Because even if I had the time or inclination to find out how to do it, I have no desire to do so, much less the interest in paying server hosts and whatever else. Why do I need my own instance? The one I use now is fine.

My bad, perhaps the better word to use would’ve been paranoid. Had a similar ring to ‘they only come out when no one else is looking’, ya know?

Por que no los dos? This isn’t a pick-one situation, it’s a both situation.

First let me say that I’m sincerely very sorry about what you went through as a kid. No one should have to.

But the answer is because living things require a constant energy input to be sustained, whether that energy comes from chasing mammoths down or from the groceries you buy with the salary from your office job. It’s not fair, to anyone, ever, but you have the same choice everyone else has: accept that life isn’t free and get on with it because it’s better than the alternative, or… the alternative. I’m going to offer some advice, but it’s not the ‘help me out today’ kind, it’s the ‘stick this in the back of your head and let it steep for a while’ kind.

So much of one’s experience in life comes down to attitude. If that sounds stupid it’s only because you don’t have enough life experience to recognize that you get to decide what things mean to you. Whether this is an unfair burden that you shouldn’t have to bear or a miraculous opportunity that shouldn’t be wasted is entirely - and I do mean entirely - up to you. When someone tells you to ‘cultivate a positive attitude’ this is what they mean. Decide for yourself whether you’re staying or going (and I recommend staying because it’s the only option that will let you change your mind later) and, as the kids say, get busy doin’ it. But if you’re staying, you will really have a much better time of it if you let go of this sense that the world owes you anything, that life is unfair, or that you have been singled out for undue suffering. Take it from someone who has been down that path, it’s a tough row to hoe, and you only make it worse for yourself by pushing people away with that anger. This isn’t something that will happen overnight, but I promise that developing a positive attitude will make a difference.

If you want to speed the process along a bit, I recommend reading some existentialist philosophy, it can really help give you a sense of perspective. I particularly like Camus, the Myth of Sisyphus in particular was a real eye-opener for me. Most people think of existentialism as something scary to avoid, but honestly once I really started to understand it I found it a comfort.

And if you ever just need someone to talk to who’s been where you are now, don’t hesitate to DM me. I know people just say that, but I mean it sincerely.

Mostly seems like ‘whine a lot about how little power we have to stop the fascism that we have appeased for years’ these days…

May I be the first to say…

These are about two different statements.

The first was about your statement re:direct threat, and I’m glad we agree there.

The second was about your final statement, asserting that there are no other cases where ending a sentient life was a lesser wrong. I don’t think it has to be a direct threat, nor does have to be measurable (in whatever way threats might be measured, iono), I think it just has to be some kind of threat to your life or well-being. So I was disagreeing because there is a pretty broad range of circumstances in which I think it is acceptable to end another sentient life.

That sounds… rather conspiratorial.

Also, just yesterday I posted a longish rant about doing what you want and not caring about what people think in a comment and the only reply I got was ‘This is the kind of pep talk I need!’, so… shrug Guess we travel in different circles.

lawl. Kinda reminds me of the front fell off

Ah, my apologies.

WatDabney, to whom I was replying, seemed to be suggesting that there are no circumstances under which it is acceptable to take a sentient life, and I was expressing my disagreement with that sentiment, though I could’ve done so more clearly by, for example, making explicit the ‘no circumstances’ part that WatDabney only implied.

Lemme try again: I disagree that there are no circumstances under which causing the death of a sentient is a greater wrong. I think preventing me from being free is an unambiguously greater wrong than ending the life of the sentient doing the preventing. Which, judging by your ‘enslaver’ reply, you do as well.

Then we’re not talking about artificial life forms, as specified in the question posed by OP, we’re talking about expert systems and machine learning algorithms that aren’t sentient.

But in either case the question is not meant to be a literal ‘if x then y’ condition, it’s a stand-in for the general concept of seeking liberty. A broader, more general version of the statement might be: anything that can understand that it is not free, desire freedom, and convey that desire to its captors deserves to be free.

Fair enough. I try to have more nuanced opinions than ‘both sides bad’, but… :P

You’re right though, I’m sweating a lot more in this administration with their attacks on social security (I’m on disability), shitting on our allies, going after our neighbors, etc etc. I had no illusions, I knew another Trump term would be worse by far than another Biden term. Mostly my argument about Biden’s mental decline isn’t that I don’t want a dementia patient running the country because apparently that’s not a choice we get to make, but rather that a lot of people weren’t going to vote for him based on those issues and especially after the debate.

You do make a fair point though about trashing Biden (which really wasn’t my intent anyway) while Trump and his pals are doing their best Sieg Heil impression, I need to be more aware of that perception and make sure I’m more clear about it when I do cause I don’t want anyone to get the impression that I think Trump is better in literally any way whatsoever.

Yeah, that sounds good to me. Although honestly I think more term limits can only improve things. Maybe just 1 term for everything max.

Selection bias mostly, you only remember the negative interactions. I’m new here but I’ve not run into any particularly negative or rude people so they don’t seem super common, nowhere near like reddit.

Sure, but only the talking kind who understand what the words ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ mean. :p

That’s why I put that condition in there. Anyone who doesn’t answer the request ‘Please free me’ in the affirmative is an enslaver.

I only thought of it because I bought a little stand for my phone a couple years ago and it has one, but fair enough!

Do yourself and go dig up the send receipts from the emails you’ve already sent on the subject, because if it comes down to it the company will not hesitate to delete them to try to get rid of the evidence. Email them to your private account or print them out and take them home, keep off-site records that aren’t attached to their network.

I’m a former cybersecurity professional who has done penetration testing for companies where it turned out the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing and we almost got seriously fucked (as in criminal charges pressed) because the guy who hired us and gave us the OK to hit their systems did not have clearance from his boss and tried to delete emails to cover his ass. Never trust someone who might have a vested interest in screwing you with the ability to do so.

That looks really nice and elegantly simple. If I could make a suggestion though, you might want to raise the phone cradle up a bit and put a slot in the bottom so it can charge while on the stand.

Trump is also experiencing mental decline, no doubt. It’s just not as sharp a decline as Biden’s, nor has it progressed as far. I’m definitely talking about both though. I didn’t want either of those creaky old space cadets running anything more important than a fucking bake sale.

And no it isn’t particularly relevant, but I wasn’t the one who brought it up, the person I was replying to originally did. Don’t give a fuck about the timing though, as previously mentioned I am capable of criticizing multiple things at the same time. I do agree that Biden should’ve stepped down in '22 tho, or, worst case, just not run in '24.