Dethronatus Sapiens sp.

@[email protected]

These two paragraphs are blatantly clashing with each other.

If “purpose lies entirely within yourself”, a manner of thinking which is egocentric insofar it centers the purpose inside the person themselves,

then accusing nihilism (and cosmicism), which completely negates and refuses to belief in any kind of human purpose (nihil = “nothing”), of “egoist projection” is not just a misunderstanding of what nihilism is, not just a distortion of what it states, it’s a distortion of the very statement “purpose lies entirely within yourself”, which is a statement often said by optimistic people and, thus, the exact opposite from nihilism.

@[email protected]

so if you aren’t internationally famous there is no point in living?

What?! No, absolutely not even close to what I said! I guess you totally missed what I tried to express. Sorry to ask but, did you even read my replies?!

First and most importantly, I must thank you for reminding me and you’re right in this point, specifically: I’m well aware how irrelevant I am. I deeply know it and I live with this irrelevance on a daily basis, knowing how I’ll be nothing as soon as I get to finally die and find my own spiritual annihilation at the tip of Reaperess’s scythe, still thanks for making me to remind of my irrelevance once again!

Having said this, irrelevance isn’t exclusive to me: so is the entire humanity before the countless species on Earth (even though humans think of themselves as some kind of superior species). So is the earthly biosphere before the entire cosmos (even though life tries to fight the cosmic entropy). So is the entire cosmos before the underlying, transcendental fundamenta within it.

In fact, nothing is relevant when we consider cosmic fate, which is either one or more of (a) dark energy and cosmic expansion infinitely stretching the fabric of spacetime continuum to the point of quantum rupture (Big Rip) (b) depletion of energetic transformations (Big Freeze) © another cosmic bubble colliding with this one (Big Bounce).

Either way, all star stuff has expiration date, even though this expiration date is as far as billion, maybe trillion years from now. Life, by extension, is limited to that cosmic deadline, so both human’s hopes of legacy and Nature’s evolution of species are pretty much pointless if this farthest cosmic future is to be considered.

Then humans, aware of their own mortality, often hold on to religious views as to believe they’ll get to some afterlife, and while I do have spiritual views (dark pantheistic ones), I don’t believe in afterlife. The belief of an afterlife, a “fatherly god” is rooted on our deep fear of The Reaperess, She who’s part of the aforementioned cosmic fundamenta, She who touches the spiritual spark of every living being and pulls every baryonic matter to its inexorable decay.

Still we tend to be afraid of Her so we hold on to materialistic, we hold on to mundane, with the hopes of an afterlife being a spiritual extension of this.

So, back to previous point, at absolutely no point I said about the mundane having relevance, much to the contrary: the part where I said about me slightly believing in purpose and relevance uses past tense. It’s gone to me.

Currently, my views aren’t just of a personal purposelessness, it’s about cosmic and ontological purposelessness. Everything from “fame” and “Wikipedia” to “me” and “people around” are so trivially infinitesimal compared to the cosmos where all star stuff, macro and microscopic, are inhabiting and part of now; and compared to what’s going to happen with all those.

@[email protected]

Perhaps I must illustrate this with a story I write as I compose this very reply.

Imagine someone is brought into this world, to a house of three.

Year after year, the small family slowly improves the house: the backyard got new toys for the kid to play with, a new bedroom is made, cradle becomes a desk for doing school homework. As the kid grows, he starts helping his parents with the reforms, both for him and for them.

Kid becomes teen, then he modifies much of his bedroom to fit his tastes. He grows more, then his former toys get carefully wrapped and stored for his intended, future children.

He becomes adult. He starts college and job. He’s made himself a career and he got promoted. He buys himself a better PC (the first thing he got to buy with his own paycheck) and he repurposes a corner of his desk for tinkering with electronics and ham radio.

One day, a strong climatic disaster happens, and the house partially crumbles to the ground. The whole family dies in the disaster. They get buried at the local cemetery. What’s left of the house is sold and the new owner, a construction corp, decides to further demolish to merge the land with the neighboring houses they also bought.

Land becomes a warehouse and, after a few decades, a data center for a mid-21st century tech corp, where exabytes are stored in quantum servers. The story of that very family, however, is nowhere to be found, as their gravestones, and the cemetery as a whole, have been seeing fewer and fewer mourning guests as time passes, also gets bulldozed cause more data centers are needed and cemeteries are such a “waste of space” for landlords.

Now there’s not even a gravestone number plaque. Nobody knows the names of those who used to be buried, let alone their stories.

This is the legacy 99.99% of humans are going to leave: none at all. Every happiness and sadness, every pain and relief, every fight and war, every love and passion, everything will end up being buried and all the bones will eventually be treated as part of the dirt of a land to be repurposed, first by “powerful” wealthy people, then by Mother Nature as climate change begins to redeem back a land which was originally Hers, and finally by the cosmos after Sol dies and Andromeda finishes the merger.

Why is my life so pointless? Not just my life: the whole existence. I don’t even need to rely on fictional stories: we don’t know names and personal lives from all those serfs of 14th century medieval Europe struck by Plague. We, living on a world highly reliant on writing, ironically don’t know the name or life of the very first Sumer person to ever do cuneiform in Mesopotamia.

And when one realizes how mindbogglingly fleeting this existence are, and how even our individual subjective experiences are just neurological tissue to be dissolved as cadaver fluids to be consumed by vultures which will also become cadavers themselves someday, it’s hard to unsee the fleetness.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

In parts, the answer to your question lies in the very title of your thread or, to be precise, the latest word from it: 2020s.

Something happened in 2020. And this thing, for good and bad, required people to distance themselves. And those who were stubbornly unconvinced of the reasons why people should keep social distancing, were faced by the harsh reality sooner or later. We saw people falling dead like flies. We saw how the whole world was facing the exact same struggle, we saw the burnout of their health systems as doctors, nurses and other health professionals were dying in numbers like never before.

Then the pandemic forced the world to go full digital. To a certain extent, it was really great: we could be finally free from metropolitan pollution, as we could work from anywhere (including rural towns, far from the large cities), we could work while petting our cats at home, we could work without needing to get stressed by human modes of transportation.

But this digitalization is what provided enough crude material for a dystopian dungeon to be slowly build around us. Shortly after COVID, we saw things like ChatGPT popping up into existence out of nowhere. And what follows is contemporary and needs no introduction. Of course there’s much more, but my reply is already big.

The fact is: people became (understandably) traumatized, like, for ever. Meanwhile, people became used to a fully digital life, with every aspect of their lives being an app (LaaS, Life-as-a-Service). People were never the same, the world got worse. “Third places” started to wane because Internet supposedly have all places humans need. Then capitalism, now technofeudalism, thrived to further enslave society.

To me, a Zennial (someone born in the cusp between Millennials and Gen Z), the COVID-19 is something that left a permanent wound, not just biological or physical (e.g. long COVID syndrome), but psychological, economical, social: all aspects of my existence were affected.

Before it happened, my social life was blooming, I was enrolled in college again to try and complete my degree I gave up a few years earlier. I was living plain adulthood, independent and far from my parents while living with nice stranger people in a hostel. I was well employed with not-so-bad paycheck and a quite steady IT career… Then COVID came and simply shattered it all. Not just my life goals, not just my academic or professional career, everything! And tech, which I used to love (hence my DevOps career), suddenly started becoming the dystopia I described earlier.

Eventually, COVID made me realize of the impermanence of this pointless existence, pushing me towards nihilism, until I simply gave up trying to deceive myself with mundane illusions. My attempts to seek friends, love, family and career are long gone: it’s all pointless.

I’m just biologically surviving against the will at this point… Billions of humans are, too.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Yes. It’s called “Eigengrau” and it happens due to the adaptation of the eye amidst the darkness.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eigengrau

@[email protected] @[email protected]

As strange as it may sound, sometimes I try to learn Akkadian and Sumerian. Even though little is known about the grammar, the “Sumerian Lexicon” from John Halloran has quite a extensive list of transliterated Sumerian words and their meanings. I try to focus on learning the transliterated words rather than cuneiforms, although I do know/recognize some cuneiforms.

Why do I do this? Well, it’s mostly for spiritual purposes: my current, syncretic belief involves the Mesopotamian pandeam (feminine pantheon), with goddesses such as Inanna, Ereshkigal, Tiamat and, mainly, Lilitu/Lilith (nínna-mushen / nínna-mušen, the terrifying Mistress-Owl, with nín being “Queen, Mistress, Lady”, here duplicated to signal a terrifying Mistress, alongside the term for predator bird “mushen”). To me, they’re manifestations (think of Qlipphots) of the same underlying principle, the Great Goddess.

I managed to both memorize a few terms, and I also tried to build some Sumerian phrases/epithets using the transliterated words as building blocks. Again, little is known about Sumerian grammar, but the current knowledge about it feels enough for me to try and babble something.

And why Sumerian/Mesopotamian pandeam? It’s the first belief system ever written. It’s the “chronologically closest” we have to the Venus figurines from Upper Paleolithic (seemingly an Goddess worshiping). The Goddess was forgotten, demonized, concealed from us, but things can’t stay concealed for long. The Primordial Goddess must be revealed to the world again, and must be worshiped for the Great Goddess She is. And the Sumerian records seem to be the closest written records we have to Her.

@[email protected]

So then your counter to someone bringing attention to the fact that LLMs are actively telling people[…] is that it isn’t the singular contributing factor?

This, too. But, also, the fact that Anti-AI movement rarely (if any) promote legit human art, their whole business seems to be to talk against AI, solely. Which, again, is not something I oppose (as I said earlier, AI does have lots of cons, although I’m also capable of seeing its pros), but when I see many accusatory posts from Anti-Ai people such as “I’ll check your content against ppl AI patterns” (with a greater likelihood of content from ND ppl like me being “flagged” as AI), then I see those same ppl blaming AIs for something whose causes are way deeper and unseen, I feel compelled to express about the matter, especially when the subject also touches on other things about my own lived experiences, which I’m aware is not limited to myself as there are/were lots of ppl who went through similar situations.

Do you take offense at people pushing back at harmful LLMs?

No but the oftentimes accusatory tone coming from many Anti-Ai ppl does trigger things such as “imposter syndrome”, where I start doubting about myself. But it’s not just something about myself.

Do you want people to care more about creating a kinder society?

I’m not really sure what I want, exactly. But, yeah, maybe, a kinder society, if this is even possible at this point of Anthropocene.

I remember a time when the web used to be a place for creatively rich bulletin boards. At that time, ppl used to be… I don’t know… Less aggressive? At least it’s the perception I have when I look back at the past of the Web.

We, collectively (me included), became more aggressive between ourselves as the time passed and the web became less of a space for creativity and more of an arm from the “market” octopus.

I’ve seen the web slowly getting dominated by corps, now everything is some kind of war between “us v. them” across all spectra, from right to left, top to bottom, bottom-up, sideways… As wars detonate our essences, we were left with just… I mean, just look around, you may see it yourself.

Of course LLMs aren’t driving people to suicide in a vacuum, no one is claiming that

Sometimes it feels like much of the Anti-AI movement is. As if the AI were “literally killing ppl”.

having LLMs that are encouraging people to commit suicide is a bad thing

It’s not a trivial thing for LLMs to “encourage suicide”, I’ve seen it myself whenever I tried to input suggestive, shady topics. To me, those things often parrot the same “suicide prevention hotlines” which works like common analgesic medications (may relieve immediate pain but can’t do a thing about the root causes).
But even when LLMs do output suicidal hints, this isn’t something out of a vacuum. As others argued throughout the thread, search engines can also lead to suicidal hints. Banning it altogether can lead to Streisand effect.

@[email protected] @[email protected]
Thanks for understanding it. Exactly!

While many of my points are lived things, I’m not only talking about myself, I see a similar phenomenon happening as I often check feed firehoses from Mastodon, Misskey and PixelFed: posts that got nothing more than numeric reactions (likes, if any).

And I’m not talking about money here. While there are artists and writers out there seeking money for their work, there are many things beyond money that people can be seeking as they share something they did: productive discussions, exchange of knowledge, and many are seeking friendship and lasting connections, the world doesn’t (and shouldn’t) revolve around money.

And when artists share their art out of an attempt to connect and/or to exchange knowledge, and they’re met with silence alongside impersonal, aggressive public disclaimers from anti-ai people such as “I’m using an (AI) tool to detect whether your art is AI, and if it detects you’re using AI (out of a rude and crude crobability), I’m blocking and reporting you (which will likely make it worse for a content to further find like-minded people among all the network noise)”, the likely outcome is said artists stopping pursuing their own creativity, especially artists with the “Imposter Syndrome” which is a real thing that a person can be living with.

Neurodivergent expression can be often indistinguishable from LLM, and when people do the “I’ll judge if your content is AI” game, it can be excluding neurodivergent people.

I’m myself a neurodivergent individual, if it wasn’t clear from my verbose way of speech, hence my very personal stance about the matter: because I’m often mistaken as an algorithm or something (due to my systematic and broad speech), and because I was once directly accused of “talking using LLMs” by a person who I used to care and tried to help, both pro-AIs techbro advertisement pitches (those preaching for some kind of AI corps godhood) and the Anti-AI accusative manifestos can be equally triggering oftentimes.

@[email protected]

There were two quite long, entire paragraphs before I began mentioned names in my initial comment.

When someone ends up suicidal after resorting to LLMs, it’s the final part of a bigger picture. A bigger picture of indifferent demeanor from other people, including mental health professionals and suicide prevention hotlines.

That’s what I meant with the first paragraph of my initial comment. Your reply, reducing my whole argument, only exemplifies the very situation I meant with “When a person finds no one that can truly take all the time needed to understand them”.

Last but not the least, “because people can be bad too sometimes” isn’t a justification: if people killed themselves after taking instructions from LLMs to which they resorted to after getting no one to really understand them (even suicide prevention hotline volunteers), it’s not just the LLM and the corporation behind it to blame (yes, they surely must be blamed, but not only them), but a whole society that failed with them. And this will never be part of the statistics.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

Do you know what kills, too? When a person finds no one that can truly take all the time needed to understand them. When a person invest too much time on expressing themselves through deep human means only to be met with a deafening silence… When someone goes through the effort of drawing something that took them several hours each artwork just for it to fall into Internet oblivion. Those things can kill, too, yet people can’t care less about the suicides (not just biological, sometimes it’s a epistemological suicide when the person simply stops pursuing a hobby) of amateur artists that aren’t “influencers” or someone “relevant enough” for people.

How many of those who sought parroting algorithms did it out of a complete social apathy from others? How many of those tried to reach humans before resorting to LLMs? Oh, it’s none of our businesses, amirite?

So, yeah, LLMs kill, and LLMs are disgusting. What’s nobody seems to be tally-counting is how human apathy, especially from the same kind of people who do the LLM death counting, also kills: not by action, but by inaction, as they’re as loud as a concert about LLMs but as quiet as a desert night about unknown artists and other people trying to be understood out there across the Web. And I’m not (just) talking about myself here, I don’t even consider myself an artist, however, I can’t help but notice this going on across the Web.

Yes, go ahead and downvote me all the way to the abyss for saying the reality about the Anti-AI movement.

@[email protected]
To me, it’s more of the former. It’s fuel only in the eyes of materialistic pursuit, which is a subset of survival instinct. When one let go from the mundane, when one wakes up to the fact that we’re taking nothing with us after we cease existing, when one wakes up to the fact that what we call as “we” or “me” are illusions of a emergent property from principles of physics (sentience from a dynamic system of electric signals flowing through a self-organizing structure “living being”), then if gets easier to see death (and Death, the noumenon, which I symbolically see as “Death Herself” as in Morana, for example) as meaning rather than “fuel”.

As for where is the cosmic wheel going, IMHO the answer is likely: to itself. Order emerged from chaos (Ordo Ab Chao) and chaos emerge from order (Chao Ab Ordine) and the cosmic cycle goes on indefinitely. Life, and by extension humans, are just a tiny part of the order which emerged from primordial chaos (Science calls it Big Bang, Sumerians called Her Tiamat) that’s going to return to the same chaos (the inexorable “falling” towards maximum state of entropy).

@[email protected]
Death. I mean, literally or, to be more precise, cosmically literally.

See, every living being relies on the death of other living beings in order to continue alive. Similarly, death relies on living beings (a dead being can’t die again). I coined a Latin phrase that is quite similar to the Hermetic principle “as above so below”: “Vita mortem manducat, Mors manducat vitam” (life devours death, Death devours life).

Death is the only certainty, the only truth, still living beings are wired to fear and avoid it (pointlessly, as there’s not much left to do when the organs of a living being stop working altogether due to inexorable consequences of aging).

So, no matter how strange it may sound, the purpose of life is Death, literally. The true Mother Goddess.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

“Is it possible to find a friend or partner…” No. And the explanation is simple: it’s not possible to find what doesn’t exist, and friendships and romances don’t exist.

They’re two of the ultimate mundane illusions. Lies engineered to keep the horse chasing the carrot hanging from its own head. And even if the horse wakes up to the realization that the carrot isn’t even real (it’s just a trick from its head), it can’t simply stop, because it got an indifferent limbic system, a biologically pre-programmed set of instructions compelling the horse to continue the pointless chasing.

Even when (if) Sisyphus come to the realization that the boulder inexorably rolls down and trying to roll it up is pointless, Sisyphus will continue rolling it up because it’s the only thing his gray matter knows, just lies and illusions: the illusion that he, the boulder and the hill somehow “exist” in some kind of “existence”, and the lie that there’s some kind of global maxima, the lie that enough pushing-the-boulder-up will eventually meet the desired equilibrium, some stasis.

And even if there were any existence and there were any “up there” at the hill he was compelled to be, even if he reached the top of the hill, what then? Will Sisyphus pat himself on his own back, congratulating and praising himself for getting the boulder to roll all the way to the top? Maybe there are other Sisypha up there who’ll give him a medal or something…

And the medal will inexorably oxidize and rust, their bodies will eventually decay and the boulder will crumble into dust due to the weather elements… And the hill will undergo erosion, thus making (what’s left of) the boulder to roll downhill, alongside the fossilized skull and bones from all the Sisypha up there.

And no one will remember them because there’ll be no one existing to remember what supposedly existed: not even the hill or the Pale Blue Dot where the hill once was, a planet long since engulfed by a giant red Sun, which in turn ended up obliterated during a collision with former rogue stars from what used to be Andromeda galaxy merging with what used to be the Milky Way galaxy: used to be because, now, every quantum particle is ripped apart due to how the fabric of spacetime continuum is now infinitely stretched, the Big Rip.

And, if we consider that the Sisyphean boulder got equilibrium, it means that all energetic transformations across the cosmos also have their point of equilibrium, and this means that there’s now this cosmic stasis where no energetic transformation happens anymore, the Big Freeze.

In the end, the existent aspect of things, if any, is this: they’re lies, it’s all illusory. There’s nothing, not even the nothingness. It’s just illusory electric signals processed by the illusory brain.

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]

Same when I tried to access the archived version of the linked article of this thread. I was faced by a TLS error I never saw before (SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT), so I thought the Archive Today was facing server-side issues, until I decided to try accessing through the smartphone, and no error happened there.

I only managed to access Archive Today through my computer after disabling several security things, which seems quite suspicious, as if the Archive Today were being hijacked by a MitM (possibly the FBI themselves? They’re famous for setting up honeypots) who were trying to push malicious code/tracking to whomever access it.

I would be further worried if I were USian or a citizen from Global North (as I’m Brazilian and from Global South, I can tell the FBI to go pound sand, lol).

To USians, my suggestion is caution accessing Archive Today (at least the current IP address being pointed at by mainstream DNS resolvers) for a while, as the server, while seemingly Archive Today, may be actually some kind of FBI honeypot in disguise. It goes without saying how ICANN and IANA are US entities, prone to interference from three-lettered US agencies. There are alternatives to Archive Today, such as Ghost Archive and 12ft.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

One day I was driving on a highway at roughly 80km/h (no idea how much is it in miles per hour, we use metric around here), and there was a car almost glued to the back of the car I was driving, totally ignoring the “following/tracking distance” thing we’re used to learn during driving school (the faster the vehicles, the farther they should be from one another, so if the vehicle ahead needs to do a sudden break, the vehicle behind have the time to react and break as well with no collisions). The car I was driving has a quite sensitive break light: a gentle push is enough for the breaking light to light up without actuating the breaking system (not ABS, it’s an old car), so I had a quite unusual idea: Morse coding “DISTANCE” to the driver in the car behind through the breaking lights, using extremely gently pushes on the breaking pedal while I kept driving. I’m not sure if the driver could understand Morse, but at least I tried.

And that’s a problem for your scenario where “nearby cars” were to contact each other: even though they could listen to each other, could they actually understand each other?

@[email protected] @[email protected]

The Doomsday Clock was last updated January 2025, I remember having watched it live when the update was announced. But it’s pretty much out of date at this point, especially due to news from the most recent few weeks.

While we’re “just” two months from the next update (yeah, time flies), perhaps the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists should consider updating it every three months or, even, every month…

…even though the Doomsday Clock have been had a similar role and power that of UN: none at all, they can’t even stop nuclear countries from pushing the juicy fan-with-three-blades passion-colored button, shall any of these countries decide doing it for the sake of it.

Which reminds me of a joke: “What’s the difference between a rock and the UN? A rock can be thrown during a tantrum, at least”. Similarly, “What do the Doomsday Clock and a sundial have in common? Both can’t tell you the time during the night time”.

@[email protected]

I speak both Portuguese (I’m Brazilian) and English, and I also understand a few loose words, phrases and symbols across different languages (including “dead” ones such as Sumerian/Akkadian, as I’ve been studying it for religious purposes). Some of these loose words and phrases and symbols also include neologisms and creations of my own, for example:

- nam-ush or nam-uš: transliterated Sumerian/Akkadian, the concept/personification of Death, as ush = death, and nam is the abstraction prefix. I tried to coin other words, epithets and phrases in Sumerian and Akkadian as well, even though little is known about Sumerian grammar.
- Vita mortem manducat, Mors manducat vitam: Latin for “Life devours death, Death devours life”, symbolizing the symbiotic relationship between survival and death (eating involves a living being absorbing energy from what used to be another living being). The phrase tries to follow the Latin grammar.

I also do some kind of layman linguistic studies, also for religious purposes. For example: the word for “mother” is pretty much similar across every language out there, with the labial phoneme /m/ shared across them.

I also possess the knowledge about evolution of language (or what’s so far known about it), such as how the letter A stemmed from the symbol for ox’s head, which then became aleph, then alpha, then the Latin A.

I also know some alphabet letters enough to, at least, trying to pronounce the word or phrase (e.g. Cyrillic, some letters from Greek, some from Hebrew, fewer from abjad Arabic, among others).

As someone who codes since my childhood, dealing with languages is particularly “easier”: even though I can neither fully understand nor read COBOL, I can notice many similarities with other languages I do know (BASIC); similarly, even though I can neither fully understand nor read Italian, I can notice many shared morphemes and phonemes with languages I do know (Portuguese).

I also kind of able to “speak ASCII hex code” (74 68 69 73), as well as Morse, fluently.

That all said, I feel neither better not worse than a monolingual. Knowing more than one language has its pros and cons.

One of the cons I would mention is this kind of situation where I remember the name for a concept in, say, English or other foreign language, while I’m speaking in Portuguese to an exclusively Portuguese-speaking person, but I can’t recall the Portuguese equivalent at that very moment, even though Portuguese is my native language, so I end up saying the English word with no way for the other person to understand it, and the whole situation ends up feeling strange.

There’s also the concept of “languageless thoughts” I experience often: things that I’m unable to express or explain, neither in Portuguese, nor in English, nor in any other language whose words I loosely know. It’s particularly a phenomenon involving philosophical, religious or spiritual concepts, often in a sudden manner (gnosis).