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But also, they turned out fine. One of them is right outside my window eating suet at this very moment.

Not just likely to vary with location and season, it absolutely will vary with location and season.

Where I live, there’s one highly productive almost bullet proof plant that immediately comes to mind: Physalis – Ground Cherries.

They don’t seem to suffer from any of the diseases or pests that can decimate tomatoes. They can handle full sun to partial shade. They don’t need fertilizer. They’re drought resistant. Heat resistant. Deer resistant. They reseed on their own each year. And they produce a large volume of fruit over a long period of time, up until the first hard freeze.

Good luck!

As for biological parents, I have one that’s very open to hearing the truth, pragmatic, accepting, understanding, and all those good things. And I have another that absolutely refused to have any kind of reasonable conversation about later-life / end-of-life matters, to the point where his only response was “if it gets to that point, take me out in the woods and shoot me.”

Go figure it was the “if it gets to that point, take me out in the woods and shoot me” parent that most needed to have the conversation as he’s beyond the point of having a cogent conversation now that he barely even recognizes who I am.

But it’s the one that actually was willing to listen that is fully cared for and in a great spot in life in her old age.

Sometimes they choose their own poison and they choose poorly.

When I was young, I agreed with the pedants.

When I am old, I simply no longer give a fuck.

Call them what you want. The words are all made up anyway, and the pedantry doesn’t matter.

Personally I think you’re deep into logical fallacy territory. Evolutionary side effect vs. major advantage – these aren’t mutually exclusive things. And the second question makes even less sense, to be honest. Are you high?

Having said that, sentience is an emergent property of our complicated biology, and from that perspective and trying to tie this back to your question, it is kind of like a side effect of our brain structure and biochemical processes. But like all “side effects” that persist in populations through time, it almost certainly has evolutionary advantages for sentient species, or at least, it did at one time. Evolution itself is not a omniscient, self-deterministic, or static process, though.

As for correcting errors in vision, it’s possible. But it’s incredibly unlikely that’s the only advantage consciousness and/or sentience provides. Blind people are also able to process and filter complicated sensory information in order to perform substantially complex behaviors. And, conversely, organisms we consider non-sentient are capable of performing some very sophisticated behaviors, presumably completely by instinct.

So many comments in here, I haven’t read them all. I have some conjecture.

First, the AI scrapers already have Reddit’s most valuable content … their “virgin” data from the pre-LLM years. All new content is worth substantially less and much harder to differentiate / filter between bots/AI and real human interaction done without AI.

Second, the search engines that used to help drive users to Reddit mostly all have AI summaries / AI answers right there on the main search page these days. A lot of people read those AI results, get what they want right from Google (or otherwise), and never click any links over to Reddit.

Third, Reddit has expanded into other regions besides the western / us-centric world, such as India. The simplest way to put this is that the content and users from those regions costs Reddit US users and by extension advertising dollars.

Fourth, the corporate team’s decision making is bad enough to be harmful / fatal in and of itself. It’s sheer luck they’ve done as well as they have this long. Corporate is not only the worst enemy of users and communities, they’re also their own worst enemy. It’s so bad that if one of them was a competitor or adversary that had infiltrated the company in a covert operation to destroy it or gum it up, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.