u/Diet_kush

I’ve been on the S&W train pretty much since I started shooting, and have owned a 4” compact, 4.25”, and OG Shield for the last ~8 years. Haven’t bought anything in a long time, but recently replaced my 4” compact with a 3.6” metal frame and picked up a 5” FDE to try my hand at USPSA.

One thing I noticed that’s changed significantly over the years is attention to detail, for better and for worse. My metal frame compact is flawless, best shooting gun I own and could not be happier with fit and finish. But the 5” polymer frame, especially compared to my old performance center, is lacking. There’s way more slop between the slide and the frame, and the seam that runs the length of the frame is not shaved down at all (cut my hand up a bit my first day out). It was an easy enough fix with a knife, but still a little annoying. Every seam on my performance center is perfectly smooth, and there’s almost no wiggle between parts.

This isn’t to say new S&W doesn’t make great pistols, but they are definitely putting a lot more attention on their metal frames when compared to the polymers. Also maybe a boomer take, but I somewhat prefer the hinged trigger in the PC over the new flat face.

I recently came across this piece co-authored by Levin, and it reminded me a lot of the Hegelian framing surrounding Frisron’s Markovian Monism (whom Levin very frequently references in his work). The Hegelian process of conscious expansion is grounded in the recognition of self in the other and other in self, a fundamentally empathetic mechanism. As more theories of consciousness flirt with the combination problem, is it worth reframing some human behavior not as “emergent,” but as mirrors to underlying evolutionary mechanisms?

Abstract; Intelligence is a central feature of human beings’ primary and interpersonal experience. Understanding how intelligence originated and scaled during evolution is a key challenge for modern biology. Some of the most important approaches to understanding intelligence are the ongoing efforts to build new intelligences in computer science (AI) and bioengineering. However, progress has been stymied by a lack of multidisciplinary consensus on what is central about intelligence regardless of the details of its material composition or origin (evolved vs. engineered). We show that Buddhist concepts offer a unique perspective and facilitate a consilience of biology, cognitive science, and computer science toward understanding intelligence in truly diverse embodiments. In coming decades, chimeric and bioengineering technologies will produce a wide variety of novel beings that look nothing like familiar natural life forms; how shall we gauge their moral responsibility and our own moral obligations toward them, without the familiar touchstones of standard evolved forms as comparison? Such decisions cannot be based on what the agent is made of or how much design vs. natural evolution was involved in their origin. We propose that the scope of our potential relationship with, and so also our moral duty toward, any being can be considered in the light of Care—a robust, practical, and dynamic lynchpin that formalizes the concepts of goal-directedness, stress, and the scaling of intelligence; it provides a rubric that, unlike other current concepts, is likely to not only survive but thrive in the coming advances of AI and bioengineering. We review relevant concepts in basal cognition and Buddhist thought, focusing on the size of an agent’s goal space (its cognitive light cone) as an invariant that tightly links intelligence and compassion. Implications range across interpersonal psychology, regenerative medicine, and machine learning. The Bodhisattva’s vow (“for the sake of all sentient life, I shall achieve awakening”) is a practical design principle for advancing intelligence in our novel creations and in ourselves.