Because that’s the purpose of a posermobile, which the vast majority of pickup trucks are.

Hot take: It’s no stupider than any other pickup truck, and at least it stands out. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fugly as hell, but that’s still better than being indistinguishable from every other vehicle in its class.

Yup. It’s incredibly convenient, I have no idea why people stopped using it. I follow a bunch of youtube channels, webcomics, podcasts, blogs, and apps in development. If there’s some way other than RSS to have all those updates show up on a single page, I don’t know it.

To flip it, aren’t they life creating machines as much as murder machines?

Yes, but having a baby doesn’t exculpate you of murder. It doesn’t cancel out.

If a person is cloned by a transporter there are two of that person

Yes, thank you! Finally! That’s what I’ve been trying to explain this entire time!

Well you can fuck yourself if it pleases.

That’s not very nice, and it makes me sad that you resort to insults rather than more sincere arguments in the face of criticism. And just when we were getting somewhere. Oh well, have a nice day.

I could dispute that

Yeah, well, in Strange New Worlds the doctor’s daughter isn’t even aware she’s being put through a transporter until he tells her, so… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (also, spoiler warning)

starts up again, indistinguishable from before

It is distinguishable by its history, which is known. Understanding that two things that are identical are still two different things and not the same thing seems like a very basic cognitive ability developed pretty early in childhood, and I should probably remember what the technical term for it is, I’m sure there is one. It’s also universally understood and accepted that genuine things are more valuable than their replicas, even if the replicas are so good that their lack of documented history is the only thing that distinguishes them from their genuine models. (This is why genuine antiques with known provenance are far more expensive than even perfect fakes.) As such, I find it very difficult to believe you’re arguing in good faith here.

with every right to call itself “me”.

Oh really? Okay, another thought experiment: Let’s say someone creates a perfect clone of you. Does that clone now have rights to your property? Is it okay if he/she sleeps with your spouse?

I would love my children if they suddenly were twins.

But would you be okay with your child being taken away and replaced with a duplicate? If you’re being honest, you should be. Nothing’s changed from your point of view, it’s the same person. Right?

If I copy information from one substrate to another, and do so with no changes, I don’t have any new information.

But you have a different instance of it. If there were no distinction, copyright wouldn’t exist.

The pattern buffer serves the same function of redundancy.

No, because people are not conscious in the pattern buffer.

The pattern of synapse connections firing is what thinks it’s “you” and the transport duly preserves that pattern.

Yes, but consciousness is not a pattern, it’s an activity, and that activity gets interrupted. Saying that the consciousness continues is like saying that an aircraft that made a flight, landed, and then made another flight really only made one continuous flight. It’s the activity that we’re talking about, and the interruption divides that activity into two distinct instances, even though it’s the same object performing them.

If a loved one took a transporter trip I’d love them just the same when they got back though.

That’s not what I asked. The transporter destroys the original person, which makes it easy to pretend that the clone is that person. The point of my question is that you know that the original is still around somewhere out there. So I ask again: Would you be okay with your loved one being replaced by a perfect clone that looks and acts exactly the same, identical down to the last atom, while knowing that the original still exists elsewhere? Or would you consider that new version to be an impostor?

how does one know that the duplicate doesn’t somehow inherit the original consciousness, and some new one with the memories and personality of it doesn’t get immediately generated in the original body?

Consciousness is brain activity. New brain = new activity = new consciousness.

Yup, pretty much. It’s a shame Star Trek recognizes and points out this problem but then chickens out of it actually having any consequences.

If a consciousness thinks it’s continuous that consciousness is continuous.

No, it’s simply mistaken.

The substrate your consciousness dances on also changes all the time. Molecules arranged around the galaxy or cells dying and being replaced pose the exact same quandary, and the solution to both would seem to be “who cares”?

The difference is that molecules and cells don’t all disappear at once. Consciousness is brain activity, and the brain has redundancy that allows that activity to continue uninterrupted even while small parts are being swapped out. When you destroy the whole thing, though, the activity stops.

The arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” goes in, the arrangement of cells and neurons known as “You” comes out.

Would you be okay with your child (or some other loved one) being forcibly taken away and replaced with a perfect clone? If what you’re saying is true, you should be, since according to you they’re not just a copy, they’re literally the same person.

Easy, build the clone without destroying the original, then test if they share perceptions and memories. Show one a playing card and ask the other what card it was or something. Proving that two people don’t have the same consciousness is pretty trivial, and I don’t know of any philosophical schools that would dispute that.

Basically all of NetHack, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the fact that the devs foresee things that don’t even exist in the game. For example, if you polymorph yourself into a monster that can eat metal and then eat a trident, you get a humorous message referencing Trident bubble gum. A similar message exists for when you eat a piece of flint (referencing the Flintstones, naturally), despite the fact that there are no monsters in the game that can eat rocks. In other words, that message can never be seen in the vanilla version of the game, but the devs prepared it anyway just in case you mod such a monster in.

Also, Vane.

Frontier: Elite 2 had it in 1993. There really is no excuse at this point.

Dang, this is a disappointing read. This might be an unpopular take, but I have been steadily losing respect for FromSoft over the years due to them essentially following the same path as Bethesda - they used to make varied games until one of them randomly became very successful, and from that point on they’ve just been remaking that one game over and over with slightly different coats of paint. I was hoping they’d break out of that pattern with AC6 and do something original for a change, although I was also keenly aware there was a risk that, being the sixth game in the series, it would be just another AC. The fact that it’s apparently just another Souls is somehow even worse.

two decades is enough to capture Skyrim and Fallout 3.

So a decent but by no means amazing game and a complete turd? Not really helping your case here very much, IMO. The last truly great game Bethesda made was Morrowind, and I will die on this hill.

Experience. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me, uh, you can’t get fooled again!

Hyping up old features as if they’re groundbreaking is a proud Bethesda tradition. I still remember laughing at their pre-release hype around the Radiant quest randomizer in Skyrim, which is virtually identical to the quest randomizer that Daggerfall had been built around fifteen years prior.

It seems like BG3 is getting more attention than all of Larian’s previous games combined (and maybe all of Obsidian’s recent crpgs as well).

Legendary brand name which the game actually lives up to.