Bay 12 Games Forum

Humans are given the free, totally optional choice of converting into Cybermen. Completely self sufficient walking suits of armour, no longer needing food or sleep, just electricity. Superhuman physical ability and eternal life, but with emotional inhibitors. Not exactly an attractive option for anybody who enjoys being human.


Thing is, it's a pretty much guaranteed chance to survive the inevitable over-heating of the planet and the dwindling of its natural resources.


How many humans do you think actually go for it

The basic premise is sound. Being an immortal being of pure intellect is a pretty good deal in general, and one I would 100% take.
However being a cyberman would be horrible.
Not just cause of the emotional inhibitor, but because of the whole mind controlled into turning other people into cyberman and being so massively traumatized that if your emotions ever turn on again you commit suicide basically right away.

Not sure how many people would actually do it. There are a ton of desperate people out there, and I could see a good portion of really old people who know death is right around the corner and in an immense amount of pain going for it. Sure, you would never feel the touch of a lover or the feeling of sunlight on your face ever again, but that's already the reality for a good chunk of folks.

And of course these prompted AIs have a sense of time in a sense, since they don't simply calculate instantly when prompted

Probably not honestly.
Creatures only evolve senses when they are useful in their environment, hence why we have the ability to perceive common parts of the EM spectrum but not the ability to perceive tachyons or gamma radiation.

So if these AI gain no benefit at all by sensing the passing of time they won't ever be trained into understanding it.

Of course *some* AI totally have the concept of time. For instance this DOTA 2 bot? Yeah, it totally gets it.

The future is AI powered spam bots and political campaigns, and it sounds terrible.

Honestly I've been worried about this topic in particular.
A single AI that gets on B12 will be able to make more posts per day then every single human on the forum.
Assuming it makes a large number of accounts its entirely possible that when you talk to someone here there will be like a 90% chance it isn't an actual person.

If they only pushed [whatever their agenda is] it would be easy to see who they are, but if they are subtle there won't really be any way to tell.

Of course this won't be confined to B12, all free sites without hard verification will be vulnerable, which makes me worried about the future of the free anonymous internet.
We might end up having to go the china model where everyone has to register to places with their actual real world information (presumably in the form of some kind of ID code) to avoid the future of 99% of posts on the internet just being made by bots to sell you something or control you or feed you misinformation or convert you to scientology.

Another big problem with flying cars is maintenance. Flying stuff needs a ton of maintenance and requires you to replace anything that could ever break, because if it breaks or shuts down unexpectedly there is a good chance everyone just flat out dies.
If you have ever been in a car and it suddenly stopped because something broke? Good chance you would be dead if it was a flying car.
The public simply cannot be trusted to keep their vehicles well maintained enough for flying cars.

We're in a flaccid cyberpunk dystopia, not a proper one. All the shiny gubbins to go with the dystopic cyberpunk mess but they're neither ubiquitous nor particularly effective

Good news though, with AI coming I fully expect we transition into some other kind of futuristic society within the next few decades.
From global warming stricken cyberpunk with megacorp owned AI running around to Terminator style AI killing everyone to anything in between the future is truly limitless.
(Prooobably ain't great though).

Equally so it could just be entirely psychological, as it has been literal years since I’ve had one, but I stand by the difference!

American bread has too much sugar yeah. Even the "organic" stuff just has a bunch of honey instead of sugar/high fructose corn syrup. But uh... I can still taste all the sugar yo.

I've found that generally your best bet if you don't want sugar in it is either sourdough which doesn't have any, or baugettes/french bread.

Equally so it could just be entirely psychological, as it has been literal years since I’ve had one, but I stand by the difference!

I would bet on you being correct, there are so many different ways to make bread (and food in general) that finding the same thing in another country can be basically impossible.

You've read my entire argument completely backward. I wasn't making a point about medicine, I was making the point that "abnormal" doesn't mean "bad". I used medicine as an example of something that is clearly abnormal by global, historical, and biological perspectives.
You're sitting here giving me shit about "I didn't use the word BAD, I'm not calling them BAD".
THAT WAS. MY FUCKING. POINT.

I'm not playing both sides of the fence, I'm clearly saying "don't equivocate between 'normal' and 'right'" and you are categorically refusing to stop equivocating between 'normal' and 'right'.

Oh, and about the "environmental cost", seriously, how did you all miss that I phrased the alternative as "chew on some grass and die anyway"? I put them both in negative terms to make the point that everything has tradeoffs and can be made to sound however you want depending on what you emphasize.

If everyone misunderstands what you said in the exact same way it may be because you either weren't clear, or (in this case) you seemed to be clear enough but arguing for something else entirely.

Your most recent posts have been clear enough, but your previous ones were bad and confusing enough that people being angry/annoyed at you is on you.

Oh, and about the "environmental cost", seriously, how did you all miss that I phrased the alternative as "chew on some grass and die anyway"? I put them both in negative terms to make the point that everything has tradeoffs and can be made to sound however you want depending on what you emphasize.

You're just equivocating between "abnormal" and "there's something wrong with it". Pills that have to be manufactured in a factory halfway around the world and shipped to you at enormous energy expense are obviously abnormal, and qualitatively different from the prehistoric "eat some roots and grass and probably die anyway" correlate.

deviating from what is normal or usual, typically in a way that is undesirable or worrying.

The "chew some grass" thing being bad was very much not clear at all by the way you wrote the post, largely because the word abnormal=bad in many contexts, especially when juxtaposted with something normal.
Yes, your position seemed strange and stupid. That bizzare opinion you were presenting (but very much did not mean to present) is what got people annoyed at you.

I mean maybe it's partly TurboTax, but I think it's also the fact it's made by lawmakers and not engineers.  I mean there are forms that are literally circular references: "your AGI is the sum of these numbers, but if one of the numbers in the sum is negative, it can only be negative if your AGI minus that entry is less than some amount."

No, its 100% turbotax and similar groups like H&R block that benefit from people having to do their own taxes that are to blame here. Your gripe of stuff being stupid and complicated for no reason is also their fault to some degree. See, it turns out that the harder and more annoying filing taxes is and the easier it is to mess up the more money people use turbotax/tax prep people.

A simple way to look at America is that if something is wrong and a small group of rich people/companies benefit from it and all it does is annoy/minorly upset everyone else in the country then it isn't a bug, its a feature of American Capitalism.

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I am still just sort of gobsmacked to be accused — accused! By two different people! — of being "Paleo". Is processed food mandatory now?! Sooooo weird. Man. Whatever.

Do you raise/grow, slaughter, butcher and cook your own food exclusively?

No? Then congratulations. You're eating processed food.

As long as you do *anything* to it before you eat its processed, it doesn't matter if you slaughter it yourself unless you are eating it raw off the bone its processed.

But his greater point of highly processed food being bad for you is in general completely correct.
Not all the time of course, you can process a food more and make it more healthy.

However the simple fact of the matter is that heavily processed foods typically have a ton more added sugar/salt in them even if you ignore the stuff (*cough* forever chemicals *cough*) that should never be in food in the first place and that other stuff that probably isn't quite safe but also isn't outlawed yet by the weak FDA.

Quote from: lemon10 on March 16, 2023, 08:32:18 pm

Good news! With homeopathy you can indeed get your atomless remedies, as in, there will be literally no atoms of the "active" substance or any cure in what you get.

...that's no good. It's still got the huge dose of dihydrogen monoxide in it. So much that it'll probably homeopathically dehydrate me horribly!

(At the very least, it's a placebo-blocker. And they haven't even worked out how to do a randomised double-blind trial to check if a placebo-blocker is effective.)

You have not truly internalized the truth of homeopathy if you don't know that the more of something there is the less powerful it is.
So all that water is certainly going to be homeopathically inert.

The block channel button you get from clicking on the triple dots below the video should work just fine to block it.

It won't catch the side channel stuff, but if you diligently block them as well it should eventually catch on and stop recommending them to you.

(Of course if you have *already* been using that button and it hasn't worked then I don't really got any advice for you).