Wow, this completely crashes Firefox for me. Don't think I've ever seen that before.
Super cool though! Works fine on Chromium. I liked Pass the Ball, and it was really fun contorting to avoid the red balls in Ball Dash -- if you're looking to add some games, maybe some along the lines of Twister or the Hole In the Wall game show? A whack-a-mole style game could also be interesting. Also, it'd be nice to be able to navigate the menus with mouse.
This is a longshot, but -- I have a lychee tree that's fruiting right now, with more fruits than I know what to do with, and I'm about to go on a road trip from Florida to the midwest in a week or so. I could drop off a bucket along the way. Shoot me an email at concat("ksymph0", "@", "proton.me") if you're in the area.
I dunno, it kinda freaks me out. For thousands of years we've been selectively breeding another species to love us unconditionally, and be so subservient to the point of dependence.
Imagine if we found out some alien species has their own 'breed' of human they've been genetically engineering for millennia; one that wants nothing more than the company of their alien owners and hates when they leave, that has been bred to be perpetually child-like and devoid of critical thinking in order to better please them, is sometimes pampered and sometimes abused but absolutely subject to the alien species' will. They keep us locked in a house or yard most of the day because their world is dangerous for us, and see all of this as totally justified because they're our intellectual superiors. They make posts on AlienNews about how beautiful the alien-human relationship is because they bred us to be the perfect companion; only magnifying the social compulsions that already existed in humans, to be fair, but still fundamentally changing us.
For the record I do understand that selectively bred humans != dogs, but it still just makes me kinda uncomfortable when I think about it all too much.
That's not really how it worked. It's more accurate to say that dogs co-evolved with humans in a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship. We've only been actively selectively breeding dogs for a few thousand years.
It's a pretty good relationship for the dogs from an evolutionary perspective. All of their needs are met forever, they experience essentially no hardship or struggle, and their species gets a free ride to survive indefinitely into the unimaginably distant future by being attached to a more successful species.
Being cute is a strategy to get attached to humans. Selective breeding amplified this in recent times, but humans evolved to find dogs cute and dogs evolved to be cute in order to enforce the symbiosis. Humans didn't subjugate dogs, the presence of the human species created an ecological niche and dogs evolved to take advantage of it.
Remember that we didn't just create dogs. Wolves initially filled the role that dogs now take. Over evolutionary time, wolves adapted to better fit the niche. Not because humans wanted that, but because it was evolutionarily advantageous for a companion species to be more compatible with its host. Wolves got smaller, more friendly to humans, more protective. Wolves that didn't protect their humans lost the benefits humans provide and died. Wolves that attacked in-group humans were excluded or killed. Wolves that didn't obey their humans died due to hazards to themselves or their humans.
We only started breeding them after they became dogs. They evolved from wolves to dogs on their own.
One's perspective on this discussion really hinges on the question you raise: if an animal has a 'better' life in captivity by various metrics -- lifespan, access to food, safety from predators, etc. -- is it morally right to keep them captive? What exactly are the metrics by which we judge quality of life and what values do we assign? Does a dog (or cat, or gorilla, or selectively bred human, ) have a concept of freedom or independence that carries weight? And what if that drive is extinguished through genetic modification?
There aren't clean answers to these questions, of course. We've essentially just described the same process of wolf-to-dog evolution from the two ends of the spectrum, and neither perspective is entirely wrong or right. I would like to point out a couple things, though:
> Over evolutionary time, wolves adapted to better fit the niche. Not because humans wanted that, but because it was evolutionarily advantageous for a companion species to be more compatible with its host.
Take a step back and consider that statement. What made it evolutionarily advantageous is that humans wanted it. If humans didn't want a more compatible companion species, it wouldn't be evolutionarily advantageous. You can't separate the advantage from human desires.
Selective breeding doesn't have to be entirely intentional. Early humans weren't practicing pedigree breeding on wild wolves, of course, but nonetheless it was artificial selection that drove evolutionary change. And for the past few thousand years, we very much have been actively and intentionally breeding them. Also -- this is beside the point, really, and total speculation, but -- given how early humans understood selective breeding in plants, it seems likely that they had some awareness of the knock-on effects of favoring friendlier wolves.
Regardless, the moral unease I feel is primarily about the current state of having another species tailored to serve our emotional needs, not how we got here. Even looking at dog to wolf evolution as an entirely natural process, does that justify everything we've done and are still doing to modify them to suit our desires? Dogs as a species may benefit from our ownership, but does that make all the individual suffering we cause okay? We think of dogs living a life of privilege and comfort, and many do, but just as many have abusive owners or are living on the streets, often with worse quality of life than wild wolves today.
Well there are theories humans on Earth are selectively bred too.
The selective breeding that led to the dogs being more subservient also affected humans. As human populations who worked with dogs had advantages over the ones who didn’t. That’s a theory at least.
There are also theories that humans domesticated ourselves. That civilization promotes certain traits over others. Just like when we domesticated other species we chose to promote some traits over others.
Jails could be an example of this process. Violent fools getting removed from society. The genes that led to that stuff being removed. Meanwhile the humans with traits more compatible with society get successful and have kids and so pass on those traits.
> Imagine if we found out some alien species has their own 'breed' of human they've been genetically engineering for millennia
Isn’t that just being a child? I get the rejection of neoteny. But haven’t humans also become genetically better suited for civilization than our wild ancestors?
Idk man, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me. I don't have to go anywhere or do anything, all my needs are taken care of for me, I can just relax and do whatever I want. What could be better than that? Sign me up lmao
That's a good idea, but remember that, up until CLU's outright betrayal, Kevin had no reason to be concerned, and after it, he had no way back into meat space to run those commands.
Also -- unrelated, but a nitpick of the article -- Kevin was using the laser to come and go from the grid for a while before he got stuck there. The laser would have been pretty well-tested by the time he made/edited the last will and testament, so the article's explanation that it was his first use of the tech doesn't make sense. (He could have just spontaneously decided to update it though, which isn't too far fetched)
On that last point, GNOME/Gtk/Adwaita apps generally function really well on small screen sizes. The design language naturally suits it, and in my experience most apps will even make some layout adjustments where they're needed when resized to ~phone screen dimensions.
Anecdotally, out of the ~50 or so I have installed right now on my laptop, which covers the basic calculator/calendar/contacts/etc., and also things like file compression, torrenting, a Mastodon client, RSS reader, and so on, all of them are ready to use on a phone.
Alas, if only there was a (reasonably priced + fully functional) phone that could use them.
> Progress is movement towards a perceived refined, improved, or otherwise desired state.
I.e. progress is understood as positive advancement. Otherwise we use other words like “regression”.
The quote as it is typically used is advocating for the unreasonable man because they precipitate progress. My point is that we shouldn’t idolise this idea of advancement in the abstract, because pretty clearly it can turn everything to shit. We’re not benefiting from those unreasonable men, quite the contrary.
I think the use of "progress" in the quote is somewhat ironic -- "movement towards a perceived refined [...] state", as the definition puts it; an unreasonable person's perception of progress likely doesn't match up with a reasonable person's.
As I see it, the quote neither advocates nor critiques unreasonableness, but rather observes that unreasonable people are most often the ones responsible for change. Whether you take that as a lesson on the merits of unreasonableness, the dangers of it, or something in between, is up to interpretation, and depends on how much one values reasonableness vs progress (for the record, I've heard the quote more often in a negative sense by people who put reasonableness above "progress"). It also depends on one's definition of "reasonableness" of course, and whether something can be unreasonable yet still a positive.
So I guess my point is that the quote can mean just about whatever you want it to mean. It's an interesting litmus test. I do agree that people using it as carte blanche for unreasonableness in the name of some sort of nebulous "progress" is, well, unreasonable, though with context I'm certain GP was using it as more of a critique.
> Regulation that’s defined entirely in terms of the technology it regulates, as opposed to in terms of the effects it has on society or imposing boundaries and limits on the technology itself, is a core component of the technopolistic political and legislative environment.
Incredible article, a lot to unpack here, but I found this particular offhand tidbit interesting. It does seem like any attempt at tech industry regulation over the past decade or two (that isn't somewhat in the interests of big tech anyway, i.e. age verification and so on) has been either overly vague, or overly specific, leading to easy workarounds.
It seems like a microcosm of a wider trend in regulation; the disconnect between intentions and results. On the rare occasions that consumer-friendly legislation does go through, there is no working mechanism for evaluating its effectiveness and refining the rules as quickly as big corporations can adapt to them. I like how the article frames this, of how the regulations are targeting the wrong thing, how they're defined by the problem rather than the desired end state.
For more thoughts along these lines I'd highly recommend checking out Jennifer Pahlka's blog Eating Policy: https://www.eatingpolicy.com/
Super cool though! Works fine on Chromium. I liked Pass the Ball, and it was really fun contorting to avoid the red balls in Ball Dash -- if you're looking to add some games, maybe some along the lines of Twister or the Hole In the Wall game show? A whack-a-mole style game could also be interesting. Also, it'd be nice to be able to navigate the menus with mouse.
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