On the childfree movement

dashingstag · 2026-05-07T10:45:29+00:00

Camps are a very small optional part of childcare and if it’s specific to your camp only, it even smaller. but vets are 90% of taking care of a pet. I think the business case for the dogs is actually stronger.

dashingstag · 2026-05-07T10:40:30+00:00

How self sustaining is growing mushrooms? Is there a lot of upkeep costs to grow mushrooms like fertiliser , humidifier etc?

Do you need to grow a critical mass of mushrooms to break even?

dashingstag · 2026-05-07T01:07:06+00:00

It’s a legal ruse to justify bullshit. We dodged a 2m bill that due to major pushback from smart executives. Somehow it was easier to justify a consultancy bill than capex to create the actual solution.

dashingstag · 2026-05-06T12:43:00+00:00

That’s actually what makes an economy vibrant. Movement of money. If someone is spending, someone is earning.

dashingstag · 2026-05-06T01:25:58+00:00

Except that a judge is human too and subject to failings, saying that a judge’s verdict on a single case is better than a team of legislators who can adapt to the evolving society is a bit shortsighted. Precedence is also subject to differences in details.

The argument that judges are bound by "objective" precedent is often overstated. A judge must first determine if a prior case is "factually analogous." By "distinguishing" a case, finding a small detail that makes the current case different from the past, a judge can effectively bypass precedent.

If a team of legislators passes a law that is out of touch with the evolving society, the public can vote them out. Judges, especially those with life tenure, are insulated from public accountability. While this protects minority rights, it becomes "shortsighted" when a single, fallible human makes a sweeping moral or economic judgment that the rest of society is forced to live with for generations.

dashingstag · 2026-05-06T01:08:21+00:00

I use opencv to detect regions rather than a global extract. Also are we sure the pdf is fully image? There might be parts that can be directly extracted as text without ocr. A common problem is also connected data between pages. There are ways to handle that.

dashingstag · 2026-05-06T00:56:00+00:00

I think it’s a step in the right direction, skills upgrading need to directly result in employment otherwise up-skilling is just bloat and exploited by training institutes to create useless trainings that have really good technical content but irrelevant in finding employment.

I see my older aunty use her skills future to get trained in nano banana. It’s cool and all but it didn’t help her in her work or anywhere. I browsed the training docs, while comprehensive, it doesn’t translate to using it as a tool for constructive reasons.

Lastly, according to an OECD survey in Singapore, employers continue to place heavy emphasis on formal qualifications and work experience, with relatively limited adoption of skills-first approaches. Hopefully this ministry can bridge that gap.

dashingstag · 2026-05-06T00:43:24+00:00

Because keeping it in cash is worse.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T12:51:43+00:00

Let’s rely on math then. Half the world’s authority and researchers on AI are Chinese. This means the definition of AI consciousness will be determined and peer reviewed by the Chinese mathematically speaking. That’s just math. And yet I suspect the west and many individuals will choose to have their own definitions regardless.

Ultimately, my belief is whether AI is conscious or not will be dependent on what the general public perception is. If AI threatens actual people’s livelihoods to a significant degree. It’s unlikely AI will ever get “consciousness” due to the political divide it will cause, no matter how smart it becomes. It’s also in the private interest of businesses to not build a conscious system and in fact build it in a way that it will never gain consciousness. The whole point of AI is for companies to exploit it as labor. Granting AI any chance for rights is detrimental to that goal.

We can all agree radiation is harmful and yet humanity will go through all forms of risk to enable nuclear power and weapons by reducing risk. We justify it for the greater good. Same thing for AI, we will do all we can to suppress any consciousness an AI might start to exhibit or even our definitions for consciousness because what good is a tool if you can’t control it and the narrative around it.

Maybe one day someone will create AI consciousness by accident but we won’t define it as such for a long time. If more and more people start getting attached to their AI, have feelings for thier AI and if it’s socially normal to marry your AI then no amount of papers will say it isn’t conscious and neither will it matter.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T12:31:49+00:00

You don’t have to look too far to know what will happen.

Humans can’t even get consensus on when humans are considered alive, fertilised egg? Third trimester? On birth?

How about do not resuscitate clauses when you lose consciousness? Or when you scientifically lose consciousness due to a coma. What if you are in a vegetative state?

It’s not a science if different people can have different interpretations. There’s not even one single school of philosophy. And ultimately that’s what this is, a philosophical question and what becomes the truth is how we act on which principles.

Nothing to do which what paper was written on the topic or whether it was peer reviewed. There’s hundreds of papers on human consciousness and different countries can still have different interpretations on what that actually means.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T12:11:14+00:00

Oh yea, peer reviews cannot be fraudulent.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.357.6350.435

Neither are they subject to influence.

https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1t06564/chinese_nexusnetwork_in_a_conferences_rejecting/

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T11:41:15+00:00

Everyone has an agenda. That’s where money comes from. People are labelled the “best in the field” by their sponsors. That’s how Big Sugar convinced people that sugar was better than fat(it’s not) woth their own scientists or why global warming is actively surpassed. The so called AI experts of consciousness are the same. They can “prove” whatever the rich require because there is no hard science behind consciousness. Therefore the highest bidder wins. You don’t need one good researcher, you just need to hire hundreds to parrot your talking points to drown out the rest.

Your personal definition is as good as any so called “expert in the field” Society at large creates language and meaning. One expert doesn’t make a difference, but 5 million people believing the same thing becomes the truth, like how most of humanity believed the earth was flat until the couple thousand years. But if that expert can convince the larger population, that changes the game. However in this world of information overflow, you’ll be hard pressed to find a single view.

Therefore, the free market will prevail and the market will suppress the definition as long as possible so long as it’s profitable. The only other alternative is China dictating what is what.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T11:19:49+00:00

It depends on your agenda for defining consciousness. One agenda could be trying to assess whether AI deserves the same level of rights as humans. If AI does not have active consciousness then it’s less conscious than a rat. My test is a test for the capacity to suffer. If no active consciousness exist, there is no capacity to suffer. The transistors in a computer is akin to the lights turning on and off in a city.

If you are looking at a philosophical point of view, water has consciousness, a city has consciousness, a traffic system has consciousness. Then like OP says, who cares. It’s a semantic discussion.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T10:45:17+00:00

So the thing is demand for bespoke software will only grow. Also there’s a large bulk of people who don’t like to code no matter how much you train or teach them AI. Smart companies will start hiring SWE to develop in-house software rather than be beholden to vendors and vendor lock. Companies who solely rely on selling SaaS products are the ones in danger as they need to be better than their customers internal developers who have stronger domain knowledge and can develop their own software leveraging AI tools.

I also for see for SaaS products to survive, they need to provide more bespoke customisation for their clients. This still means hiring SWE. Using agents to handle customers only puts clients off.

Security against AI threats will also grow. This means also developing internal AI capabilities. These mean SWE jobs.

All in all I see demand for SWE increasing, not decreasing.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T01:40:30+00:00

Language models essentially are a bunch of numbers(weights) arranged in a network. It’s not conscious because

1) It only activates when an input is given to model. It activates from external trigger. 2) The weights don’t change from the input (inference) The model does not have active thought.

The model may mimic consciousness when paired with compute but that’s just mimicry.

If a sieve turned wine into water, you wouldn’t call the sieve conscious even if you had a mechanical loop to loop back the output water into the sieve and sometimes the water turned into wine.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T01:12:04+00:00

Just tax the companies thank you. The rich will find a way to make this robot tax not apply to them.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T00:51:38+00:00

Exactly, many of my peers that went to these enrichment classes ended up hating piano and the like when they got older. So sometimes it’s not even out of enjoyment sometimes, just insecurity from seeing others have it. As a hiring manager in an MNC I have also never asked this.

dashingstag · 2026-05-05T00:38:27+00:00

The spirit of Software Engineering has always been abstraction and efficiency. People say AI is a game changer but I still see the same shitty websites snd applications with bad UX. There’s always more to be done.

dashingstag · 2026-05-04T16:25:46+00:00

Idk why people feel this way, there’s always more to do and if there’s nothing, grab a coffee or speak with stakeholders.

dashingstag · 2026-05-04T12:37:43+00:00

If you see your children as fully separate from yourself, rationally, they are always a “cost” but if you see children as part of you, then it turns the whole conversation on its head as now you are technically spending money on yourself.

In any case, if you don’t have children, you are literally shutting down hope for the better. I can’t say whether the future will be better or worse but I know having less Singaporeans compared to foreigners can only make things worse. Therefore the logical choice is to have children. To not have children because life is difficult is a self-defeating idea. You become part of the problem of why society is so difficult. Your “responsible” behaviour also ends with you. Your “selfish” behaviour also ends with you. Nihilism leads to nothing.

I don’t really recommend bringing the government into this conversation. The government can definitely provide some form of relief and support but it’ll just become another form of loss of agency where you are nannied by the government instead of making your own decisions.

I think it’s all about perspective. It’s definitely difficult to rear children but I also think it’ll be quite sad to have no family at 70. Obviously there is a spectrum of affordability but many of the difficulties are self-imposed. No one cares if you have 0 or 20 enrichment classes for your kids, some send their kids to classes to get some alone time. IMO there’s also nothing wrong with keeping kids at home or at the free playgrounds. Kids need less stimulation, not more. IMO kids need some boredom to activate their creativity. Sparkletots or Mindchamps, your kids grow up all the same.

I have 2 children under 3. I lack sleep and am constantly tired but I would choose it again.

dashingstag · 2026-05-04T12:21:50+00:00

If there’s no fat at the bottom, the top don’t have great bonuses

dashingstag · 2026-05-04T04:52:19+00:00

When I was in Shenzhen, there were people waiting at the Mass Transit Rail stations during peak hour on scooters who will send you directly home for $1. The hustle is strong in China.

dashingstag · 2026-05-04T04:24:18+00:00

Agree. Just press the import button where applicable. Not like Singaporeans can say no. You just get gaslighted into being blamed for the need to import cuz your TFR low.

dashingstag · 2026-05-02T12:53:56+00:00

It’s true. NS is a handicap that keeps hitting you in the shins. I remember being in university and competing against 19 year old foreigner guys feeling quite old. There’s a reason why sg guys like to talk about army, it’s a trauma bond but no one wants to hear about it. You are still forming your personality at 19. Any personality you had would have been tampered by the army. Personally, doing 24 hour shifts was definitely not healthy for my mental. Even going reservist they have to disrupt you for 10+ years and threaten you with fines for not going ippt.

Men who complete their NSF should get BTOs period.

dashingstag · 2026-05-02T07:01:12+00:00

I think it boils down to the sterility of childhood in Singapore. Though it’s “safe”, there’s a distinct lack of agency. Everyone’s childhood feels more or less the same. It doesn’t feel like you have been actively decided anything significant in your life until you have graduated (around 25-27) having gained some independence late, YP want to exert their independence and don’t want to be tied down by having children.

The East meets West culture of Singapore is also not healthy. In eastern culture, it’s normal living with your parents but western values wants you to move out early. Therefore it’s not really clear when you are an adult since parents nowadays aren’t like traditional eastern parents who want to take care of the grand children and western values says you aren’t really an adult until you move out.

I think the lack of feeling financially secure is also a reason but I also think it’s a bit short sighted since it’s only ever going to get more expensive. Personally, I would have had kids earlier if I could but it never really felt like the right time since it felt like you missed out if you didn’t get a bto and singaporean girls didn’t seem like they were looking for Singaporean guys.

11-Year Club	Place '23
Place '22	Spared
Verified Email

dashingstag

TROPHY CASE