex and something they've been struggling with for a while.