I think you and the previous comment are talking about different types of drones- the smaller commercial quadcopters used in the Russia-Ukraine conflict can be shot down with shotguns fairly effectively.
Both sides have been seen with one member of a squad carrying around an issued shotgun in an anti-drone role- the fact that it shoots pellets in a cone is precisely why it's so effective. Skeet shooting is a great example of how relatively small fast moving targets can be hit consistently at range with a shotgun and they are usually using much smaller/lighter pellets with poorer velocity/range, I would assume the loads used in an anti-drone role are bigger.
I feel like bigger studios have definitely been playing it safer in the last 10-15 years. You used to see a lot more unorthodox ideas and mechanics or just flat out bizarre premises that I'm sometimes baffled even got the green light to go ahead. Today for the most part that kind of daring seems mostly relegated to the indie space. Everyone else looks for the safest option they hope will sell.
I think a large amount of AI skeptics are just tired. I'm what you would call in the AI skeptic camp and the most I'll contribute to in person conversations anymore is feigned indifference towards the topic or something along the lines of "Oh, I haven't really been keeping up with AI news lately."
For me personally (and maybe for others as well?) there's two parts to this. The first is that it's exhausting to constantly be pulled into "debates" with staunch pro-AI supporters who can't accept that you have some reason to be against it or agree to disagree and move on from the conversation. The second is that I've noticed that even mild anti-AI sentiment lately seems to make people (especially tech people) see and treat you as an anti-science luddite or conspiracy theorist.
It's easier to just pretend I don't care or that I'm not interested in public than be a skeptic.
This is always how it is, though. People would get straight up in your face if you told them that the Apple Vision Pro wasn't going to take over the world. People would get straight up in your face if you told them 3D TV was a fad. People would straight get up in your face if you told them there are alternatives to React. People once thought Visual Basic was going to end programming as we knew it. People once thought UML to code (Rational Rose) was going to end programming as we know it.
There are certain types of people who will always do this - and think they're right.
Product/tech fanboyism has always existed, sure, not going to argue that point.
But I don't remember it ever being getting anywhere near as heated or pushed in real life conversations. That kind of borderline religious fanaticism mostly lived in online spaces.
Wild boar and javelina (though it's a different species) both make some great breakfast sausage. I tend to like game meat as a breakfast meat in general.
The biggest thing I miss about smoking myself and smoking being common and prevalent in general is the social aspect (you immediately both have at least one thing in common and 5 minutes of free captive time with each other)
Stepping outside for a smoke on the job, at parties, while out running errands, in foreign countries as a tourist, to kill time outside an appointment waiting room, etc. was a guaranteed way to strike up an unexpected conversation with all manners of characters from all walks and levels of life that I wouldn't have had the chance (or courage or social skills I suppose) to do otherwise.
Some of the most entertaining or thought provoking conversations with strangers in my life have been a result of this. Approaching random people busy with their random lives outside of a smoking area feels intimidating and often doesn't seem to have the same result (which makes sense- someone smoking is actively not busy)
And in the office, it always felt to me like the smoking areas were the only place you could get real, no bullshit answers from people across teams/divisions "off the record" about actual deadlines/timelines etc.
I've heard people say something to the effect of, just go hang out in a smoke spot and don't actually smoke to get the same perks but as an ex-smoker if I saw a non-smoker doing this I would definitely feel a bit weird about it / less open towards them.
I feel like just about everyone knows of (through friends/family/community) or has experienced some form of life changing harassment, assault, blackmailing, scamming, or otherwise malicious activities that have happened over social media / online platforms and the perpetrators are rarely if ever caught or punished. And it feels like thanks to the AI boom these problems are only going to get significantly worse over the next decade or so, maybe longer, thanks to the ability for bad actors to easily scale their efforts and create more realistic lies/threats/setups using AI tools to accomplish what they might not have had the skills to do beforehand.
I have little doubt that people looking back in the future on the first few decades of widespread internet usage and adoption without guardrails in place will see it as a huge moral failure on society's part. We've created a system that has enabled predators, scammers, and the like all over the world to cause untold amounts of harm to victims they would otherwise never have encountered, and get away with criminal behavior that, lacking a physical out in the open component isn't seen or caught by anyone until the damage is already done.
Instead of slowing down or reflecting on if a 24/7 deluge of social media / entertainment / bullshit novelties are really worth the harm companies are just ramping up the potential for future danger in the name of profit with all these new AI tools for "innocent" purposes.
>There are nonlethal ways of defending oneself or others, too, btw. Learn martial arts, knock them out, use a taser if you have too, then grab your kid and run. None of that requires shooting them.
Agree with the general sentiments of your post. A lot of pro self-defense talks online read like thinly veiled "bad ass" fan fiction where someone salivates over the idea of killing someone in a legal manner that they face no consequences for.
But I don't think this last part is very realistic and possibly even very dangerous. Martial arts aren't anywhere near as effective as people make them out to be if you are not highly trained and essentially useless if the other person is armed even with a knife. They are better for training confidence/athleticism than self-defense. Tasers are frequently shrugged off by aggressors (no shortage of videos online showing this) and if you miss you just escalated the situation with no other way out. A gun is really the only thing that puts even the weakest victim on par with the strongest aggressor. But situational awareness for where you are and who is around you is 100x more important.
The interesting (to me) part about such a philosophy is that it seems like it can only really survive and prosper within a society where someone else is willing to pick up the burden of doing the killing for you.
It seems like in nature or on its own such a mindset would be akin to being in a death cult- you're just going to get rolled over by someone else and your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.
But if you live in the midst of a society full of other people who are willing to kill or be killed to protect those in it beliefs like that can grow and gain followers without any risk of external challenge putting their faith to the test.
Reading my comment I realize it may sound a little bit inflammatory or perhaps bloodthirsty- that's not my intention, I don't know how to word it better. Just a passing thought on this topic
Note that Quakers never rejected the possibility of being killed for their beliefs, just the choice of killing others for them. Pacifism does not equate to passivism, after all: it simply means that they reject the notion of visiting violence on others.
It's also important to note that pacifism has been a divisive issue for Quakers from very early times. The play 'Sword of Peace' that's performed throughout the year in Snow Camp, NC, is about Meetings in the US struggling with the question of pacifism vs. the desire to aid their nascent country during the American Revolution. It was a debate for Friends during the US Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and onwards – one of the tenets of Quakerism is the need to wrestle with those issues by listening to the 'still small voice within' rather than blindly accepting the dictates of others. For many Friends, the threat posed by British colonial rule, the Confederacy, or Nazi Germany simply outweighed the demands of their conscience not to bear arms.
Friends often refer to the anecdote of William Penn asking George Fox (one of the founders of Quakerism) whether Penn should stop wearing his sword because he was now a Quaker. Fox told him, 'wear thy sword as long as thee is able' — meaning he should give it up because his conscience dictated it, not because he was a Quaker.
Thanks for the background! I am admittedly not very familiar with Quakers or their history. The clarification in the first part of your post helps with the context, I'll agree it's an entirely different story if it's a moral that is strived for but not strictly enforced (follow this or you're not one of us)
>your "tribe" won't be around long enough to have this belief "reproduce" and be passed on.
This is an atheistic understanding of the world that a Quaker obviously wouldn't share. Self-sacrifice aren't genes or memes your tribe reproduces, they're divine truths, the logos of the world so to speak that everyone will eventually be drawn into (represented by Christ as a person).
You can't destroy self-sacrifice any more than you can kill beauty or empathy or gravity. You can kill every good person, but not goodness ultimately. The entire starting point of the faith is Jesus dying on the cross, which in early Rome he was mocked for[1] according to exactly this logic "what, you worship a guy who just died on a cross, how will that religion continue to exist?"
It is not a comment on the religious/philosophical validity of the belief as I initially understood it.
Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.
I don't think this comparison to early/mainline Christianity is entirely fair. It was murder, not "just" killing that was prohibited by their values.
>Just that for a specific belief to survive, some number of members need to survive to pass it on to the next generation, which if their beliefs bar them from killing or violence requires them to rely on people who aren't.
Literally every Quaker could die today and their beliefs would still survive because we can do things like write books and publish websites now. The spread of knowledge and culture isn't limited to direct person-to-person transmission, and it doesn't depend on anyone doing violence on anyone else's behalf.
How often do you see people trying to recreate the lifestyles or belief systems of extinct cultures / societies for themselves to live by in a genuine day to day manner, and not in a academic or archeological capacity?
The content of their belief system might be known and recorded in that scenario but the teaching of it as a genuine belief/truth to live by and to be passed on from generation to generation probably wouldn't be.
Quakerism is still a form of Christian faith. And for a Christian the life on Earth is but a small episode of existence. The point is to obtain the life eternal, the salvation. To suffer and be put to death for the refusal to reject the principles of the faith, aka martyrdom, is a known way to practically guarantee a salvation.
Of course, from a game-theoretic perspective, such ideas can only persist if someone else protects the pacifists from being killed, likely by use of lethal force. In this situation the only morally acceptable choice for the pacifists is to not be afraid of death, and not demand somebody to do the dirty work for them. Which is what we see.
>The interesting (to me) part about such a philosophy is that it seems like it can only really survive and prosper within a society where someone else is willing to pick up the burden of doing the killing for you.
This seems to assume the "the burden of killing" is not only necessary but unavoidable, as if violence were a constant which should be equitably distributed amongst everyone. If so, I would presume the Quakers would disagree, and would be perfectly satisfied if no one bothered killing at all.
And historically speaking not a lot of people have been willing to kill to protect pacifists like the Quakers who have little capital, social clout or political power. So it isn't much of a burden to begin with.
It's not a condemnation of the morals within their belief system, and not a demand that everyone should participate equally in (potential) violence that comes along with protecting a community/country.
Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military. I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.
Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.
>Just an observation that at any given point in human history such a philosophy could only survive long enough to be passed generation to generation if its members offloaded the burden of having to make that moral choice onto someone else ie police or military.
People have no choice but to offload the "burden" onto the police and military, that's the entire premise of civil society and the state's monopoly on violence. Your ability to commit violence within society is already legally proscribed, and except in the case of military conscription, has never been required.
>I don't think such a belief could have ever developed and survived in a vacuum.
No, because it is explicitly an expression of opposition to the violence of secular society. In the absence of such violence, such a belief wouldn't be necessary.
>Every group of humans with surviving beliefs in known history have had some subgroup of (or been a subgroup of) other humans willing to resort to violence to protect the whole.
We're going to have to agree to disagree that the purpose of the police and military, or most equivalent groups throughout history, has ever been to "protect the whole."
You do have a choice, because the state/police/military aren't an opaque non-human monolith. They are made up of people who DID make the choice to take up that burden, for any given reason, it doesn't have to be an act of selflessness or duty or love for people or country. It just requires some subset of your population being morally at ease with that.
Being able to endorse extreme pacifism long enough to have your belief turn into a large group with many followers is a privilege of being a subgroup in a society where someone else isn't bound by that particular moral outlook. That's all I meant by offloading the burden. You can oppose the violence of secular society, as you put it, while also accepting that that opposition would only ever have worked at any point in history if only a part of your population agreed with you.
The addiction is the kicker there. Kratom withdrawals/dependency isn't as bad as traditional opioids/opiates. But it's a magnitude of an order worse than nicotine/caffeine/etc. dependency and withdrawals for some people. And the full safety profile of people taking concentrated kratom extract for long periods of time isn't really known yet.
I'm really of the belief that the only reason kratom exploded in popularity the way it did was because it was a legal alternative to opiates. Not necessarily because it's an upgrade (or even sidegrade. ) If morphine could still be purchased in every corner store and pharmacy over the counter kratom extracts would never have blown up the way they did.
Both sides have been seen with one member of a squad carrying around an issued shotgun in an anti-drone role- the fact that it shoots pellets in a cone is precisely why it's so effective. Skeet shooting is a great example of how relatively small fast moving targets can be hit consistently at range with a shotgun and they are usually using much smaller/lighter pellets with poorer velocity/range, I would assume the loads used in an anti-drone role are bigger.
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