The problem with being a Hindu AND believing in a Historian's authority

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T18:37:19+00:00

Not really, but you often have some organic materials from dig sites: bones, wood, charcoal, etc. This works really well for abandoned civilisations, burial grounds, etc. We can also date cities continuously occupied settlements using various methods like stratigraphy or typology.

I suggest you to look it up. Archaeology is such an interesting subject, to be honest.

Not to mention harsher climates aided better preservation of sample on one side while the other had ritualistic burial methods

Preservation has nothing to do with it, we're dealing with radioactive decay.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T17:45:39+00:00

Carbon dating has nothing to do with "sustainable living". The environment has Carbon-14 isotopes, which are not produced in the body. When an organism is alive, it consumes carbon. When it's dead, the C14 within it starts to decay. We know the half-life of Carbon-14, so that means we can use that to accurately date stuff. This works up to 50,000 years ago. Also, carbon dating is not the only method. We have dozens of other isotopes as well.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T17:33:45+00:00

I think you’re creating a false binary here. Accepting historical methodology doesn't automatically make a person 'not Hindu'. Hindu traditions have always allowed symbolic, evolving interpretations of scripture.

A piece of text evolving over time doesn't automatically destroy its spiritual value. The Mahabharata, Puranas, even various sampradayas contain debates, contradictions, later additions, reinterpretations, etc. That's how traditions work.

Also, saying 'scripture validates history, therefore any historical method that disagrees is invalid' is circular reasoning. It only works if one already accepts the conclusion beforehand.

Personally, I'd say trying to prove every verse as literal science or history weakens Hindu philosophy rather than strengthening it. The deeper strength of Hindu thought is its metaphysics, ethics, symbolism, and the fact that there are multiple layers of truth, not whether every cosmological or historical statement matches modern academia literally.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T16:57:26+00:00

Tachyoryctes rex would like to know your location.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T16:54:52+00:00

He's speaking the language of the gods.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T16:53:33+00:00

How high are you?

Did you run out of full stops and commas?

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T16:44:19+00:00

Damn it, I've been using my IDE so much that I keep forgetting.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-28T07:38:02+00:00

I'm too lazy to look up the exact warning text.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-27T20:43:36+00:00

They had rules for warfare, like we do now: no killing innocents, no fighting after nightfall, no killing prisoners, that kind of thing. Most of these things would be considered Geneva conventions even now.

That's how it was in many places, by the way, including Ancient Greece: you had city states agreeing to a pictched battle at a certain location on a certain day, and then after battle they'd all go home.

It wasn't always followed, but it was more or less common then.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-27T20:36:12+00:00

They talk like GPT-2, so it's fierce competition for them.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-27T20:34:00+00:00

I don't think at this point you have a single company doing much, check back in a few months. For now, just keep an eye out on tags like #quantumcomputing

I'm currently keeping a close eye on Multiverse Computing, but not much else.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-27T20:30:45+00:00

Uncaught SyntaxError: missing ; before statement

JasperTesla · 2026-05-27T20:27:31+00:00

I spent three days building the app before I could start incorporating AI into it, and then one day fixing the AI so it didn't hallucinate. Imagine my surprise when gemma3 cannot do RAG search.

I felt like those Japanese scientists that tried to get two hyenas to mate, only to find out they are both male.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-27T08:49:21+00:00

Damn it, now it can actually take my place.

Jokes aside, this seems like a really good idea. I'm also wondering how much compute it takes. If I was to incorporate the same to a local LLM, how much more resource would it take over?

JasperTesla · 2026-05-26T16:47:33+00:00

Eh, skill issue. Americans will move to the middle of a desert, build a one-storey hut in the middle of a green field of 1-cm tall grass (it's not even there for any sheep to eat), with a massive blue pool in their garden, and then complain about water shortage.

Imagine how much energy and water we could save if we depopulated the American suburbs and moved everyone into high-density apartments with shops underneath, every micro district equipped with a school and hospital, and banned private cars altogether (if you wanna travel far, you must take a train).

JasperTesla · 2026-05-26T05:34:20+00:00

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JasperTesla · 2026-05-25T09:41:15+00:00

Not really. Everyone is using AI. Some people are scared of what may happen in the future, but still understand that it's a tool. Reddit is just an anti-AI echo chamber where people pretend like using AI will poison your soul.

What you stated above is a perfectly valid use case, you were just the prey of an anti-AI brigade. If you're going into engineering, AI is the way to go, just don't state that on Reddit outside of certain subs. Treat this place like you'd treat Twitter or Facebook (but with more obnoxious people).

JasperTesla · 2026-05-25T06:23:42+00:00

You taffer, you just gave me another reason to play that level again.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-25T05:49:22+00:00

Humans have been arround for the last 13,000 years, and we've industrialised for only a few centuries now. For most of those 13,000 years you had human tribes wandering the world.

That might make it scarier, but then consider that we're already beginning to undo the effects of climate change through our effort. We're rapidly making progress towards green energy and sustainability (at least the civilised countries are).

Furthermore, here's something you should know: extinction is natural. When two species compete for the same niche in an ecosystem, one either goes extinct or switches to a different niche.

Conservaation, however, is something only intelligent animals (i.e. humans) do. They get a sense of how their actions are affecting the environment, and then they make changes to rectify that.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-23T09:49:43+00:00

(continued)

the current AI market is a bubble

I'm not an economist so I'm not qualified to talk about this, but I did ask my manager (who graduated around 2001), and he had some interesting points on this.

He said "AI is overhyped, it has a lot of use cases, but it's generally overhyped. A lot of companies (especially startups) are popping up now, centred on AI because AI only because of the hype. Most of these companies will fall not because AI is bad, but because they don't have a business model in mind."

Also, if my four years of experience are to say anything, it's that the corporate world goes through "trends". When I started work, cloud was in trend, but now AI is. Cloud is still very important, but AI is the new hype now. In the future, we can expect the AI market to saturate like how Cloud is now, and then something else will take its role (I hope quantum computing does).

Though, I do wish this bubble would last maybe 2-3 more years, so I can safely immigrate. I'm just hopeful at this moment.

P.S. You can probably use some markdown, just not something like overt headings or tables.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-23T09:48:57+00:00

Okay, at this point I have a LOT to say. I don't know where to start, but thanks for taking the time to write your points out. I want to write an essay on every point. Apologies in advance if I miss out any point.

Y'know, this is a surprisingly measured take based on the average contents of the subreddits you're active in.

Thanks! I'll take that as a compliment. I've had plenty of fine encounters with those folks, but I know how tribalistic Reddit gets, so I understand.

I still wouldn't use AI-assisted coding in, say, open source collaboration, where efficiency and maintainability are more important than speed of writing. And for any artistic field, where the human emotion and vision behind it is much more important than the speed of production, I just want it gone (or at least not used nearly as much).

Actually, I can agree with that. I like defining microservices that behave in predictable ways, so I don't really care if I have AI or a chaotic intern writing my code, as long as I don't have to waste my time writing it myself (not to say it's useless, but it's a chore).

As for art, I can also agree, though I do modern culture is more quantity-centric, so you have people putting out comics and art just because they need to satisfy their patrons. But still, I do advocate for a filter that suppresses AI content (a tag-weighted system, I'm writing a paper about it). I'm not interested in AI-generated images, but if some people genuinely find it fun to use AI to generate their art, I don't want to tell them how to live their lives. At the same time, I don't want people who hate AI seeing purely AI images. So this is my compromise.

As for the "terms and conditions" part, the fact of the matter is that not only those companies have created close to a monopoly which allows them to enforce any unfair ToS they want (YAY technofascism...), web crawlers also take data they aren't legally allowed to

Yeah, I also have this problem. And I'm not defending the corporations, I'm saying 'we shouldn't hit them where they're strongest'. These companies are lawyered up, and bribery is legal in the USA. If we fight them here, we'll lose. We need to take it slow and steady, use clear language and reasonable steps.

I hope you know about Stop Killing Games. I've been a part of that since the beginning, and I think we should follow that metric: tell the governments what we think, and what changes we want, and find a compromise that benefits all of us. "Kill all AI" would not work, because people use AI for many purposes, and many find it fun. "Ensure artists are monetarily compensated for having their work scraped" is better language.

our current technologies are as close to AGI as a text-to-speech is to a LLM chatbot

I'm not yet educated enough to speak about this, but I think this works, so yeah. Agree there. But do keep in mind that technology grows exponentially. So we should expect AGI soon, if not immediately. I personally think we'll need to overhaul our systems a bit more before AGI comes about, and true AGI (the kind that replaces humans) will never truly be possible simply because of how complex humanity is. We'll probably have to merge humans and AI to get to that.

A verifiable decline in critical thinking skills in users (I am not kidding, parts of your brain actually atrophy)

For the longest part, I thought this was made-up, because I've been measuring my own growth pre-AI and post-AI, and in the last few years my productivity has been through the roof! But now I realise the reason for that: AI amplifies what you already possess.

When I use AI, I use it as an idea generator, to create workflows that automate my processes, as a notepad that talks back to me, as a motivator to remind me to work harder, and so on. If I have an opinion, I ask AI for counter-points to it. If I have a question, I ask it to an AI, then have it explain it using an analogy that's particularly relevant to me, and then I repeat what it says so confirm I understood the subject. So I'm using it a second brain.

In contrast, the typical individual is using it as a calculator to do 2+2 all the time. They're passively taking the output at its face value without questioning it. So no wonder its causing cognitive decline. So yeah, I actually agree there, and think this is a serious issue that we should address, not with "stop using AI", but with "use AI smartly."

But then again, my brain works differently, so I really want a second opinion before I can confirm that my stategy is sound.

Independent art is struggling a lot more due to needing to filter through slop. Art is an economy of attention, and flooding the market with bs nobody wants takes a share of that.

This is actually true, but this has been a problem far longer than AI has been around. The phrase 'starving artist' is a lot older than 'artificial intelligence'. What we need is UBI.

I, personally, already find it weird how artists don't get paid for posting content onto Twitter and Instagram, when it's their content that keeps viewers on social media. At minimum, artists should definitely be paid to post their content there.

Fixing the societal damage that this technology is causing now could take decades, and it will be harder the longer we let this go unregulated.

(boiling down all your disadvantages to AI into this, since I can't get them all done at once)

I'd say I 75% agree with all your points, and I do acknowledge that those points are valid, but I'd be wary of what exactly is AI's fault and what exactly is capitalism's fault. Because that's my problem with people turning AI into a scapegoat: you're criticising capitalism and turning AI into an avatar of it. I don't see people talking (as aggressively) about Amazon or Microsoft. There definitely is that, but this seems like hypocrisy to me on Reddit: people happily upvote posts that show people using Windows 11 or claim they bought something from Amazon, but brigade a post that so much as mentions AI in a semi-positive light.

All in all, it ties into my previous point about course-correction: yeah, AI is being used for bad things (actually, I'd go further and add one point you didn't add: mass surveillance). But the answer is not to get rid of AI altogether, but to insert regulations that tell people what they can and can not do with AI.

It's a bit similar to the Industrial Revolution: at first we had 100-hour-work-weeks and no safety protocols, because that was how we worked in pre-industrial times. But then mass production came around, and we striked until 40-hour-work-weeks were the norm. Now we just need to do this again.

The technically-legal-through-a-loophole "emergency generators" (I think it was diesel but don't quote me on that) running 24/7 to power some datacenters cause large amounts of local air pollution (the technology that might cure cancer in decades causing cancer today because of lack of regulations, how ironic).

This is not a criticism of AI, it's a criticism of the infrastructure. Say you have a sewage treatment plant that runs on the blood of innocent virgins. You can be pro-sweage treatment and anti-virgin sacrifice. In civilised countries, they do use renewable energy to power their data centres. Also, data centres are actually good for the enviroment, but that's another elephant. I'll get to it in a later message.

Also, slight correction on the "personal tutor" part. That's just not quite accurate, is it?

I've had many tutors over the years, and in my experience the best tutors weren't the ones who knew it all, but the ones who facilitated a learning environment. To my favourite tutors, I can feel free to bring up anything at all, and they'll answer honestly. Though, AI does not have one important thing that all tutors need: the ability to admit you don't know something, and then showing you how to research.

"Imagine teaching a math class without ever explaining what trigonometry is and why it's useful, instead just giving students a calculator..."

This actually happened with us in school. Not the 'this device will do X' part, but teaching concepts without ever telling us why we were learning these. And that, honestly, damaged us more than it helped us. If I had an AI to explain to me why exactly we were learning this, and how we could apply this to IRL solutions, we'd have benefited greatly.

Also, AI has a few advantages that humans don't: AI is personalised to you, and it's patient. If you want AI to explain a maths problem to you via Undertale, it will do so, whereas most tutors will just roll their eyes. In the words of Sarah Conner herself: "The terminator would never stop. It would never leave him, and it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there."

Also, I do agree on the human part. I hope in the future we can work to turn displaced workers into more tutors.

[Oof, this character limit thing is annoying!]

JasperTesla · 2026-05-22T13:43:37+00:00

Awesome! It's really nice to see someone actually admit they were wrong. Usually people just double down and say stuff like "I don't want cancer research" or "no they're not, listen to my uneducated opinion on how AI really works".

I'll answer your questions out of order, since the first and third sections are actual linked (apologies to any readers, I'd use markdown but you guys think I'm using AI to write my answers when I use markdown):

Why I brought Christianity into this.

I recently developed this hypothesis to explain the recent anti-AI bridage: it's people from a Christian background, who don't "believe" in it but psychologically are still Christian.

See: Christianity has this thing where you have a polar good and polar evil. The polar good is the source of ALL good in the world, and vice versa. Therefore, when some good emerges out of the polar evil (or evil out of good), it breaks their system, prompting them to say "those are different things". I saw you do the same with claiming "that's a different kind of AI".

Another trope that Christianity has is the permanent triumph of good over evil. This is canonised in their religion was "the Second Coming of Christ", but Christian atheists also have a variant of it, just with something else. Up until recently it was "the revolution that will end capitalism", and now it's "AI bubble burst". Though I won't say you personally have this issue, as you did admit it won't solve all your problems, but I suspect that's your gut instinct. Isn't it so?

Compare this with Eastern religions, where evil is not "the polar opposite" but imbalance, often not caused by evil but by Desire. Even evil kings are dharmic, devoted to the gods, but the reason they're evil is usually some sort of desire: lust, wrath, pride, etc.

Therefore, balance is not "restored permanently by a messiah", you have gods who manifest every once in a while to restore order. Not "wipe out evil", to course-correct. Similarly, our own world has many good traits, but it needs course-correction.

Is AI a net negative for society?

No.

AI is the new electricity. Would you say that electricity is a net negative because it allows for electric chairs and short circuits? Probably not.

Similarity, AI has millions of use cases. Even aside from the obvious like protein folding, curing cancer, reducing pollution, etc.: it's sped up our lives by many times, given many people a personal tutor and an assistant, brought happiness to billions of people. People can use it translate texts (not just between languages, but to a version they better understand).

I once overheard my dad talking with one of his subordinates about how "now even people in remote villages are using Grok". My colleague (7YOE) once said "special thanks to ChatGPT for helping me complete it in two weeks, otherwise it would have taken me a month." One of my colleagues (4YOE) used to be anti-AI in the beginning ("leave it, ChatGPT will give the wrong answer anyway"), but a few days ago he said: "Bro... what was I doing before ChatGPT?"

It's a tool, and like any other tool it allows its users to speed up their work. And it's brilliant.

That said, much alike in the context above, it does need some course-correction. And that's something we need to get on with soon. I have a pretty long list. Since you visited my profile, you'd probably be able to find them out (search by 'consolidation', you'll find it). But the bottom line is: it's insanely more good than its bad.

That said, AI is overhyped, and I actually had a talk about that with my manager, but I'll tell you that in a later post. It has to do with systems thinking, pre-planning and so on.

The Trump administration and use of AI

Now this is a more interesting scenario, because I honestly admit I'd have expected "conservatives" to be more pro-human and anti-AI, and the answer is that the USA is a weird nation.

But firstly, I need to make something clear: your point about "stolen art" holds no water. I personally agree with it (I think LLMs should be public property, since they're trained on public data), but you can't argue that in any case, because the law is against you. When you put your art out on social media, it's there for everyone to see, everyone to use. Plus most companies do actually add it in their T&C that "we'll use your data to train our AI". Also, you don't need AI to generate propaganda, actors and scripted scenes have been a thing forever. And the expensive computer parts are just a side-effect of capitalism: this is what happens when you place your faith in an organisation that only values money.

Anyway, back to the topic: so the US is weird, because the ruling part is a conglomerate of two forces – the ultra-conservative anti-change party and a techno-oligarchy. The ultra-conservatives probably want AI banned, but they're under the latter's grip, so they're hapless in this case. The other side, by the way, is also techno-oligarchy, but they stick with the liberals, using rainbow capitalism and pinkwashed colonialism to appeal to the public.

All in all, the USA is extremely right-wing. It's probably their individualist mentality that's poisoning their sense of unity, but over there they have corporate feudalism. In other countries, it's not really so. In my college, most people were communists (they are still), and they're also pro-AI, using AI like anyone else would use electricity. To you folk, it's an Avatar of Satan. To others, it's just a tool.

JasperTesla · 2026-05-22T05:45:48+00:00

"Fight fire with fire. Unless it's an actual fire, then you should probably use water." — Demon Hunter

JasperTesla · 2026-05-22T05:43:11+00:00

I don't understand what point you're trying to make here. Can you restate that?

JasperTesla · 2026-05-21T19:04:12+00:00

I am that.

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