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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • It wouldn’t occur to me to broadcast this to others on the internet, especially with personal details, even for a random solicitor, let alone a family member, let alone my own child.

    And since the kid didn’t anticipate the public ridicule, it may very well be the first time they ever asked for this kind of help. What an awful way to learn your parent considers you little more than an expendable prop in their social life.

    In nature, some species prey upon their young. We usually understand this as an evolutionary mechanism, to ensure only the strongest offspring survive. With that in mind, if your parent behaves like this, consider that they may no longer be your caregiver, and it may be time for you to decide what it takes to be the offspring that survives.


  • We can satisfy this curiosity with a fair amount of scientific evidence.

    Of course, most regions of the brain are so densely and variably interconnected that the technical difficulty of “replacing parts” precedes the ethical consideration by many, many years. But we do have a great deal of evidence for how our subjective sense of self is affected by “losing/removing parts” of the brain. Patients are often unaware of change unless evidence for it is overwhelming, and even then are adept at healing/reconciling instinctively. It appears that this is just something brains have evolved to do.

    So while the technology (and sheer artistry) required to match and “stitch” these networks is quite staggering, basically magic, it is theoretically possible that a patient could have every part replaced without recognizing any continuity errors in the chimeric stages, until one day they wake up as a completely different person.






  • Habitually using your own machine for non-work tasks often lets you keep certain records of the research process which begat the work, even while the client/employer owns the work itself through SLA/NDA/AOI. This typically includes records contributing to general “personal expertise,” such as query history, bookmarks, generalized notes, and other non-proprietary information.

    It also lends to an overall impression of professional sprezzatura when the client can only see a history of master strokes, without the nitty-gritty details of your autodidactic effort.