It’s not AI-generated. I’m the author. I wrote it in about an hour this morning, then spent another twenty minutes or so fixing a few mistakes. There are probably still a few more in there :)
There are AI tells all over the article unlike two previous articles I saw on the blog.
It's a daily hacker news coal post regardless: "see how I can't be replaced because I do some more things". There's nothing new in it and some rehashing of this argument gets posted to HN ten times a week.
The article is entirely handwritten. As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty proud of how it turned out, even if, in a long article like this, I have to use AI tools like Grammarly and WordReference here and there to sound more fluent and natural. There are probably still plenty of mistakes in it which, if anything, is further proof that a human wrote it. I'm sorry you didn't find it interesting, and I hope that future submissions will better meet your standards.
But Nietzsche has more impact on minds of people. In 100 years I am sure Bronze Age Pervert will be seen as more influential than some random philosophist from random university.
I think he's probably seen as more influential now, given that it's widely believed that he's been read by nearly all of the young staffers in the Trump admin.
(Hate to have to add this caveat and acquiesce to the Reddit-ification of HN, but: caveat lector, the above statement is not an endorsement)
I agree with you. My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers (someone included a link to philpapers.org and all I saw were various editions of books written BY Nietzsche, I'm not sure what their point was with that link). Is he widely read by non-philosophers and has he had an impact with this same group? I think he has.
If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. Nietzsche's writings I would label more as literature and not philosophy. When I reread BGE, standing on its own I find it entertaining, but his readings and understanding of past philosophers were quite wrong.
Anecdotally, in my eight years of studying texts with people who are professional philosophers and meeting regularly with them in discussions, I would say Nietzsche's name was mentioned maybe twice, and both times by individuals who were quite new to philosophy. Nietzsche is just not that interesting philosophically.
The bottom right of each work listed shows how many times it has been referenced. For example, the top link, Beyond Good and Evil, has 510 academic citations on PhilPapers, alone. That’s a lot, and very clearly shows that your claim here:
My point is that Nietzsche is not really taken seriously as a philosopher by philosophers
Interesting. I did some more digging and according to several metrics it seems Nietzsche is, in fact, cited quite heavily, and not just in non-philosophical publications which would've been my first guess. Touché.
> If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc.
Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.
You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.
Yeah, this is such an entertaining exchange of layering being more "inner" and clued in. Reading the Greeks, Nietzsche or even, oh horror of horrors, Marcus Aurelius (if not "more interesting" earlier authors in his tradition) can make people reflect on their lives. All these can lead you astray in interesting ways but at least you are going somewhere, anywhere. There's always salty people who insist you should struggle through respectable academic philosophers instead, lest you are some kind of a prole.
This is kind of analytic (but also continental) mindset really does feel like wannabe math, just without visible correspondence to reality, like can be observed even with basic arithmetic or geometry. Also curiously you cannot really get the same results independently, without being nurtured by people from the circle. If you're shutting down earlier human curiosity about ethics, epistemology, meaning of language etc. and care only about your short lineage, this feels analogous, I don't know, to something like being a lore "scholar" of some franchise considering ponderous questions of how W40K deities relate to each other. And God help you if you bring up anything outside of approved lore or some other parts of human culture.
> There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically
Try reading Parmenidean Ascent if you get a chance [1]. While not his main thesis, Michael Della Rocca argues why not treating "ancient" philosophy as philosophy proper is in error. Personally, I've studied Aristotle, and Plato, quite a bit and I couldn't disagree with you more.
> What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch.
That claim is contestable. I do agree that Frege, for one, was the first person to advance philosophical logic in 2000 years, with the previous advances made by Aristotle himself. Please study Aristotle's Organon. His singular advances in logic were astounding and not much else was done in logic until the likes of Frege appeared on the scene. What Heidegger did in philosophy was extraordinary, but it was built on the shoulders of previous philosophical giants. So what the "modernists" did was really not "from scratch".
I applaud you for not being in the least phased by blunt, needlessly confrontational manner of my writing!
This is how you really convinced me to read Della Rocca's treatment on history of philosophy that you linked to, even though I personally find the idea of great geneology spanning the greeks up to modern-day philosophy PhD students completely laughable. You said it yourself: Frege was not the result of iterative, standing on shoulders of Giants-esque improvement. He just "showed up." Clearly, developments in language and sciences opened the door to new line of inquiry which largely made whole swaths of the so-called philosophy (historically speaking) completely redundant. Wittgenstein knew this intuitively, and it's perhaps the biggest take-away from his body of work (contra logical positivism nonsensia)
I will concede that Aristotle on logic (specifically) is actually not a waste of time, but in general, all the time spent reading the Greeks, dialectics most of all, is the time I'm never getting back. I'm sorry, but the Greeks' command of language is simply too superfluous, or rather ill-equipped, for the purpose of philosophy. Regardless of translation. You could say they were too early... Which is another way to say they were "wrong." I won't go as far. It's kind of important to teach philosophy undergrad students some of it, because so much of their academic life will be spent performatively back-linking to Hellenic tradition to please their cargo-cultist professors. I know academic philosophy is full of this because I sometimes put myself through the pain of reading what they write. If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato? Did you just pick it up and go with it at some point, or was this a deliberate regression?
> If you don't mind me asking, what gets you going with Plato?
I am definitely no Plato expert, but two texts: Plato's Theaetetus and his Parmenides.
Questions of accurate translations aside, if one can focus on the metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological ideas presented and questions posed, I think one can spend the rest of one's life trying to understand these two texts. As an added incentive to whet your appetite, Wittgenstein was particularly interested in Theaetetus in his later years.
And if I had to recommend two texts from Aristotle, definitely his Physics and his Metaphysics. Here he's dealing with the really deep, and meaty, problems of philosophy.
These four texts definitely get me going, so to speak, although my talking about them bores my wife silly.
[EDIT] And you didn't ask for this, but here goes anyway: the three philosophers that "get me going" and whom I think are the three greatest philosophers are Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel. (I know that last one will get me a lot of hate!)
> Our monthly total spend is around $180 with a team of 6, about half technical; our biggest line items are for American models or subscriptions which we probably will be planning to get rid of.)
Please tell more :). Do you pay per token from bedrock / openrouter / somewhere else? How many tokens you use over the month, and how many for each task? Which harnesses?
Pay for DeepSeek directly. One developer insists on having his own account and in theory expenses it, but he forgets to turn in $10 expense reports. (Total spend in last two months = about $45.)
Pay for OpenAI Pro directly, but I’m the only guy that uses Codex. $100 a month. My nontechnical partner likes to talk to ChatGPT 5.5 Pro for image related tasks (think generating interior decorating pics).
The nontechnical staff use a Gemini account on a Google family AI Pro sub. I use Antigravity when working on Android or Google Cloud API codebases.
Everyone gets OpenCode Go. The cost is trivial. $10 a month per person.
Pay for MiMo directly. We use it during Chinese off peak hours though. Total spend so far $25 in last month.
We run a few Qwen models locally and pretty much have them pegged all day. RTX 5090 on a PC and a Mac Studio.
There’s also Grok which is used for Imagine for artistic / graphic design related work. I also use the subscription for a vision model in my oh-my-pi harness.
We’re having discussions about how to pull in GLM-5.2 cost effectively. We compete with third world development shops so we can’t really pass on inference costs, but we can benefit from getting jobs done for customers faster. But ⅔ of our work is either internal or open source projects we can’t bill for.
Not the GP, but I use Opus for planning, Deepseek for actual coding (implementing the plan) and GPT for review. GPT is inexhaustible on the $20/mo plan, Deepseek is dirt cheap (maybe $10/mo) and Claude is Claude.
Do you want your children to grow up amidst traffic, potholes, pollution and stray dogs?
Maybe the well-earning FAANG SDEs on here might pretend to escape the reality of Indian metropolis by renting or buying an apartment in a "gated society".
Yet you have to go outside the "gated community" and routinely exposed to the realities of metropolitan India, which exacerbates everything wrong with the country by packing a million of them in one PIN code. This is only going to get worse in the coming years.
There's no solution apart from developing the "tier-2" cities and villages.
Every mediocre "SDE" leetcodemaxxing to work for the same 15-20 top paying companies HQ'd in Eastern Bangalore is not going to end well.
Properly vaccinated and properly treated they can be part of the fauna of the city.
Man and dogs have befriended and helped each other for tens of thousands of years. Turning our backs when we don't need them anymore is positively shitty behavior that humans are capable of.
A. You may always travel in an car and stay in a gated apartment. But for people who want to walk in the night or use a motorcycle, they are an absolute menace.
B. Vaccination is impossible in a corrupt and low trust society. If government sponsors vaccinations, there will be a significant portion of dogs which will be marked vaccinated without even vaccinating them. Nevermind counterfeit vaccines: https://travelhealthpro.org.uk/news/867/falsified-rabies-vac... . By what measure can I trust that vaccination is actually successful?
C. They make it very hard to jog or bicycle in residential areas. These would otherwise be good options for fitness.
D. Barking
E. Even vaccinated, they gang up and maul children and elderly.
No civilized society has this sort of "fauna".
Instead, people in civilized societies can jog and walk.
It is usually (i) anxiety triggered over reactions on the part of humans or worse, plain abusive behavior (ii) such as kicking, beating the dogs or driving/riding dangerously.
People familiar with dogs have no problems with them.
Stray dogs are warmly welcomed at the Taj hotel of Mumbai. No patron minds.
> It is usually (i) anxiety triggered over reactions on the part of humans or worse, plain abusive behavior (ii) such as kicking, beating the dogs or driving/riding dangerously.
Sorry that it happened. I can give some useful tips on handling such a situation.
From what I have seen, such incidents cluster into two types
i) the dogs have been habitually harassed by bikers, who hit and kick. You might have no intention of doing that but the dogs don't know that. It's bad human behavior that has trained the dogs to react like that. Unfortunately very common.
ii) these are play chases / mock chases. Their fun goes away when there is no prey that's running away. This is exacerbated by the "prey" speeding up or acting scared.
In both cases, stopping and holding your ground dissuades them if a chase is already on. Note you are considerably bigger and can inflict substantial damage to them. They are respectful when your behavior projects that belief.
If the chase is not already on, slowing down prevents the chase in the first place. They may growl and bark though.
It's only trained attack dogs, guard dogs that will commit to attacking a human holding ground.
If strays posed genuine danger the Taj Mahal hotel would have been out of business several decades ago. Instead of being a failed business it's one of the most esteemed hotels of India.
I know. That's human fear kicking in and it makes it worse. Try it once, success brings confidence. Your own anxiety around dogs might be making things worse for you.
If you search you will find that holding ground is the way to deal with any territorial dog pack, stray or not. It helps to have grown up with dogs around, then it becomes second nature.
Works with pack of hissing, charging monkeys too. Been there done that, well I charged back, rather than just holding ground. Walked away with my food in my possession.
No biker in Bangalore has time to play kicks and hits with street dogesh. Dogs may chase you at slightest disturbance even if you don't even look at them. You sound like one those "bhadralok" upper class pacifists.
This applies to software engineers too. Especially now there's claude to help them complete the tickets without understanding the system.