I suppose I just had higher expectations for Lemmy tbh. When I first joined on the first instance I found, the community was so nice, supportive, and in general just an amazing place to be where it felt like anybody could have a reasonable discussion about anything. It just really, really quickly devolved into what every other social media site is.
I did find using the app Connect to block lemmy.world where I assume most of the most toxic people land purely on account of its size instantly reduced toxicity in my feed by a massive amount, but it also unfortunately blocks half the content on the site and I also don’t like that I have to block plenty of reasonable users as collateral to achieve it.

I’ve noticed this an uncomfortable amount on Lemmy. Being trans, I’ve started bringing up my pretransition experience/traumas living as a dude even if it’s not relevant whenever I talk about a women’s issue that effects me because I don’t get taken seriously otherwise.
Well, actually, lately I’ve taken up just not talking about women’s issues, and really just commenting less frequently over all, because this whole place is like a mine field of people who just wanna argue. Every time before I hit send I have to think “Is somebody gonna think this is about them and get pissed with me?” And 99% of the time the answer is yes.

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My mom does this. Can’t count how many times I’ve been looking for something only to be told by her “I didn’t touch it. I never touch your stuff. You must have lost it.” Only for 3 hours later her to find it and go “Oh right, I moved it here so it’d be easier for you to find it.”

Huh. Most of my friends are in the older gen Z and younger millenial range and reaction GIFs are everywhere in every chat we have. I’m just about the only one who doesn’t use them, and it’s not because I find them cringy, they’re just not my style.

Gen Z here. Your interpretation seems correct to me, but I’m also on the way older end of the generation.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s super common for millenials to hate on gen Z for stupid stuff the same way boomers do, but this thread is not an example of it. It’s just a bunch of people saying “do what you want, don’t need to be cool” and playful teasing.

Also, it might just be because I’m on the older end, but I haven’t even heard of anybody from my generation cringing at any of these things. Either there’s a bigger divide between older and younger than I thought, or we’re getting accidentally lumped in with gen alpha again.

Gen Z here.
Do people really not have wallets now? There’s so much I can’t carry without a wallet, most importantly my ID. Am I expected to just put that loose in my pockets or bag?
And like, sometimes I’m forced to carry cash for one reason or another. I need a space place to put that.
I’m guessing it’s just because the majority of my generation isn’t old enough to be regularly encountering these issues. I’m 100% certain it’ll change as they age the way I was forced to.

I’ve definitely heard “invasive” used to describe people quite often. It’s not usually the first word people will pick, but it’s not uncommon.
But on a related note, what’s up with Lemmy (and previously Reddit) insisting that just because they didn’t get a joke means it’s not funny/poorly written? You’re allowed to just not understand jokes sometimes. You can’t explain away why something is objectively not funny any more than you can objectively explain why a joke is funny.

I spend 1/3rd of that on all of my groceries combined per month. If I was spending that much per week I would be over 1000$ in debt after a single month. Is the average person really that rich? And what food are they buying that they need to spend that much?
This is baffling to me as a poor person.

Well it is Heathcliff. I’m not sure if I’m too autistic to know if everyone was avoiding pointing that out or if people really didn’t know.

I suppose I was overly vague about what I meant by “exact copy.” I mean all of the knowledge, memories, and an exact map of the state of our neurons at the time of upload being uploaded to a computer, and then the functions being simulated from there. Many people believe that even if we could simulate it so perfectly that it matched a human brain’s functions exactly, it still wouldn’t be conscious because it’s still not a real human brain. That’s the point I was arguing against. My argument was that if we could mimic human brain functions closely enough, there’s no reason to believe the brain is so special that a simulation could not achieve consciousness too.
And you’re right, it may not be conscious in the same way. We have no reason to believe either way that it would or wouldn’t be, because the only thing we can actually verify is conscious is ourself. Not humans in general, just you, individually. Therefore, how conscious something is is more of a philosophical debate than a scientific one because we simply cannot test if it’s true. We couldn’t even test if it was conscious at all, and my point wasn’t that it would be, my point is that we have no reason to believe it’s possible or impossible.

I see, so your definition of “physical” is “made of particles?” In that case, sorta yeah. Particles behave as waves when unobserved, so you could argue that they no longer qualify as particles, and therefore, by your definition, are not physical. But that kinda misses the point, right? Like, all that means is that the observation may have created the particle, not that the observation created reality, because reality is not all particles. Energy, for instance, is not all particles, but it can be. Quantum fields are not particles, but they can give rise to them. Both those things are clearly real, but they aren’t made of particles.
On the second point, that’s kinda trespassing out of science territory and into “if a tree falls in the forest” territory. We can’t prove that a truly unobserved macroscopic object wouldn’t display quantum properties if we just didn’t check if it was, but that’s kinda a useless thing to think about. It’s kinda similar to what our theories are though, in that the best theory we have is that the bigger the object is, the more likely the interaction we call “observation” just happens spontaneously without the need for interaction. Too big, and it’s so unlikely in any moment for it not to happen that the chances of the wave function not being collapsed in any given moment is so close to zero there’s no meaningful distinction between the actual odds and zero.

There shouldn’t be a distinction between quantum and non-quantum objects. That’s the mystery. Why can’t large objects exhibit quantum properties? Nobody knows, all we know is they don’t. We’ve attempted to figure it out by creating larger and larger objects that still exhibit quantum properties, but we know, at some point, it just stops exhibiting these properties and we don’t know why, but it doesn’t require an observer to collapse the wave function.
Also, can you define physical for me? It seems we have a misunderstanding here, because I’m defining physical as having a tangible effect on reality. If it wasn’t real, it could not interact with reality. It seems you’re using a different definition.

A building does not actually enter a superposition when unobserved, nor does Schrodinger’s cat. The point of that metaphor was to demonstrate, through humor, the difference between quantum objects and non-quantum objects, by pointing out how ridiculous it would be to think a cat could enter a superposition like a particle. In fact, one of the great mysteries of physics right now is why only quantum objects have that property, and in order to figure that out we have to figure out what interaction “observation” actually is.
Additionally, we can observe the effects of waves quite clearly. We can observe how they interact with things, how they interfere with each other, etc. It is only attempting to view the particle itself that causes it to collapse and become a particle and not a wave. We can view, for instance, the interference pattern of photons of light, behaving like a wave. This proves that the wave is in fact real, because we can see the effects of it. It’s only if we try to observe the paths of the individual photons that the pattern changes. We didn’t make the photons real, we could already see they were real by their effects on reality. We just collapsed the function, forcing them to take a single path.

I think you’re a little confused about what observed means and what it does.
When unobserved, elementary particles behave like a wave, but they do not stop existing. A wave is still a physical thing. Additionally, observation does not require consciousness. For instance, a building, such as a house, when nobody is looking at it, does not begin to behave like a wave. It’s still a physical building. Therefore, observation is a bit of a misnomer. It really means a complex interaction we don’t understand causes particles to behave like a particle and not a wave. It just happens that human observation is one of the possible ways this interaction can take place.
An unobserved black hole will still feed, an unobserved house is still a house.
To be clear, I’m not insulting you or your idea like the other dude, but I wanted to clear that up.

On the contrary, it’s not a flaw in my argument, it is my argument. I’m saying we can’t be sure a machine could not be conscious because we don’t know that our brain is what makes us conscious. Nor do we know where the threshold is where consciousness arises. It’s perfectly possible all we need is to upload an exact copy of our brain into a machine, and it’d be conscious by default.

We don’t even know what consciousness is, let alone if it’s technically “real” (as in physical in any way.) It’s perfectly possible an uploaded brain would be just as conscious as a real brain because there was no physical thing making us conscious, and rather it was just a result of our ability to think at all.
Similarly, I’ve heard people argue a machine couldn’t feel emotions because it doesn’t have the physical parts of the brain that allow that, so it could only ever simulate them. That argument has the same hole in that we don’t actually know that we need those to feel emotions, or if the final result is all that matters. If we replaced the whole “this happens, release this hormone to cause these changes in behavior and physical function” with a simple statement that said “this happened, change behavior and function,” maybe there isn’t really enough of a difference to call one simulated and the other real. Just different ways of achieving the same result.

My point is, we treat all these things, consciousness, emotions, etc, like they’re special things that can’t be replicated, but we have no evidence to suggest this. It’s basically the scientific equivalent of mysticism, like the insistence that free will must exist even though all evidence points to the contrary.

I don’t have direct examples because I suck at googling, but what I saw that made me think of this was an ancient Greek philosopher insulting another, presumably in a rude tone, but still translated to look super polite and old timey. The explanations people have given here have really shed a lot of light for me on why that is though, so it makes sense to me now.

I tried to find examples but turns out I’m really bad at googling. Quotes of ancient Greek philosophers is one example though. Surely not all of them spoke formally, and I’ve heard some even spoke rather rudely, and yet when they’re translated they’re still translated into really formal, old timey language. There’s been some nice explanations here of why that is though, so I understand a lot better.

I’ve learned the dumb way going for married people is always a bad idea regardless of the status of the marriage, so I must politely decline.
I’m an Ubuntu user anyway, so I’m unfortunately unfit for marriage in the first place.