How’s musk related to this one?

My point is just that nobody really thinks it should be a free for all.

Don’t made judgements about everybody based on one guy. I’m on an instance that doesn’t defederate lemmygrad or lemmy.ml, so I commonly see utterly insane tankie takes in popular, and of course also in various comments - and yet I don’t want those people to not have a platform. Because I trust just about noone to decide whether my opinions should be censored, and if that means also not censoring the opinions of people who I think are very wrong, I’m willing to take that trade.

Yet, people suffering from it can lead happy and fulfilling lives.

Sure, it’s possible for a person with a severe disability to grow up happy. But when one is making a decision in real life (like having a child), one should consider an average case, not a exceptional one. And the average case for an example like Down’s Syndrome is pretty bad. It is a bit unclear how to quantify the suffering in this particular disease’s case because the main harm to the child is lifelong mental impairment and assorted physical disabilities - but it is at least going to inflict suffering on the child’s family, since caring for a child with a severe disability for their entire life isn’t exactly fun.

It is a slippery slope that, if not navigated carefully, has historically leaded to atrocities.

I don’t see the relation. You’ll notice that I’m not proposing killing off disabled people for the “improvement of society” or whatever it was that nazis called it. I am not doing this because nonconsensually killing a person is a harm to them. But deciding not to have a child isn’t the same thing as murdering a person - it’s not harming anyone who exists, and hence may well be morally better than having a child.

(Oh, I suppose you might mean that I’m arguing that there are circumstances in which it’s morally bad for a person to have a child, which is similar to nazi eugenics in that I’m deciding whether or not people should have children? In that case, my answer is that the difference is that I’m a person, not an authoritarian government, and I don’t have power (nor, indeed, the desire) to force people to obey my personal moral judgements.)

Developers usually make $50-300/hour.

That seems like an overestimate even for US. More importantly, I don’t think most open source developers earn this much money (otherwise they wouldn’t ask for tiny donations), and hence it’s not the relevant figure. If I’m wrong about this, please do tell me - I very much would like to know if the hours I occasionally spend on open-source contributions can instead earn me hundreds of dollars. ;)

Depends - do you have crypto?

I see. No, I don’t think I have any specific questions at this point.

carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side.

Not necessarily. Someone dying isn’t the same as someone not existing at all.* It does imply that the world would be better off if it stopped existing, and under some assumptions implies it’d be moral to, say, instantly end all of humanity. I’m not sure that these conclusions are necessarily “contrary to our instincts”.

*one reason why this has to be true, is that if we didn’t distinguish between those, then if an average life had positive value, it’d be immoral not to have as many children as possible, until the marginal value of an extra life fell to zero once again (kind of like how Malthus thought societies worked, except as a supposedly moral thing to do). That conclusion is something I do consider very contrary to my instincts.

I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

I too am an utilitarianist, sure. I’m not sure I can possibly buy “maximum suffering and no happiness” being the zero point. I very strongly feel that there are plenty of lives that would be way worse than dying (and than never having existed, too). It’s a coherent position I think, just a very alien one to me.

That’s literally true, but the simple counterargument is that the happiness/suffering conversion coefficient is a matter of one’s values and not particularly up for debate - so there’s nothing incoherent about, say, the position that your child living a happy fullfilling life for a thousand years but stubbing their toe once is enough suffering to make their life net negative.

This is a great comment. I’ll add that anyone thinking about disability ethics should read Two Arms and a Head, lest they start taking too seriously the idea that disabilities have no effect on quality of life.

I agree that there’s a lot of space between “considered disabled” and “horrible life”, but OP said “suffer their whole life” which I associated with the latter.

Is there some feature comparison of lemmy vs mbin vs other reddit-like platforms? There was some major reason why I didn’t like kbin, but I forgot why.

What’s so hilarious about it?

You have no moral obligation to have children at all, even if they’ll predictably have a happy life. So if their life will instead be predictably horrible (or if they will predictably ruin the lives of the people around them - plenty of severe mental disabilities seem much less horrible for the people themselves than for their caretakers), it’s very reasonable to avoid it.

Thanks, I’ll keep that take in my pocket for later. “Your honor, you can’t possibly prove that in the future a superintelligence won’t be able to reconstruct enough of the victim’s brain to resurrect them, and hence they aren’t dead and I can’t have committed murder!”.

I’m very happy Servo exists but if they want, like, a working browser, it’s no wonder they chose Chromium.

For comparison, from a recent Servo blogpost: “Servo can now run Discord well enough to log in and read messages, though you can’t send messages yet. […] We now support enough of XPath to get htmx working.”.

Servo has been in development for 7+ years and it’s still not able to render modern web. Maybe it never will, since it’s impossible to build a new web browser.

This post is currently top-1 when sorting by controversial. Objectively amazing bait.

I use Firefox (and forks) myself but wouldn’t donate to it. It’s like Wikipedia - a great project with a shitty parent company which’ll spend all of your donations on shit projects.

I’m not aware of how exactly blocking works there, but if it’s similar to China and Russia, consider subscribing to a VPN provider that supports stealth proxies (e.g. Shadowsocks or VLESS); that’s harder to block.

The title is somewhat misleading:

The company’s billionaire founder, Mark Zuckerberg, on Tuesday announced that the platforms’ factchecking program would be replaced with X-style “community notes”, a feature that allows users to add context to posts.

Twitter’s Community Notes is whole lot better than nothing. In fact I’m not sure it’s worse than the “factchecking” Facebook had.

Every time there’s an AI hype cycle the charlatans start accusing the naysayers of moving goalposts. Heck that exact same thing was happing constantly during the Watson hype. Remember that? Or before that the Alpha Go hype. Remember that?

Not really. As far as I can see the goalpost moving is just objectively happening.

But fundamentally you can’t make a machine think without understanding thought.

If “think” means anything coherent at all, then this is a factual claim. So what do you mean by it, then? Specifically: what event would have to happen for you to decide “oh shit, I was wrong, they sure did make a machine that could think”?