Straight out in the first book Culture is shown as the bad guy, civilization that is not alive and has to be destroyed. It wins eventually but the point stands: Culture kind of like the Borg, absorbing humanoid species and growing without limits.

No, not really. Very intentionally by Banks, we see the Culture through the eyes of Bora in the first book. Bora hates the Culture, for his own ideological reasons. He believes that the Culture makes people soft and complacent and lacking agency, but we’re shown in the book how he’s wrong.

Further, he allies with the Idirans - a strictly worse civilization: brutal, imperialist, religious zealots who squash the civilizations they capture below their feet, breeding and dumbing them down to serve them.

The Culture is absolutely nothing like the Borg. The Borg forcefully concquer unwilling participants and suppress their individuality to force them into essentially slave labor.

The Culture grows by the merit of people wanting to join it. No-one is forced to. Their ideals are just something resonating with people. Individuals’ needs are fully taken care of, but in complete opposite of the Borg, it’s to enable each member to fully flourish and live their life to their own aspirations, free from material desperations.

I’m sorry, but what you originally wrote is exactly something that would come out of Bora’s mouth, and is just as wrong.

(Btw Banks has talked about how he wanted to first show the Culture through the lens of an enemy, and then dismantle that distorted view.)

No other civilization relies on AI as much. In Hydrogen Sonata you have good description of other civilization that uses digital constructs that are still based on humans, not pure AI. There’s clear distinction between AI controlled Culture and other civilizations. Why other civilizations don’t use AI as much? Because they don’t want be controlled by it.

True, but again, this is something that other civs say about the Culture, not literal reality. Humans, drones and Minds are not equally powerful, sure, not even close; but that there’s no (systemic! Stories sometimes focus on rogue individuals, be they human or machine!) abuse of this, that the Culture is as equitable as can reasonably be imagined, is one of its strengths.

It’s clear AI likes to use people so it manipulates them to do what it wants. Player of Games is clear example of that. In State of the Art AI straight out assassinates a guy who doesn’t want to follow its orders.

Yes, somewhat. The stories intentionally focus on the fringes of the Culture. (Plus, Gurgeh actively decides that he WANTS to get into Contact/SC, knowing that this sort of thing happens, and then is used as a pawn). Regarding the killings: this is part of accepting machine and human equality. If you would bind these superhuman Minds via Three Laws of Robotics or the like, then suddenly we have a class of oppressed machine beings.

I think the main point here is: we focus on the interesting bits and outliers (as Banks himself said), and as I tried to describe above, this issue is not systemic. We see, what, 5 cases like this? In a galaxy of trillions.

In State of the Art Culture is also shows as sterile and boring. Everyone behaves because they don’t have a choice, their actions are meaningless, they don’t really control or anything or advance the civilization.

Somewhat true, but again: you’re mixing what a character expresses about their perception with literal reality. A character, for that matter, who already was on the fringe of the fringens, being an SC agent. It’s also heavily implied that he simply romanticizes earth. Earth is backwater, exciting, chaotic; but if he really just wanted “non-stagnant”, he could have kept his relative safety and went into any of the non-Culture, but alien-acquainted civs.

And heavy, HEAVY disagree on the Culture being meaningless: this even is discussed in the books themselves! The Culture does, from time to time, debate its right to exist; why not sublime? And the answer is, because they’re doing measurable good.

We also see the culture change pretty drastically between, say, Consider Phlebas and Player of Games.

People have more of a sentimental value for AI. It does recognize human as intelligent the same way we recognize that animals are alive. People are sure taken care of but everything is run by AI. People are just pets.

Once again, this is a sentiment expressed by some characters, not literal reality. However, I actually think it’s somewhat close to true. At least in the following sense:

If Minds would stop caring about humanity tomorrow, then Culture citizens would be fucked, the same way your dog would be fucked if you stopped feeding it tomorrow.

However, where the analogy breaks down is that Minds don’t cage, neuter, steal from the wild, or restrict humans and drones. They took over production, transport and so on not because they wanted to keep humans in check, but because to them it’s literally no bother; so why not? Seems like a nice thing to do! I.e. its altruism, and without strings attached.

Note also that the “humans are just pets” argument is expressed multiple times by characters in a derisive way, but never shown to be the truth, and arguably the books show how and why it’s wrong.

Banks and his characters do examine the Culture from various, critical perspectives, which is why I’m so confident to say: the Culture is a Utopia.

(One we’ll never reach.)

No, I’m really happy with fish in general and use its syntax. The only times are things like e.g. a coworker sending me a 3-line script and then not being able to just copy, paste, enter.

Funny, I also went from packer to lazy.nvim, but then hopped off and redid my config in nix. Hadn’t actually heard about the default package manager. That seems like a good thing for the ecosystem!

Okay, you know what… That’s actually better than what I said. Defeat acknowledged.

(However, it still seems a bit silly to me. name="value" will prompt you to enter set name "value", with your exact name/value prefilled. As far as I know, it really is just syntax substitution; or am I wrong here? Are there semantic differences that can’t be translated?)

I’ll second Pocket-ID.

I originally had Authentik setup. It worked well enough. However, their packaging constantly broke and no-one seemed to care.

Switched to Pocket-ID and won’t be looking back. Passkey-based OAuth was all I wanted anyways. (Also, the logins themselves are noticeably faster!)

find modules/nixvim/ -name "*.nix" -type f -exec cat {} + | wc -l
3890

I’d say I’ve spent enough time configuring neovim 😄

(Btw, highly recommend configuring neovim through nixvim if you’re already using nix. Incredibly stable. I had to fix one plugin or another all the time with plain nvim. Now, literally never. Plus, nix run github:<username>/<repo>#nvim on any nix-enabled system, and get dropped into your exact config, keybinds, theme, plugins and all. I’ve set it up to expose language-enabled variants by appending e.g. .go or .python to that command.)

(Sorry my comments tend to go off-topic)

That analogy only holds if they cook the burger for you, hold it in front of you, and go “we don’t make this”, then throwing it out

I just wish fish would accept standard bash syntax in addition.

Like, if you can warn me that “this is not how we set vars in fish, do this instead!” then you could also just, you know, do it.

I mean… Maybe. But she had two opportunities to do so.

I’m not angry at her in any way, I should clarify. If I was in the same situation? Low paying job, potential for significant additional pay for no extra work? Hard to say no to that.

According to my card statement, Le Crobag (in the Cologne main station).

Oh god, here in Germany, too. Was at a chain bakery in Cologne station a couple of weeks ago, bought something for like 3€. The employee told me “choose on the screen and place your card”, I just automatically placed my card. Nothing happens. “Choose on the screen”.

Oh.

Do I want to tip 15, 25, or 30% for the literally 5 seconds of service I got?

Of course didn’t tip, because wtf.

However, I’m sure in her eyes I was being an asshole. And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Every party is incentivized to push for this model.

• payment terminal makers increase the amount of fees they collect
• employees get lured with the promise of making more money
• employers get lured with the idea of being able to reduce expenses wages eventually

(This wasn’t the first time btw, just the most egregious one I’ve encountered)

Temperatures in my apartment never fell below 32C for a full week straight, including over night with all windows open.

Burden of proof is on Astrology claiming to be real.

• AI bad
• Astrology 100% superstitious bullshit

Yeah. Out of curiosity though, how far did you get into it?

(Not that it gets better in this regard or anything)

Well, no. Hopefully NOT the same shit.

Yeah, like 3-4x/week.

This includes things like train tickets, because I refuse to have to have my phone with me.

Sheet music, shopping list, letters to doctors/government offices/…

Are you having a stroke

!pferdesindkacke@feddit.org

I feel like one could legitimately run on this platform at this point.