I can’t speak to the moral side, but it’s worth noting that from a privacy perspective the major cloud providers basically don’t want to be able to interact with your data.

I work as a cloud engineer and regularly engage with support from Google and Amazon and in general they can only see stuff like metadata and resource configuration, as well as the raw hardware health for your resources. For anything further generally you’re going to have to explicitly provide information, share your screen, etc.

Just wanted to clear up that tidbit. Again, doesn’t help with any moral objections you may have though.

I, too, wish to be a sentient chainsaw.

That would be such a cool prospect, but we’re going to need to accelerate our space program quite a bit if we’re going to want to turn people into von Neumann probes.

You’re not entirely wrong, there. That being said, such a thing kind of exists now, in that if you can’t pay your rent or mortgage you lose your home. Obviously not the same thing as one denies your right to existence, but it’s not too dissimilar.

It’s a complex topic though and I think eventually we’re going to need to tackle it.

I have half an answer for it, which is that those people who are uploaded could by working just as they do today. There are plenty of pitfalls for that though, like what if someone gets laid off. Or what if that person did manual labor like construction? Kind of hard to do that if you only have a digital presence.

You should be able to punch this info into the AWS cost calculator and see this info, right? I work with AWS on a daily basis for my day job and regularly have to pull these estimates for upcoming projects. Granted, these would be estimates.

As for current costs, generally AWS lags by a couple hours to a day before costs show up in cost explorer, so not seeing them immediately isn’t too surprising.

Oh yeah, forgot about that. I’m grandfathered into the lifetime too. Good point!

I’ve always been a fan of Pocket Casts personally.

So my employer has been pretty cool about the whole return to office thing. We all had collectively agreed that the vast majority of our jobs could be done remotely. Unless the position absolutely required a physical presence in the office, such as running cables or certain leadership positions, we all were given the option to be permanent work from home.

You got any tutorials for that? I’ve been interested in setting something like that up for my own media library but just haven’t gotten around to it. Might make for a fun weekend project.

You and I might be music brethren. Think that about sums up my year in music.

No. It’s the home of SirenHead.

Yeah, if there’s an atoptics (I think that’s the word) community, they’d be all over that!

I haven’t seen or spoken with my siblings in several years. I was always the black sheep among my sibling group and when my parents divorced, it basically just made it that much more concrete.

Personally I don’t regret it, though every now and then I wonder how they’re getting on with life.

I like to think I’ve gotten better at my music production skills. Not useful necessarily, but enjoyable.