A million-to-one chance happens 9 times out of 10.

For me it’s definitely an RP choice. I don’t always choose one or the other, but in games that give character creation options I tend to go for a quick “non-canon” play test to get a feel for the game and setting and get an idea of how I want to play it. Then I start a new file and create a character to fit that. Sometimes I go for a lithe rogue or a buff fighter, and the gender usually depends on either how I’m feeling or possible story/world stuff that makes it fit better, or sometimes just something interesting. Like in early Cyberpunk there was a glitch where you could start with a male character, then switch some settings and you’d get the female options but it would keep the original genitalia, so I played through as a trans woman because it wasn’t something I’d done before and it was interesting and fit well into the setting. It didn’t change anything in the game and I kept my character clothed so you never saw her hanging dong. But then I hit the story with the trans woman NPC and my V found a friend who they could connect with a little better. It was a fun role-play opportunity and I felt like it helped my connect to the game and the world even better when my avatar wasn’t just a puppet I used to interact with the game. Even in games like the Witcher where you’re given a named character, my Geralt always developed his own personality. I once accidentally sold all my boots and didn’t realize for a few days that he was running around without shoes. When I noticed it immediately became part of his personality that he doesn’t wear shoes. He like feeling the grass when he fights and he’s more connected with nature. It kinda fit with the default personality but I leaned heavy into the more nature-focused choices where possible and it changed how I played.

Though I’m probably not an average case-study. I tend to eschew gender norms while identifying as a straight cis guy. I wear what I want, paint my nails or wear makeup if I’m feeling it. And I do lean heavy into the single player RPG games and avoid MOBAs or shooters. I think I’ve mostly just been playing DnD in all my video games, lol.

Speaking of DnD, my BG3 playthrough started with a female Drow monk because I haven’t played any of that in DnD before, but as I played I knew I wanted a rogue so I restarted and as I built it I started with a human male but ended up with a Gith male rogue because I liked the look a bit more for it and knowing what little I did about the Gith in the opening it would be fun RP. But in my head, he’s not from a creche but was lost as a small Gith and raised in some small village by human parents. So he doesn’t fit in with the Gith he meets but also faces the fear that most people in the world experience when they see him. It just adds so much more depth to the game when they have their own personality.

I mean, I’m not arguing anything other than your false equivalent. I’m sure, at some point, we’ll be able to mimic how the human brain actually works, not just imitate the results. But we’re not even close right now. Not in the same ball park. Not in the same tri-state area. We still don’t really understand how it does what it does completely. We know some of the processes, and understand that’s it’s chemicals interacting with the meat in some way, but it’s still mostly kinda just weird stuff our body does. We’re mostly just pointing at areas that light up with activity when we do a thing and saying “yep, that’s the general area that’s doing stuff.”

And that’s just understanding it, let alone figuring out how to imitate it with technology. And none of those parts of the brain work independently. They’re spread out and they overlap and exchange and change information constantly, all with chemicals. Getting a computer to mimic the outcome is still something we’re far from, but without the same processes, its not really gonna come out the same. We’ve got just… so long to go before we actually get close to simulating a human brain.

And just for fun, I do think this line of yours is funny:

The idea that the human brain is special is ludicrous and completely without evidence

Again, I wasn’t saying anything of any sort, and I’m still not really taking any stance beyond “that shits complicated and we’re not there yet.” But you’re supposing that a “synthetic implementation can achieve the same thing.” … without supporting evidence. This argument was clearly meant for someone else, but it’s not really fair to demand evidence from someone for their claim when you don’t support your own. Jumping to the conclusion that something is impossible is the same as assuming it’s definitely possible. You don’t know that. I don’t know that. No one really knows that until it’s done.

You’re equating creativity to the soul. They’re not the same thing. But we can definitely look at the brain and see what parts light up when perform creative tasks.

While right now you need to put children and teenagers through years of rigorous training and expose them to immense stress and pressure so most of them break

Uh… I don’t think that’s a necessary part of the process to making k-pop, or any kind of music. Industry people may think it’s critical to making themselves shit-loads of money, but it’s not important for the creation music or even selling the music.

Where’s your data that, “all else being equal, office-based work IS better”? I mean, I don’t have data that says otherwise, but I know the company I work for as well as higher-ups at other companies I’ve talked to noticed right out the gate that productivity went up when they went work from home. The same work needs to be done, and it gets done. If it doesn’t, fire them. I have trouble seeing how the location the worker is in matters, all things being equal.

You’ve got some good points there, but it feels a little naive of nuance in parts.

Like, if these are natural rights, presumably this still counted before humans banded together to form the first societies. Before, even, we were small roving migratory groups that only just managed to climb out of the trees. humans, as they were, are basically animals at that point, right? I mean, we’re still animals, but you know what I mean. So we still have those rights? What makes us different than the other animals (or even other ape descendants) that we see as food? As a species, we were evolved to eat meat, which requires killing something else that presumably has these same rights that we have to violate to enforce our own right to life. Or did natural rights come later, when we were “better” and “more advanced” than the animals we hunted? Does that mean we get these rights when we reach a certain point in self-awareness?

It’s tough to argue with the base arguments you present, and I don’t disagree with them… but they can be argued against. Like your slavery argument. It goes against these natural rights that we have always had, yet we started taking our first steps toward stopping it, like, 600 years ago? Slavery predates writing. As far as we know, mankind was enslaving other people as far as we can track, and definitely hundreds, if not thousands of years before. So were they not aware of these natural rights or just didn’t care?

It sounds like you’re saying these are natural rights that everyone has because it feels right to you dues to the society you grew up in that appreciated these rights. They have to come from somewhere to be natural but only really count for some living things and not others.

Personally, I don’t believe in natural rights. We’re animals that grew opposable thumbs and learned to make tools. Human rights come about only because we live together in societies. In a way that sounds contradictory, we formed groups and gained rights among those other humans, and in the same instant traded some of those away for that group to function. Rights have to come from somewhere. Without groups agreeing on what those rights are, then the decider of rights is whoever is strongest. Might makes right started to decline only because we got into groups large enough to defend against outside forces, and even then it was only within the group in which those rights existed. Rights themselves are part of the social contract we all participate in when we exist in society and universal human rights is a relatively recent advancement, and we definitely haven’t come to a consensus as to what they all definitely are. But if society breaks down, those rights definitely disappear overnight. But I’ve always been the kind of person who needs reasons to believe a thing and have sound reasons to believe it.

I’m with you on right to life, and bodily autonomy are things that all humans should have. I think we just differ in their origin and universality.

So who decides what rights are natural ones and which ones need a government to enforce? And what are the natural rights? Not just that you believe it to be so, but why? And what you use to make that decision.

Forgive me, but I’ve been doing a lot of research lately on natural rights and their protections, limits, and origins. I’ve been reading a lot of philosophy on it and it’s extremely interesting. I’m genuinely curious how people come to these conclusions and I love hearing different viewpoints.

So where do these rights come from, if not the laws? I wonder if you may be taking free speech as a right as a given because of the time you grew up in. You speak of it as an absolute, but where does that belief come from? You say “rights” as if they’re something enshrined in our souls by a god, but like, how do you know that? Where does this information come from?

This is purely a philosophical question. I’m on the free speech wagon here. But realistically, Who gets to decide what’s actually an inalienable right that everyone has vs. rights that are encoded in laws?

That might be due to our heavy government surveillance system. Remember, it wasn’t that long ago that a militia was arrested before they could carry out their plan to kidnap the governor of Michigan. The year before that a Coast Guard lieutenant was arrested before he could kill journalists and Democrat politicians. There was that nutjob who took a hammer to Pelosi’s husband’s head (Didn’t even catch that one in time!) There’s tons of attempts to assassinate presidents. Kinda feels pretty par for the course.

But the original point, I think, was that it’s kinda weird for someone to say it’s not surprising for it to happen in Mexico, as if it’s some third world country run like New York in Escape from New York while pretending it doesn’t happen in the US frequently. The US is just a bigger police state so they catch most of them before anyone dies. The FBI has plants in militias and groups like them all over the country specifically to catch this kind of thing. Most governments just can’t afford that kind of manpower. The US is not special or really that much safer, and comments normalizing this kind of thing for Mexico is why anyone even made that argument. It’s definitely shitty, and probably racist to think that it’s reasonable, when it’s in Mexico, people say "Eh it happens.”

I can’t imagine them using V again. Geralt was a character in his own right that had character traits that were handed over to you to play with. The world was built for Geralt to be in. V was built as a blank slate character to insert yourself into. There’s no reason to keep them. I’m pretty sure they only gave the character a name so everyone else in the game could have voice lines for everything and refer to the character by name. It was an attempt to make it a smoother experience, but really, V was a faceless avatar for the player no different to the Fallout games. But because they did the thing with the name it’s seamless and everyone sees V as a character, but they’re all seeing them as a different character based on how they played. It was pretty clever and I’m sure they’ll do it again.

In the Witcher 3 they had a thing where if you’d played the previous game on the same system and the game file was still there you could allow it to read that file and use decisions you made there to inform the new game. Now, I never got around to finishing Cyberpunk and don’t know what the different endings are, so I don’t know how much of a difference it would be, but if they’ve done that before they could do something similar here. Like, the world and story are the same, but any reference to the past includes the choice you made. And if you don’t have a save file, they just pick the one the developers like most probably.

What do you think the reasons are?

The stated purpose of the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 is to maintain sanctions on Cuba as long as the Cuban government refuses to move toward “democratization and greater respect for human rights.” ^cite

If that was actually true, half the countries the US trades with should be embargoed. Saudi Arabia, a monarchy?

U.S. goods and services trade with Saudi Arabia totaled an estimated $46.6 billion in 2022. Exports were $21.6 billion; imports were $24.9 billion. The U.S. goods and services trade deficit with Saudi Arabia was $3.3 billion in 2022. ^cite

Let’s not lie to ourselves, it’s always been about the Communism Boogie man. But if you want to cultivate capitalism in a country, cutting off the ability for free trade outside that country isn’t the way to do it. America’s influence stops other countries from trading there as well so they have no option but to rely on a government focused economic system as they’re the only ones with the ability to really participate in any market elsewhere. I agree that tankies can go fuck themselves, but you’re letting 60 year old propaganda get to you. The rest of the world has no problem with Cuba and it’s getting weirder and weirder that the US continues these unreasonable sanctions like a middle school bully holding a grudge well into middle-age. I can only assume you’re so sure because it’s just always been that way and you assume it’s for a good reason.

Why do people always do that? I agree it would be a good move, but because smoking is unhealthy and addictive and it’s existence in our society makes it collectively worse. But here I keep seeing people just say they’re glad because they think cigarettes are icky.

So I work with a lot of people from a variety of countries. Some of those countries have really bad governments. When we joke about each other’s countries, it’s about the governments. I remember this guy who used to work with me from the Philippines. It was near the beginning of lockdowns and just after Duterte was elected. He made fun of the shit Trump was saying and doing, and I got to joke that they had their own Trump(maybe worse) coming. Australian co-workers laugh along when we joke about their shit politicians.

What we don’t do is joke about the people or the culture. That’s shitty. All those people are just as much victims of their own circumstances as we all are of our own. But we’re adults who work with each other every day and it’s easy to remember that we’re all real people. The internet however…

I haven’t noticed Americans getting upset when people criticize shitty government policies or decisions. At least not from people who aren’t boot-lickers from jump. The problem is when people make fun of American stereotypes. Americans are fat and loud and whatever. Like, if all you heard was people talking about Canadians being stuck up about needing things written in French or topped with poutine, it would probably get old, right? “Go cry at your Tim Horton’s and take your polar bear for a walk.” (okay, so I had to google Canadian stereotypes and it’s a short list.)

I don’t like America’s gun culture either. And I hate when it comes up there’s always someone who comes in and preaches the gospel of the 2nd amendment. It also doesn’t feel great when people make that generalization about me. This thread is full of people saying Americans are dumb and racist. That’s just shitty behavior that no one bats an eye at because it’s normal to make those jokes. If I started making comments about like, French people smelling bad or (insert some other offensive thing. I don’t keep track of bad stereotypes and I’m done googling it) then that would also be bad and it’s a thing I think we should start calling out across the board.

Have you ever watched a movie? Were you blown away by all the execs they added in the credits and assumed they must have had thousands of others under them not mentioned? Or do you not typically assume every other industry follows the same standard as yours?

What you said is akin to me saying “Why are they expecting their name on things? The restaurant I work at doesn’t put my name on the menu when I’m cooking that night.”

It’s a different industry and I would be foolish to assume the standards in mine definitely should translate to others, and then confidently comment publicly about it.

“It’s a very true dichotomy!”

Proceeds to make up an imagined scenario with a ridiculous fake name to prove it’s reality.

Go crazy?

My poor understanding of this situation is that, of the team working on it, one guy was like “We need to hold off on publishing until we’re 100% sure.” Then another guy was like “lol, gonna publish anyway and leave you off the paper.” The hesitant guy gets wind and rushes to publish (with everyone included) so as to at least be included in the process.

Also, there’s a thing about the first published one only had 3 people on it, making it eligible for a Nobel, but more than that does not qualify.

But overall, I agree! It’s not like it being publicized stops them from working on it. They will still be working on it, and it’s definitely a step towards progress. Technological process tends to be lots of small improvements to the same system over time until someone comes up with a huge leap. Then the process begins again by constantly improving on that new technology. Hopefully, this is that next huge leap in energy.

Plus, with their process so far published, more people are able to work on it without starting from scratch. It would suck for the original scientists, but be a net good overall if the early publication led to someone else being able to move farther then them because they now have access to it.

Great deal. You get 10 hours pay, they get perpetual use of your likeness for all eternity and you don’t have to work ever again! Great deal for somebody.