I think SOMA made it pretty clear we’re never uploading jack shit, at best we’re making a copy for whom it’ll feel as if they’ve been uploaded, but the original remains behind as well.
That’s what I’ve always thought more or less, to have a chance you would need a method where mental processing starts to be shared in both, then transfers more and more to the inorganic platform till it’s 100% and the organic isn’t working anymore.
The animated series Pantheon has a scene depicting exactly this, and it’s one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen.
Edit: Here is the scene in question. It’s explained he has to be awake during the procedure because the remaining parts of his brain need to continue functioning in tandem with the parts that have already been scanned.
Interesting but I would argue that’s actually still a destructive copy process. “Old Man’s War” did a good job of what I’m talking about, it was body to clone body but the principal was similar and at the halfway point the person was experiencing existence in both bodies at once, seeing both bodies from the perspective of each other until the transfer completed and they were in the new body and the old slumped over.
That also reminds me of this scene from Invincible where during the copying process their experiences are sort of “blended” making them see from both bodies at once, only here they both live and are separate afterwards.
Edit: is it obvious how much of a sci-fi geek I am lol
You would have to functionally duplicate the exact structure of the brain or its consciousness while having the duplication mechanism destroy the thing it was reading at almost exactly the same time. And even then, that’s not really solving the issue.
I don’t see an issue with that. A prolonged brain surgery that meticulously replaces each part with a mechanical equivalent in sequence. Could probably remain conscious the whole time.
Yeah, but it’s still a Ship of Theseus problem. If you have a ship and replace every single board or plank with a different one, piece by piece, is it still the same ship or a completely different one, albeit an exact replica of the original. It’s important because of philosophical ideas around the existence of the soul and authenticity of the individual and a bunch of other thought-experimenty stuff.
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.
Not necessary. Imagine you begin suffering Alzheimer. And the artificial neurons are making a copy of your brain. Once a neuron stops working the backup one replaces it. Your mind, if it worked, could see the new neuron as part of the same brain and work with it seamlessly.
Yeah, like replacing individual braincells with more durable mechanisms. Idk, maybe they would be cellular as well. …that makes me wonder, maybe it is possible to transfer consciousness even with traditional biological mechanism?
Ahh, but here’s the question. Who are you? The you who did the upload, or the you that got uploaded, retaining the memories of everything you did before the upload? Go on, flip that coin.
If you are the version doing the upload, you’re staying behind. The other “you” pops into existence feeling as if THEY are the original, so from their perspective, it’s as if they won the coin flip.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but I would. The knowledge that “A” me is out there, somewhere, safe and sound, is uplifting, but it’s still quite chilling to realize you are staying wherever the hell you are. At least we die after enough time has passed because our bodies decay.
Is it chilling? I was already going to stay where I am, whether I made a copy or not. Sharding off a replica to go on for me would be strictly better than not doing that
I think it’s both for me, which I think is what you might be saying as well. I would absolutely push the button to create the copy, or whatever, because I think I would derive satisfaction from creating a life (identical to mine, no less) that was free of the circumstance I was in, which must have been dire. However, I definitely don’t consider that instance “me” even if I do consider the copy a legitimate, separate version of “me”, so I don’t feel that I have perpetuated my own instance, leaving me in whatever fight-or-flight terror I was in to cause the scenario in the first place.
What do you mean he wasn’t so lucky, after all he lived out his live in Toronto. That he did a brain scan at some point of his life doesn’t matter. Sucks for the robot who thought he was him.
I was just annoyed at the protagonist for expecting anything else. The exact same thing already happened 2 times to the protagonist (initial copy at beginning of the game, then move to the other suit). Plus it’s reinforced in the found notes for good measure. So by the ending, the player knows exactly what’s going to happen and so should the protagonist, but somehow he’s surprised.
Yeah true. But Catherine said it perfectly at the end. Something like “you still don’t get it? What did you expect?”. The fact that one of his consciousness remains down in the abyss was kind of frightening. All by himself.
Two actually. The one from the before the suit change is also left there, and Catherine said he will wake up in a day or two. Maybe they can meet up actually.
That’s actually not true. When you cut/paste a file on your computer (for most computers), it’s much faster than copying the file. Deleting the file is also not instant, so copy and delete should be the slowest of the three operations.
When you cut and paste a file, you’re just renaming the file or updating the file database. It’s different how that works depending on your file system, but it typically never involves rewriting much of the data of the file.
Only if you copy and paste to the same disk. When copy pasting to a different disk, as any consciousness transfer would entail, it is very much actually copied and actually removed (from the index).
I mean, if I die instantaneously and painlessly, and conciousness is seemingly continuous for the surviving copy, why would I care?
My conciousness might not continue but I lose consciousness every day. Someone exists who is me and lives their (my) life. I totally understand peoples aversion to death but I also don’t see any difference to falling asleep and waking up. You lose consciousness, then a person who’s lived your life and is you regains consciousness. Idk
Yeah, and I completely understand that. Just from a logical perspective though, lets say the process happens after you fall asleep normally at night. If you can’t tell it happened, does it matter? I’ve been really desensitized to the idea of dying through suicidal ideation throughout most of my life (much better now), so I’m able to look at it without the normal emotional aversion to it. If teleportation existed, via this same method, I don’t think I’d have qualms about at least trying it. Certainly wouldn’t expect other people to but to me I don’t think it’s that big a deal. I wouldn’t do a mind upload scenario, but moreso due to a complete lack of trust in system maintenance and security, and a doubt that true conciousness can be achieved digitally. If it’s flesh and blood to flesh and blood though? I’d definitely try
You make a good point. We all might be being copied and deleted in our sleep every night, for all we know.
There’d be no way to know anything even happened to you as long as your memory was copied over to the new address with the rest of you. It would be just a gap in time to us, like a dreamless sleep.
Old post but…if it’s just memory, you’d lose ttauma and other ingrained coping mechanisms, no? There’s no brain to try and fight back against things. Just memories making you…you…? Or not you, if you oose some of your behaviors?
I would not be so sure. Maybe for a static web page this is possible. Outside of that I think people are kidding themselves. Writing code that might be stateless in isolation but relies on a database isn’t a stateless server imo, it’s just outsourcing state to another service.
With the SPA approach, you can have remarkably little state on the server because all the state associated with the user session lives on the frontend. The value of doing this obviously depends on the type application you’re making, but it can be a sensible approach in some cases.
Doesn’t SPA require polling the web server for more information? I feel like any website which retains information outside of the client device (like anything with a login page) would require state to be stored somewhere on the backend.
Typically, you just have a session cookie, and that doesn’t even need to be part of the app as auth can be handled by a separate proxy. The server just provides dumb data pull operations to the client in this setup, with all the session state living clientside.
That data has to be stored somewhere though. So you would still need some kind of database server to store it all or some other solution. That’s what I mean by outsourcing state. Data is still stored in the backend, just in a database rather than a web server.
There is data that gets persisted and needs to be stored somewhere, and then there’s the UI state that’s ephemeral. The amount of data that gets persisted tends to be small, and the logic around it is often trivial.
How am I being obtuse? You have been trying to trivialise the backend and now frontend as well. Backend isn’t just writing PHP or whatever, it’s setting up database servers, authentication proxies, and all that stuff. Not everything can be stateless.
I’m not trivializing anything here. What I actually said was that when all the UI logic lives on the frontend, then the backend just has dumb fetch and store operations along with an auth layer. In this scenario, the backend code can indeed be largely stateless. Specifically, it doesn’t care about the state of the user session or the UI. The only one trivializing things here is you by completely ignoring the nuance of what’s being explained to you.
The only nuances here seem to be: a) very simple websites need little state (but still aren’t stateless) and b) that you can move the state around to make something look stateless within a narrow view.
Evidently you don’t understand what people mean when they talk about stateless backend, so let me explain. The point there is regarding horizontal scaling. If your backend code is stateful then it has user context in memory, and requests for a particular user session have to be handled by the same instance of the service. With a stateless backend all the context lives on the client, and the requests can be handled by any instance on the backend. So now you can spin up as many instances of the service as you need, and you don’t need to care which one picks up the request. The fact that you might be persisting some data to the db in the process of handling the request is neither here nor there. Hope that helps you.
Yes that’s a stateless service but not a stateless backend. A backend to me is everything that doesn’t run on the client, including the database. Databases are not stateless, even distributed databases are not stateless. You can’t just spin up more databases without thinking about replication and consistency.
I’ve explained to you why the term exists, and why it matters. It refers specifically to application code in the context of horizontal scaling. Meanwhile, many popular databases do in fact allow you to do sharding in automated fashion. If you’re not aware of this, maybe time to learn a bit about databases.
Again. the goal is not to eliminate the statefullness of the whole stack. That’s just the straw man you keep arguing against. The goal is to remove context from the server. Once you get a bit more experience under your belt, you’ll understand why that’s useful.
The whole conversation was about backend being similar because you can write a stateless server. Have you forgotten? The issue here is a backend isn’t just one service, you can write a stateless service but you are in fact just moving the statefulness to the database server. The whole backend isn’t simpler than the front-end for that reason. It might be simpler for other reasons, though many popular websites need complex backends.
I am not arguing that a stateless service isn’t a useful concept. I get why people might want that. That’s not what this conversation is about. It’s about the backend vs frontend. Backend to me includes databases and other support services.
No, I have not forgotten. This whole conversation was me explaining to you the advantages of keeping the session context on the client. You are not moving statefulness to the database. The fact that you keep repeating this clearly demonstrates that you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
The statefulness lives on the client. Everything I said about the backend application also applies to the database itself. Any node in the db can pick up the work and store the value. The issue being solved is having everything tied to the state in a particular user session.
To explain it to you in a different way. There will be a certain amount of data that will need to be persisted regardless of the architecture. However, moving user state to the client means that the backend doesn’t have to worry about this. The fact that you’re having trouble grasping this really is incredible.
I don’t write web applications for a living and I especially don’t write front ends. I do have to ask though:
What information are you actually keeping in the front end or web server? Surely you don’t need any ephemeral state that isn’t already stored in the browser and/or for you like the URL or form details. Only thing I can think of is the session ID, and that’s normally a server side thing.
I mean I’ve written web sites where there is no JavaScript at all, and the server is stateless or close to it. It’s not a difficult thing to do even. All the actual information is in the database, the web server fetches it, embedds it into a HTML template, and sends it to the client. Client doesn’t store anything and neither does the server. Unless I really don’t understand what you mean by state. You might keep some of your server fetches data from another server using REST or SOAP but that’s only used once as well.
Well, I’ve been writing web apps for a living for the past 20 years or so, and I’ve written lots of full stack apps. There can be plenty of ephemeral state in a non-trivial UI. For example, I worked on a discharge summary app for a hospital at one time. The app had to aggregate data, such as patient demographics, medications, allergies, and so on from a bunch of different services. This data would need to be pulled gradually based on what the user was doing. All of the data that got pulled and entered by the user would represent the session state for the workflow. Maybe don’t trivialize something you admit having no experience with.
So you do include ephemeral state that’s a copy of database data? If we were including that then every non-static website has plenty of state, but so does every web server. Whatever definition you are using must be quite odd.
What kind of polling are we talking about? If you are talking about realtime data, SSE doesn’t solve that either. You need SSE or WebSocket for that (maybe even WebRTC). If what you mean is that every time the page is refreshed then the data is reloaded, it is no different than polling.
Sure, but that only gets you so far. I think it’s important to distinguish between document sites where the users mostly just views content, and actual applications like an email client or a calendar. The former can be easily handled with little to no frontend code, however the latter tend to need non trivial amount of UI state management.
That’s what saved me too but I’m still stuck with unpredictable crashes, 150GB of HDD / 8GB of RAM lost in the void and bullshit ads for copilot in the lock screen …
Drivers are still a shit show. The drivers in question have changed, but there’s still extremely common hardware with poor support. I know this is the hardware vendors fault but that doesn’t change my experience as a user – I need my hardware to work.
It’s still extremely fragmented. Yes, this is often a good thing because it let’s you pick the features you want but I’m not interested in comparing and configuring 14 different tiling window managers.
It’s still fragile outside of the terminal. I constantly see posts and comments about peoples OS becoming unbootable or show stopping issues they just can’t fix without hopping to another distro or nuking their install from orbit. The 18th most popular distro seems to be popular simply because it makes it easy to roll back fucked updates or sidegrades.
This stuff might be fine for people who love to tinker but I can’t afford to have my PC shit the bed when I need it for work and I’m not interested in having “chill and play some games” involuntarily replaced with “fix the bootloader”.
And I can’t help but feel like the “anybody who isn’t sucking off Linux must be bait” mentality ensures this is a pit the scene will never escape from.
There’s absolutely no chance you haven’t seen the posts describing these problems. You’re commenting on one right now
I have to do far more tinkering with Windows to make it usable than I do with Linux. With Linux I typically install it and then change one or two keyboard shortcuts (not even necessary, just a preference).
I wish Windows was as easy. I feel like in windows you always have to go onto powershell or the registry to fix something. Why can’t it just work?
And don’t get me started on how often you have to nuke your install when you run into issues (which, since this is windows we’re talking about, is often). Seriously, contact MS support about anything. Their ‘support’ is: “have you tried a system restore? Yeah? Ok then, reinstall Windows, bye.”
The drivers are awful and you have to search them all out individually rather than all just being automatically included. I’ve not installed a driver on Linux manually in a decade.
Installing software is a complicated minefield. Why can’t Windows just have a proper software centre?
I wonder if Windows will ever be as usable as Linux is. Because right now it’s not improving.
You’re the one coping lmao. Look if you want to spend more time diagnosing issues with your PC than using it, then Windows is a fantastic choice and I’m happy for you.
I guess that 4% market share is because it’s just so good. The Linux community couldn’t even pull that off without a multi-billion dollar corporation helping them with software compatibility and stability.
Feel free to keep making fun of Windows though – I haven’t made an operating system part of my personality so it doesn’t upset me in the slightest.
@PoliticalAgitator@TheGrandNagus Well, it's mostly because Linux is way newer to the computer scene than microsoft's OS for instance. When #linux started out, computers using msdos were already being shipped for over a decade, and so they were the de facto standard, and it takes time for people to switch to a better product if they are used to another one and have the ecosystem keeps them in (that's the main reason people keep buying overpriced apple products)
@PoliticalAgitator@TheGrandNagus On the contrary, Linux was already here when the need for supercomputers and servers appeared, and that's why most of them run on Linux.
4%? Linux has 6.3%+ on the desktop. Then there’s 6.5% unknown which likely includes a disproportionately high amount Linux systems too, what with Linux users being a lot more likely to obfuscate system information from trackers.
Then on mobile, Linux has 72%.
And Windows is popular because it came first and they have a monopoly. Once you have a monopoly, it’s easy to keep. Is Comcast so popular because it’s good, or is it because it’s the only real choice for a load of people?
Well you clearly have made your OS part of your personality, because here you are vehemently defending it and shitting on other OSes.
I don’t really care. If you somehow enjoy using Windows, despite the myriad of issues, then cool beans. Use it. I’m not really sure why you’re so insecure about it that you need to come here and tell us, though.
Don’t worry, I’m sure those statistics are just “bait” and it’s actually 99%
What? It’s 6.3%+. We don’t know the precise amount due to the high amount of “unknowns”, but 6.3% is the minimum assuming zero of the “unknown” configurations are Linux, which seems unlikely.
Then on mobile, Linux has 72%.
So it has far more traction when the “bait” things I mentioned don’t apply? Fuck, who’d have thought?
You can strawman all you want, the market share is 72%. End of discussion. “Nooo but that doesn’t countttt” isn’t an argument.
Vehemently defending it by saying nothing positive about it. The only reason I kept talking is because you were such a fuckwit in your reply.
You’ve been defending indirectly. We get it, you use Windows btw. Nobody cares.
You don’t think there’s some kind of clue in the post when I wished it was in a better state?
You spread misinformation and flew into a frenzied rage lol. You don’t want it to be in a better state, you just came here to post bait.
Oh, I get it now. You just find tiny threads and pull them as melodramatically as you can. It’s a hallmark of manipulative partners and untreated BPD that I should he seen sooner.
Minor criticism is turned into “this person must be a troll trying to bait us into anger” and even something you yourself described as “defending indirectly” became “vehemently defending” and of course I was in a “frenzied rage”, probably because I used the word “fuck”.
Then if that doesn’t work, resort to the usual lazy tricks. Take figurative speech literally, accuse people of logical fallacies that don’t apply, do a little bit of mind reading and then declare yourself the winner.
If I was actually a troll, I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction. You’re the worst ambassador for Linux I’ve ever seen.
I’m not your partner, though you probably wish I was.
You got angry and butthurt, started spreading misinformation and bait.
I’m not trying to convert you to Linux. Nobody cares whether you use it or not. Stick to your broken, complicated, and unstable OS.
I must be really interesting to talk to considering you won’t stop begging for my attention. Is that what this is? You’ve already alluded to me being like a partner. I’m not your partner and I don’t want to fuck you. Go use Tinder or something.
What? You didn’t know? They secretly exterminated 6 M russian citizens on a secret 4x4 lab buried deep in Mariupol! And if you need more prove, they are fighting against Russia, they are fascists!!!
Edit: so I figured I go investigate for myself and by “Ukraine” you mean random citizens involved in what was basically a civil war, the people in the building were using it as a fortress, and blockaded themselves inside, and by “people” you meant Russian separatist insurrectionists, who were firing from the building and throwing Molotov cocktails into the crowd below.
Ah yes, because there definitely wasn’t some other common characteristic to the (not only leftist, as you carefully avoided mentioning) parties that were banned
Something like, I don’t know, supporting the country actively invading Ukraine, perhaps?
I remember the day of php files outputting html to the browser… it was 95% as functional as the stuff written in react and node today and incredibly simple.
Heck, at my company, I still sneak in old-school HTML files when I can.
I am starting to come around if not to the horrible solutions then at least the shift in thinking that made people consider using those, over the old-school approach.
Back then, the internet was this cool new thing. Fast-forward to today, and all those old pages with broken links, outdated information, and outdated presentation of information, can be problematic. e.g., should a site show an email address, or a phone number, or will doing so allow it to be spammed by bots? (except: that will happen anyway, no matter what, and why prevent people who have legitimate needs to find information?)
Back then, people had actual attention spans, and finding new information was cool, so when people saw it, they gobbled it up and relished the chance to do so. Fast-forward to today though, and there is so much more information (& unfortunately misinformation, plus active disinformation too) than could ever hope to be read, much less absorbed and/or retained, that the default is to skim or skip rather than actually “read”, e.g. a ToS/ToC that is mandatory to continue with a service that you use literally daily.
So, I am not advocating for e.g. CSS, or React/Angular, etc., but I at least see why people were considering those options, b/c there were problems with the old approach too.
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