Science shows that the brain and the rest of the nervous system stops at death. How that relates to the notion of consciousness is still pretty much unknown, and many neuroscientists will tell you that. We haven't yet found an organ or process in the brain responsible for the conscious mind that we can say stops at death.

no matter how many neuroscientists I ask, none of them will tell me which part of the brain contains the soul. the orange site actually has a good sneer for this:

You don't need to know which part of the brain corresponds to a conscious mind when they entire brain is dead.

a lot of the rest of the thread is the most braindead right-libertarian version of Pascal’s Wager I’ve ever seen:

Ultimately, it's their personal choice, with their money, and even if they spend $100,000 on paying for it, or more, it doesn't mean they didn't leave other assets or things for their descendants.

By making a moral claim for why YOU decide that spending that money isn't justified, you're going down one very arrogant and ultimately silly road of making the same claim to so many other things people spend money and effort they've worked hard for on specific personal preferences, be they material or otherwise.

Maybe you buying a $700,000 house vs. a $600,000 house is just as idiotic then? Do you really need the extra floor space or bathrooms?

Where would you draw a line? Should other once-implausible life enhancement therapies that are now widely used and accepted also be forsaken? How about organ transplants? Gene therapy? highly expensive cancer treatments that all have extended life beyond what was previously "natural" for many people? Often these also start first as speculative ideas, then experiments, then just options for the rich, but later become much more widely available.

and therefore the only rational course of action is to put $100,000 straight into the pockets of grifters. how dare I make any value judgments at all about cryonicists based on their extreme distaste for the scientific method, consistent history of failure, and use of extremely exploitative marketing?

I defederated us from two lemmy instances:

• exploding-heads: transphobia
• basedcount: finally I get to ban most of r/PoliticalCompassMemes in one go

we suffered some extremely unexpected downtime while I deployed a trivial change (a reverse proxy from http://awful.systems/archives to http://these.awful.systems/archives) to prod

the downtime was unrelated to the deployment change; instead, it seems like lemmy-ui started crashing because it couldn't render the app icons it uses when saved as a home screen app on mobile. it uses a fairly heavy dependency to do this, and has no error handling in case the source icon data is corrupt, which causes it to crash on every request (resulting in a 503 Service Unavailable error for everyone who tried to access awful.systems during this outage)

since I don't know how that corruption occurred or why it was persistent (the app icon data should be fully static as part of the Nix store as far as I know), so until I can dig in I've disabled generating app icons for our instance. since it seems like we're the first ones to hit this bug, I'll do my best to keep the patch upstreamable so other lemmy instances can benefit from the fix

RationalWiki is a highly biased cancel community which has attacked people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander before.

Background on the authors according to a far-left website.

Let's at least be honest.

That is profiling work. (Not just "Ad hominem".)

The clash with the name "rational-wiki" is too strong not to be noted.

as the infrastructure admin of a highly biased far-left cancel community that attacks people like Scott Aaronson and Scott Alexander: mmm delicious

for bonus sneers, see the entire rest of the thread for the orange site’s ideas on why they don’t need therapy:

I was about to start psychotherapy last month, I ask my family's friend therapist If he could recommend me where to go. So he interviewed me for about 30 mins and ask me about all my problems.

A week later he send me the number of the therapist. I didnt write her yet, I think I dont need it as badly as before.

Those 30 mins were key. I am highly introspective and logical, I only needed to orderly speak my problems.

to quote Key & Peele: motherfucker, that’s called a job

hey let’s see what the people who killed and buried hacker culture think should go in the jargon file!

If the spirit of the original Jargon file was to be a living document, alas, it failed to keep with the times.

Hackers at large have moved away from Lisp despite Paul Graham and other evangelists […]

Hackers also have moved away from academia at large, and 9-5 jobs at tech behemoths are more natural habitats for them, which also shaped the lingo. I mean, there’s a whole layer of slang usually pertinent to outsourcing agencies and to cubicle farms.

I can’t wait for the corporate-approved jargon file, with any hint of anti-capitalism replaced with fun words and quotes from billionaires to share as the soul leaves my body

So in order for the document to evolve, we need a system to determine consensus. Everyone who cares runs a program on their computer that joins the network and registers their intent. With each proposed change, a query goes out to the network, and it's up to everyone on the network to say yea or nay to the proposal. With enough "yea"s, the document is updated.

...this is starting to sound like a blockchain, isn't it.

for the absolute sake of fuck. coming soon: HackerDAO! collect 10xer tokens and finally prove to the junior devs why corporate gives you so many points to crunch on! vote on fun new jargon, but only if it’s crypto-related! surely you’re hacker enough to be on the pump side of this pump and dump!

Bevy is a fun, cozy game engine to play with if you’re looking for something very flexible that implements some surprisingly advanced features. things I like:

• it’s all rust, which is an advantage for me and the chemical burns I have from handling the dialect of C++ a lot of older game engines used to be written in
• it implements a flexible entity component system, which I found pretty great for specifying game and rendering logic for things like roguelikes and simulations, where multiple game systems might interact in dynamic ways
• the API is very cozy and feels like querying an extremely fast database at times
• it’s a lot lower level than something like Unity or Godot, but you get some pretty advanced rendering features included
• the main developer seems to have a lot of industry experience and a solid roadmap

Nix is one of the few pieces of software I trust. I use it on just about every computer I work on — awful.systems is managed and deployed by just nixos-rebuild and a deployment flake, as are almost all the computers in my house (including a few embedded into the house itself). in general it makes both software development and configuring Linux a lot more fun compared with the traditional way of doing things

I often call Nix fucking incomprehensible, but it doesn’t need to be. Zero to Nix is one of the documentation projects that’s intended to be a more gentle goal-oriented introduction to Nix concepts, and it’s definitely worth following along if you’re curious about Nix and want to be able to do something useful with it right away

if you end up liking Nix and want more of it, NixOS is an entire Linux distro configured and managed by Nix, and it’s incredibly powerful and stable. I run it on a full-fat gaming PC as my primary OS and the experience of running it is surprisingly very good; feel free to ask and I’ll summarize how I run stuff like games on NixOS

see this lemmy-ansible github issue for the fix; basically, our web server now knows how to handle activitypub traffic in a more conforming way

to interact with us from mastodon:

• find the community you want to subscribe to here. note its real name -- that's the name in the sidebar after the !
• search for @[email protected] in mastodon
• follow that user and enjoy our posts over there! replying and boosting should work ok, no guarantees for anything else

as for interacting with mastodon from here, I think you can paste mastodon URLs into our search and it'll maybe work? someone try that

the API is called Web Environment Integrity, and it’s a way to kill ad blockers first and a Google ecosystem lock-in mechanism second, with no other practical use case I can find

big update, awful.systems is now a federated lemmy instance. let me know if anything looks broken! here's what to expect:

• to pull up an awful.systems community on another instance, just paste that community's URL into the other instance's search bar
• federation with other lemmy instances should work, and probably kbin too? there's no way I can find to pull in pre-federation posts on remote instances though, so send your friends here to read the backlogs
• we can't federate with most of mastodon right now because lemmy doesn't implement authorized_fetch, which is a best practice setting for mastodon instances. if your instance doesn't use it, try entering something like @[email protected] into your mastodon search; lemmy communities are represented to mastodon as users
• this is pretty much an experimental thing so if we have to turn it off, I'll send out another post
• reply to this post with ideas for moderation tools and instances you'd like to see blocked (and a reason why) and we'll take action on anything that sounds like a good idea

federation was made possible by

• lemmy's devs skipping their release process and not telling anyone 0.18.2 was released on friday? so we're on 0.18.2 now
• updating all of the deployment cluster's flake inputs just in case
• @[email protected] shouting yolo

I was gonna do this quietly since I was doing it mostly for security fixes, but now I guess I gotta announce that I deployed lemmy 0.18.1 to the awful.systems cluster. changes include

• sweet christ did this UI get smaller and uglier? whose idea was this.
• we have more theme options! most of them are terrible. there is a vaporwave theme I kinda like in a geocities way. if you come here and it looks like geocities I switched to that one
• they fixed like 3 out of the 4 webdev 101 security holes they left in the code
• there's some small new UI features?
• sometimes they just make changes for no reason
• let me know if anything looks broken