Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

  • George Orwell
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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: July 17th, 2025

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  • The level of consciousness in something like a brain parasite or a slug is probably so dim that it barely feels like anything to be one. So even if you were reincarnated as one, you likely wouldn’t have much of a subjective experience of it. The only way to really experience a new life after reincarnation would be to come back as something with a complex enough mind to actually have a vivid sense of existence. Not that it matters much - it’s not like you’d remember any of your past lives anyway.

    If reincarnation were real and I had to bet money on how it works, I’d put it down to something like the many‑worlds interpretation of quantum physics - where being “reborn as yourself” just means living out one of your alternate timelines in a parallel universe.



  • Looking back, I realize I was pretty immature at 22. It didn’t feel that way at the time, but it sure does now. These days, 18‑year‑olds look like kids to me.

    I didn’t want kids back then, and I still don’t - but my perspective has shifted a little. When I see parents now, there’s a slight melancholic feeling that comes with knowing that’s something I’ll probably never experience.

    So yeah, if you’re 30 and don’t want kids, that’s probably not going to change. Before that, though, there’s always a chance.







  • Way to move the goalposts.

    If you take that question seriously for a second - AlphaFold doesn’t spew chemicals or drain lakes. It’s a piece of software that runs on GPUs in a data center. The environmental cost is just the electricity it uses during training and prediction.

    Now compare that to the way protein structures were solved before: years of wet lab work with X‑ray crystallography or cryo‑EM, running giant instruments, burning through reagents, and literally consuming tons of chemicals and water in the process. AlphaFold collapses that into a few megawatt‑hours of compute and spits out a 3D structure in hours instead of years.

    So if the concern is environmental footprint, the AI way is dramatically cleaner than the old human‑only way.



  • Artificial intelligence isn’t designed to maximize human fulfillment. It’s built to minimize human suffering.

    What it cannot do is answer the fundamental questions that have always defined human existence: Who am I? Why am I here? What should I do with my finite time on Earth?

    Expecting machines to resolve existential questions is like expecting a calculator to write poetry. We’re demanding the wrong function from the right tool.

    Pretty weird statements. There’s no such thing as just “AI” - they should be more specific. LLMs aren’t designed to maximize human fulfillment or minimize suffering. They’re designed to generate natural-sounding language. If they’re talking about AGI, then that’s not designed for any one thing - it’s designed for everything.

    Comparing AGI to a calculator makes no sense. A calculator is built for a single, narrow task. AGI, by definition, can adapt to any task. If a question has an answer, an AGI has a far better chance of figuring it out than a human - and I’d argue that’s true even if the AGI itself isn’t conscious.