Technus

I was thinking about this the other day and realized something: Back when the modern Santa character was first being developed, coal was a genuinely useful thing. It was fuel for the stove which heated your house and cooked your food. It was a basic necessity of life. If you were naughty, Santa didn't just give you _nothing_. You weren't going to get an awesome toy, but he made sure you weren't going to freeze to death on Christmas, either. Santa believes everyone deserves to live. That having a warm place to sleep is a basic human right. This might be /r/im14andthisisdeep material, but I just thought that was interesting.

Why would you bring up C# in a thread about kernel programming?

You go ahead and write an OS kernel in C# then.

Because Rust lets you choose when something is unsafe vs writing all unsafe in code all the time: Note the other 159 kernel CVEs issued today for fixes in the C portion of the codebase

Yeah but on the second incarnation, wouldn’t that put you right back where you started?

What happens to the guy that was driving it? Does he just blink out of existence when the car shuts off? That’s my question. You might argue that there is no such thing, but my own conscious experience proves to myself that there’s something else there. I want to know what happens to that part. Hell, for all I know, you might just be a soulless meatbag automaton, and there really is no one in the driver’s seat for you. Or I could just be the only actual human talking in a thread full of bots. With 90% of the training data going into LLMs being vapid contrarian debates on social media, I could easily see that being the case here.

I’m not expecting or planning for anything, that’s kind of the point. I’m not expecting one specific outcome. It’s actually really freeing, because I’m not stuck searching for meaning in an existence that offers none. And if it turns out that it does all just go black, it won’t be my problem anymore, will it?

I don’t agree that the cessation of brain activity necessarily means the end of the subjective experience. That doesn’t mean I purport to know what actually happens at that point. I hope it’s some sort of reincarnation but that’s just because there’s more I want to experience in this universe than I possibly could in a single lifetime. “You only have one life, live it the best you can” is a nice motivational mantra, but however well I live my life, it’s highly unlikely I will live long enough to experience interstellar travel, for example, or first contact with alien life. I think that really fucking sucks, and I really hope I’ll have a chance on the next go-around. But if it’s something completely different, I’m cool with that, too.

The lack of memory of past existence isn’t evidence of anything. We have clear evidence that memories are physical things, stored as connections of neurons in the brain. They can be lost to disease or injury, and they’re destructively modified every time we access them.

My whole point is that I disagree with the certainty of that claim. It’s not grounded in empirical evidence, because we don’t have any.

I’m an atheist but I don’t actually preclude the existence of an afterlife. “There is no heaven or hell, it just all goes black and that’s it,” is just as patently unfalsifiable as any claim made by any religion. It’s just as likely to be something completely different and alien from anything conceivable in our limited world view. In an infinite space of probabilities, the likelihood of it being “literally nothing” actually seems pretty low. That kind of uncertainty is exactly what scares most people, but not me. I’m looking forward to finding out one day.

I think with a capful of Adderall I could ascend to a higher plane of existence