25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • It wouldn’t change anything because this is the reality we have. I wouldn’t suddenly become immoral because there are still consequences and even if some people or even everyone but me is not real, they will still react as though they have emotions. If I hurt my wife, she would still cry. If I did something bad enough, she might divorce me. Take half my stuff. Lose some access to my kids. Those are all real consequences even if the people are simulated.

    Maybe I’d be less concerned for people not immediately around me because any good simulation wouldn’t actually sim everything out of range, so there wouldn’t e.g. be Palestinians starving to death if no one “real” was there.

    I suppose it would re-open the question of existence beyond death, but I don’t think I would ultimately come to a different conclusion—there is no reason to think this experience would continue past my own death, and if I were memory-wiped and re-inserted it wouldn’t really be the same me anyway, right?

    If it were matrix-style there is a reality out there to experience if I can leave the simulation, I’d have some hard thinking to do about whether that would be likely to be a better existence than the one I’m having here.




  • For the most part I haven’t kept track. One of them wound up getting a PhD, moving far away, and becoming a decent person. I’m also pretty sure he wouldn’t have considered himself a bully. I also probably was guilty of bullying to an extent because I wasn’t a paragon of maturity when I was young. The guy who might’ve called me a bully went on to become an accomplished author (accomplished enough that it’s his sole source of income).

    In my own life, while I’m arguably less successful than either, I’ve accomplished pretty much everything that was important to me in terms of family and money, so I guess everything turned out for everyone. I could give a shit about the worst bullies, so I really have no idea about them.


  • Historically speaking, yes. He will be convicted and executed as a message. The message to the rich is that the justice system they’ve we’ve bought and paid for has their back. To the rest of us it’s a message about the cost of going after the wealthy. Thing is, the more they fuck the rest of us over, the more it’s a cost worth paying. But they are trying to keep us in line.