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stonyrubbish

71 karma · joined April 7, 2026

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stonyrubbish··on I wanna live an NPC life
The Bhagavad Gita 18.47: "It is better to do one’s own dharma, even though imperfectly, than to do another’s dharma, even though perfectly."
stonyrubbish··on A Kantian Critique of "Sorry" by Justin Bieber
From a Hegelian perspective, the concept of the apology inherently is contradictory: for an apology before the act of harm has occurred is always "too early," yet an apology after the act has occurred is always, in some sense, "too late," ie, the harm has already been caused. We can see from this point that the apology is therefore never-on-time, always a spectre in the realm of human temporality. Also, I've never read Hegel (not that this disqualifies me from being a Hegelian.)
stonyrubbish··on The Hacker's Renaissance (2025)
I feel like the irony of a post complaining about the death of hacker culture written entirely by ChatGPT pretty well summarizes where we're at.
stonyrubbish··on Drug reverses autism-like brain changes in adult mice within hours
> How is this different from other disorders, disabilities, illnesses?

Part of the confusion here is that autism isn't straightforwardly a disability. A plurality of people with autism are ASD-1, which is the kind requiring the least support needs while, purely empirically speaking, conferring lots of well-documented benefits. The sort of elephant in the room in these conversations is that there are lots of replicable studies which show that autistic people outperform non-autistic people in a variety of areas. The idea of attempting to engineer the removal of a class of people from society-- people with unique strengths which are necessary for the functioning of that society-- has consequences that are significantly less well-understood than proponents of this idea make it out to be.

stonyrubbish··on Drug reverses autism-like brain changes in adult mice within hours
I have ASD Level 1, and I definitely don't want to be "cured." I feel like autism has basically given me significantly stronger reasoning, pattern recognition, and systemizing abilities in exchange for being socially a bit weird and awkward and eccentric. I recognize that this is the perspective of someone who is high-functioning but I strongly enjoy having autism.
stonyrubbish··on I'm 38 and I Can't Support Myself Anymore
I am 23 years old. I studied hard, went to college, got good grades, etc-- "did everything right," as far as older people in my life told me. At 19 I became disabled from a sudden rare condition such that I am now very ill and mostly housebound. I thought exactly as you did before becoming disabled. Everyone thinks sudden, rare, lightning-strike style things just happen to others until one day they happen to you.

I don't agree with railing against capitalism either-- it's not clear to me that there's any other system I would do better in, given my disability-- but the idea of, "if you do everything right, nothing bad will happen to you" is basically a comforting lie people tell themselves to feel safe. I believe in the value of hard work, and I am trying my best to better my situation-- switching my entire career from humanities to IT-- but I still am not fully sure how I am going to be able to support myself, and I don't think that's my fault.

stonyrubbish··on Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
They aren't so vague that you would argue the parrot is thinking.
stonyrubbish··on Bernie Sanders: "AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear"
AI is probably in need of far more legal safeguards than we have now, but I am sort of tired of the "everyone will lose their jobs" narrative. There are so few jobs LLMs can fully automate. I think what will actually happen is that corporate CEOs will try to cut staff, it won't work, people will be rehired, and AI will largely make people's jobs easier and less labor-intensive.
stonyrubbish··on Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
> "I don't trust anyone who claims they're intelligent" doesn't follow from "all they do is <how they work>".

It kind of does if how they work is nothing like genuine intelligence. You can (rightly) think AI is incredible and amazing and going to bring us amazing new medical technologies, without wrongly thinking its super amazing pattern recognition is the same thing as genuine intelligence. It should be worrying if people begin to believe the stochastic parrot is actually wise.

stonyrubbish··on Sam Altman may control our future – can he be trusted?
Human cognition is nothing like AI "cognition." It really bothers me that people think AI is doing the same thing the human mind does. AI is more like a parrot which is trained to give a correct-looking response to any question. The parrot doesn't think, doesn't know what its doing etc, it just does it because it gets a treat every time a "good" answer is prompted. This is why it can't do things like know how many parenthesis are balanced here ((((()))))) (you can test this), it doesn't have any kind of genuine cognition.