evilsetg (u/evilsetg)

evilsetg commented on I Am An AI Hater anthonymoser.github.io/wr... · Posted by u/BallsInIt

And that's my point. It was never about the philosophy, it was always about the economics. That's what frustrates me, why lie? If it's money you want then ask for it, don't make up some bullshit.

evilsetg · a day ago

But are philosophy and economics so neatly separable in this case? Say you hold the philosophical belief that humans creating art is important but the economics don't allow it. In that case the root of your argument is philosophical and the economics factor into it but are not the single argument itself.

evilsetg commented on What if AI made the world’s economic growth explode? economist.com/briefing/20... · Posted by u/andsoitis

spwa4 · a month ago

> Secondly, why bother: because the current world system is destroying nature

Is it? If you put it this dramatically, it's bullshit. Nature will survive us, rather than the other way around, guaranteed. MAYBE we can kill large animals if we tried, but probably not even that (they'd just shrink and then grow large again, wouldn't be the first, or second, or even the tenth time that happened).

Life on earth is being sustained by the sun and by nuclear reactions inside the earth. Nothing we do makes the tiniest of difference in the long run.

Increased temperature and increased CO2 and climate change essentially make more chemical and solar energy available in the environment. Life is chemical in nature and is limited by available energy. That means there would be more life, more green, if more energy was available. Life would have to be pretty damn badly designed if this damaged it, rather than what we actually see happening: life is spreading to much more of the planet than even 100 years ago.

So, first, you can rest assured: it is just people messing up their own little world.

Second: it would be seriously unnatural if we stopped. After all competing and using up all available resources is literally the sole goal of all life on earth. And if you compare humans to an average ocean-bound bacterial species, we're not even particularly good at it.

evilsetg · a month ago

Okay, so we are not destroying all of nature, only enough nature that it will get seriously uncomfortable for us. Great! Your second argument is even stranger. It would be unnatural to stop polluting the environment? Where are you going with this?

evilsetg commented on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another? derekthompson.org/p/what-... · Posted by u/mmcclure

seanmcdirmid · a month ago

Having kids when you are young and financially not established is just irresponsible, but particularly female bodies don’t do well having kids older when you are established enough to do so responsibly. I’m having this problem right now with my spouse (we have a kid, but are thinking about another), it’s just super hard to get pregnant without medical help.

evilsetg · a month ago

Maybe we as a society should decide that having children is fine when you don't have a stable career yet and finance it as such. The contradiction that our most fertile years are also the most unstable is something society could and should balance.

EDIT: typo

evilsetg commented on What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another? derekthompson.org/p/what-... · Posted by u/mmcclure

teitoklien · a month ago

Things should be made better I agree, But at the same time.

Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing.

Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity and energy. (and higher fertility and birth rates)

More things, "non meritocracy", "bootstrap fantasies", those things arent the problem.

People of our generation and the one before, are just always whining complaining, too lazy. I dont want to believe that either, but it is the truth.

Our freedom to do anything and everything, abort children easily, control birth planning easily, making casual sex the norm, etc, making housing unaffordable to keep this stupid real estate based bubble alive for banks, and politicians alive under garb of "Regulation" and "NIMBYism".

Are 100% much more contributing to all of this. Than nihilism, doomism, etc.

Give people better things, more money, better lifestyle, and more freedoms and no societal pressure to have kids, people are just opting for the "DINK" philosophy, Double Income No Kids.... , spend on expensive cars, better homes, more travel, but no... no kids.

Go observe every major society, the top 10% of each society in almost all of them have a pretty decent life with good savings and sense of security, freedom to not overwork too much. This is the top 10% populist politicians villify as having everything.

Now go look at the birth rates of that top 10% in EVERY major society its lower than the rest of the 90%.

More money, more affordability are not linked to birth rates at all, except for a teensy minority who overthinks things and calculates 1000 different decisions from climate change to their wealth to their partner's loyalty, to decide if they want kids. They are not the majority

No amount of motivation, higher incomes, etc will reverse this trend of birth declines, (however governments and society should strongly work towards giving people higher income, less overworking, more motivation to be optimistic not for boosting birth rates, because it wont, but simply because its the duty of public servants, politicians, policymakers and the state that serves the society in return for the society serving the state with loyalty)

TLDR; make better society yes, but even that will just lead to even fewer kids, make a more responsible society while improving people's lives.

evilsetg · a month ago

We have to find a new equilibrium for fertility that does not depend on opression of women. This could very well mean we need more rights, most of all more stable, plannable lifes i think. The old opressive ways of ensuring fertility are gone and without major societal upheaval they will not come back. I think that is good and we should focus on alternative solutions.

evilsetg commented on Supreme Court's ruling practically wipes out free speech for sex writing online ellsberg.substack.com/p/f... · Posted by u/macawfish

andsoitis · 2 months ago

> parents that are too busy or not tech savvy are helpless to block content without essentially forbidding their kids from using any connected device

Tough luck, I say. If you’re going to bring humans into this world, you better do a great job at it and not externalize responsibility or create a nuisance for others.

evilsetg · 2 months ago

Every human being creates nuisance sometimes. The only winning move in your game is not to live.

evilsetg commented on Neanderthals operated prehistoric “fat factory” on German lakeshore archaeologymag.com/2025/0... · Posted by u/hilux

jbotz · 2 months ago

When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery?

This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because then the container material will never get hotter than 100 degrees Celcius! So that's kind of obvious once you think about it, but what's interesting about this is that nobody ever considered it until just recently and the whole of paleo-anthropology "knew" that humans couldn't boil things until the invention of pottery![1] To me this is a particularly interesting and surprising example of how, in scientific disciplines, bad assumptions can stick around unquestioned even though from the perspective of physics it's quite obvious that they're bad assumptions.

Edit: add reference to some experimental verification[2].

[1] https://paleoanthro.org/media/journal/content/PA20150054.pdf

[2] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-023-01843-z

evilsetg · 2 months ago

What would speak against carving a cooking pot from stone? One thing I could find is that they might explode but I guess that would also depend on the type of rock.

evilsetg commented on Nobody has a personality anymore: we are products with labels freyaindia.co.uk/p/nobody... · Posted by u/drankl

nlitened · 2 months ago

If someone is overly aggressive, or rarely fulfills promises, or is very negative about things, or has a very fragile ego — it absolutely makes them less valuable as a person to others. Just look up any definitions of the word “valuable”

evilsetg · 2 months ago

Thankfully, a lot of cultures also recognize inherent value in humans that does not derive from their usefulness.

evilsetg commented on The Claude Bliss Attractor astralcodexten.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/lukeplato

NetRunnerSu · 3 months ago

This thread is getting at a key point, and `roxolotl` is right on the money about roleplaying. The anxiety about AI 'wants' or 'bliss' often conflates two different processes: forward and backward propagation.

Everything we see in a chat is the forward pass. It's just the network running its weights, playing back a learned function based on the prompt. It's an echo, not a live thought.

If any form of qualia or genuine 'self-reflection' were to occur, it would have to be during backpropagation—the process of learning and updating weights based on prediction error. That's when the model's 'worldview' actually changes.

Worrying about the consciousness of a forward pass is like worrying about the consciousness of a movie playback. The real ghost in the machine, if it exists, is in the editing room (backprop), not on the screen (inference).

evilsetg · 2 months ago

Interesting idea! Could you tell me more about how you arrive at the conclusion that forward passes cannot produce qualia?

evilsetg commented on Ask HN: What is your fallback job if AI takes away your career? · Posted by u/7402

evilsetg · 3 months ago

I will train to become a nurse. They are highly sought after and the job seems rewarding to me. I heard it's quite stressful though.

evilsetg commented on Mastodon Exit Interview v.cx/2025/04/mastodon-exi... · Posted by u/icy

evilsetg · 5 months ago

The way I see it, joining social media requires your account to be bound by a chain to either a corporation or some rando. I'd much rather bind myself to some random person on the internet because at least there is a chance that they will treat me like a human. A corporation just does not care. The fediverse is run by humans. Good humans, bad humans, but humans at least. This you will never get from a company, at least not in the long run.