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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • The hippocratic oath, in this case. Medicine is all about risk management, the worse the “disease,” the more tolerant we are of side effects for the cure. Pregnancy and birth are still pretty traumatic events that, while much safer than they used to be, are still dangerous. Female BC just has to be less risky than that. Male BC on the other hand, has to be as low the risk for a man impregnating a woman, which is to say, almost zero. Pretty much any negative side effect is worse than that, so it’s very difficult to pass. I would gladly take one with comparable side effects to female BC, but sometimes unflinching ethics are inconvenient. Better than the alternative, but still.



  • I agree, but it isn’t so clear cut. Where is the cutoff on complexity required? As it stands, both our brains and most complex AI are pretty much black boxes. It’s impossible to say this system we know vanishingly little about is/isn’t dundamentally the same as this system we know vanishingly little about, just on a differentscale. The first AGI will likely still have most people saying the same things about it, “it isn’t complex enough to approach a human brain.” But it doesn’t need to equal a brain to still be intelligent.




  • That doesn’t really work either. Human brains are not great at computing unless you are looking for “good enough,” results, and only on some pretty narrow fields, facial/speech recognition, some physics interactions, etc. But worse than that… we’re kind of using them. If they wanted us to compute, the whole function of the Matrix is just taking up run cycles. And you can’t just coopt them during sleep, we need the rest periods ,or we literally die. Only one answer makes sense to me, it’s a nature preserve. They didn’t want to be responsible for destroying their creators, and the only other sapient species known to exist. So they build the Matrix to keep us docile. Then, the energy reclamation actually makes some sense. They’re never going to be net positive, but assuming they are having difficulty keeping their society powered, they would be incentivesed to reclaim every watt of power they could from us to reduce our burden on their grid.


  • I think so long as you maintain consciousness that issue is fairly null in this particular circumstance. There’s lots of tolerance for changes in thought while maintaining the same self, see many brain damage victims. So long as there is minimal change in personality, there are lots of other circumstances that have a stronger case for killing one person and having a new person replace them due to change of consciousness, imo, I don’t think most people would consider a brain damaged person killed and replaced by a new consciousness, or a drug addiction with radically altered brain chemistry, etc.




  • Yes, the energy of the explosion is a function of the total energy between the output of the laser and the shield, specifically the shield energy being pointed at the laser origin. That’s why they randomly hid some maximum powered, monodirectional shields facing up when they fled the attack. So that even the relatively weak personal shields would still have a large impact. In general use, the shield energy is being projected in all directions, so the amount facing the laser origin is very small. IIRC, an average powered lasgun hitting a personal shield creates an explosion that can range between roughly an HE hand grenade and an HE naval shell. They only went up like nukes because the Harkonen were using the lasguns at max energy, and the shields were tweaked abnormally. And as another comment says, the actual point of the explosion is at a random point along the beam.