I was coming out of Barcelona on a train to France on the 18th, and through the window spotted a blacked-out quadcopter just hovering quite high over the tracks. No incidents happened in that area of Spain though so I'm wondering why it was there, I suppose it could be civilian or police?

Anyone can fly a quadcopter though? You can buy one right now for a couple hundred bucks off Amazon (and strap explosives to it if you wanted to).

If anything, the fact we’re not seeing random drones carrying explosives and diving into groups of people on a daily basis shows the vast, vast (99.999%) majority of people is actually well-meaning and has no desire to kill or hurt anyone.

If you’re legitimately baffled by a random guy being able to fly a quadcopter around without any kind of government approval or oversight, I encourage you to buy one and play around (without explosives please!), just make sure to not fly it over places where people could be standing - terminal velocity is real and even a light one could cause serious injury if it were to lose control and fall on someone’s head.

Or it shows mass surveillance is working so well as a deterrent. If we got rid of the cameras everywhere, someone might rig a drone with explosives.

Perhaps it was actually an authorized drone?

Here in the USA quad-copter drones are used to inspect powerlines and other infrastructure; I see them a few times per year in my area. I don’t see why they wouldn’t use drones to visually inspect train tracks as well. Very cost effective and energy efficient alternative to manual inspection in a vehicle of some kind.

That's kinda ridiculous to think we're not animals anymore, our nature is to use intellect for survival (and though we know we can reduce suffering further we choose not to).

It is a mind bender, yes.

Your argument, written here and As far as I understand it at the moment, goes along with the other argument that everything is a simulation, or that everything that we do is preordained based upon physics. All mindbenders.

I want to believe that I have the ability to make an educated decision when faced e.g. with impulses to suppress or oppress others, I do know that I can consider ramifications and benefits outside of those which directly impact me.

So, perhaps it's better to say, we can be unanimal like rather than simply not animal, at all? What do you think?

We don't have the capacity to act "unanimal" at all. Deprive anyone of food or sincerely try and harm their children. You'll get the fall of Rome and French Revolution every time.

You eat, sleep, procreate, go to the grocery store (hunt). You honk at others they are preventing you from getting where you're going. You size up other males if you're male, females if you're female. Your favorite food is your favorite food and not mine because YOUR biology dictates that to you based on your experience. You consider ramifications as a self-preserving defense mechanism, not as some social cordiality.

I do believe in determinism.

I see what you mean by being able to consider the worth of harming something for your own gain. But doesn't this apply to all animals? If a bear was hungry I'm sure they would happily eat you, but they would probably think twice if they weren't. Same for early humans, it's just we have our technologies (which our intellectual nature has enabled) now to prop us up and not have to really think about survival.

The main thing I'm curious to hear your thoughts on is what are we if not animals? Gods? That's surely completely relative, like an anteater to an ant.

If you hop off the modern treadmill ... you'll very quickly be thinking about survival. I once ate a salad off the ground, I was so hungry. It only takes a few days and we regress to degenerate animals.

I'm pretty sure governments know this and want to prevent it at all costs beyond a certain point.

> everything is a simulation

The "simulation" is indistinguishable from god.

> Your argument, written here and As far as I understand it at the moment, goes along with the other argument that everything is a simulation,

What?

This isn't a mindbender. You're just drawing lines.

Edit: I slightly misread your comment as advocating that we're not animals. However, whether one describes us as not animals or able to be "unanimal like" is still a matter of drawing lines.

It's honestly very scary, and if people aren't on their phone, they have something masking the outside world and blasting noise into their ear.

The blood meridian quote that stuck with me for this:

"War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner."

You can go even further and remove the recommendations panel when you're watching a video using the eye dropper on uBlock Origin, it's so good.

I have come to believe that consciousness is the fundamental state of the universe, and the brain is simply a filtering mechanism to the "real world", lots of papers show that on psychedelics, where the observer is seeing/feeling larger than life, the brain activity in areas actually goes down.

Of course we don't really know how the brain works, and I do wonder if you were on psychedelics for a looong period of time it would become normal, maybe some MKUltra victims can help with that lol.

I have a pet theory that I like to contemplate which is that consciousness is a field that brings the universe into being sort of like how the Higgs field brings mass into being

Yep, slowly moving pieces of AOSP to closed source and now silence on putting out any AOSP releases, in the name of simplifying their development..

So we've got bots automatically saying they're not bots, whilst humans still have to use their finite time on this world to manually confirm they are alive? Ok.

Even worse, only bots made by big corporations qualify.

https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot/verified...

Musk has said a lot about getting badly bullied at school, those bullies were probably bullied at home as well :/

There's a great lyric from ELUCID I think about when people say stuff like this:

> I don't have the privilege to think everything ain't political

i guess what I am saying is, though everything is political, it doesn't ahve to be "so" political.

Yeah I suppose so, most comments on this kinda thing are not really discussing the technology in a vacuum. I imagine it's due to the quite cynical nature of HN at this particular time period where society is fundamentally shifting, in arguably a negative direction, with this kind of technology as one of the main reasons. I haven't been on HN for that long, what was it like 5-10 years ago? I'm curious how it will be in 5-10 years.