It reads like someone discovered analogies and decided they’re a substitute for thinking.
The entire argument lives and dies on one move: calling AI an “alien.” And it’s not even consistent. It starts with “alien” as in foreign invader, then quietly upgrades it to “space alien,” and from that point on everything just inherits whatever sci fi trait sounds dramatic. That’s not reasoning, that’s a word doing a costume change and dragging the argument along with it.
And honestly, the quality of comments on HN feels like it’s been tracking the broader decline in cognitive performance. The long running Flynn Effect has stalled or reversed in parts of the US. Some datasets show small but real drops in IQ related measures over the past decade. You read threads like this and it’s hard not to feel like you’re watching that play out in real time.
The premise of the article is exactly the same as the title. You’re making an assumption that anyone pointing out these numbers is claiming men are being oppressed, and then arguing against that. There’s no need. Almost no one is making that claim.
The real issue is the opposite narrative. The idea that men broadly oppressed women across history, preventing them from participating in economic roles, and that modern outcomes are primarily the result of that dynamic being corrected.
There are a number of reasons at play here why that premise doesn’t make much sense (without further context). Here are just five points:
1. For most of history, labor was dictated by physical constraints and survival needs. Work like hunting, land clearing, construction, and early farming depended heavily on upper body strength and endurance, which skewed participation toward men. That’s a division of labor shaped by biology and environment, not a simple story of exclusion. As technology advanced, much of that physicality became unnecessary, which is a major driver of why participation has equalized in modern roles.
2. Women’s roles were not an absence from work, but a concentration in different forms of labor. Childbearing, childcare, food preparation, and household production were essential to survival, even if they don’t show up cleanly in modern employment statistics.
3. Many of the institutions we associate with modern economic life, including formalized science, engineering, and large-scale industry, were disproportionately created and originated in contexts where men were the primary participants. That’s not a claim about superiority, but it does mean the structure of what we now recognize as “work” and “progress” was heavily shaped by that historical imbalance.
4. The concept of a formal job market is relatively recent. In pre-industrial societies, most people, including men, were not participating in anything resembling today’s labor market. Applying modern employment categories backward creates a distorted picture of inclusion and exclusion.
5. Modern workforce participation is strongly driven by changes in technology and incentives. As physical constraints decreased and the returns to education and careers increased, more women entered and competed in the workforce. That shift is not well explained by a single narrative of oppression being lifted, but by broader structural changes.
> You’re making an assumption that anyone pointing out these numbers is claiming men are being oppressed, and then arguing against that.
I'm sorry but I'm not making any such assumptions nor claims. Sorry if you got that impression. If anything, I'm referring to this part of the title: "What's going on with men?"
Other than that, thanks for your contribution - you're listing a lot of important points. If I may add one: disposable hygiene pads that actually work are a fairly recent invention. Through the centuries, women used all kinds of different measures to handle menstruation bleeding that were, however, often associated with social stigma. Therefore, splitting the daily work load such that women could stay was advantageous also just for this practical reason - I suppose it wouldn't have been so awesome to be out in the fields or in a factory during that one week of the month.
bro listen to the guy above you. You need the lowest friction way to help users visualize what this is. By low friction I mean the exact way tik tok gets people to watch thousands of videos for hours. Only one click and zero brain power.
I wanted to buy this. I tried the demo, but then I hit a wall of no agent connected and gave up and came here looking for reviews on whether this is good or shit.
Unfortunately, that video does not explain anything at all. I now know that the product can be used with a mouse, that I can select things and set some properties. Who is it for? What does it do? Why should I use it?
Just because the path is bad doesn't mean it won't happen.
The other thing you're failing to look at is momentum and majority opinion. When you look at that... nothings going to change, it's like asking an addict to stop using drugs. The end game of AI will play out, that is the most probably outcome. Better to prepare for the end game.
It's similar to global warming. Everyone gets pissed when I say this but the end game for global warming will play out, prevention or mitigation is still possible and not enough people will change their behavior to stop it. Ironically it's everyone thinking like this and the impossibility of stopping everyone from thinking like this that is causing everyone to think and behave like this.
> The other thing you're failing to look at is momentum and majority opinion. When you look at that... nothings going to change, it's like asking an addict to stop using drugs. The end game of AI will play out, that is the most probably outcome. Better to prepare for the end game.
Perhaps I didn't sound pessimistic enough lol? I completely agree what you're saying here. This is happening whether we like it or not.
On global warming I also agree you're not going to get every nation to coordinate, but least global warming has a forcing function somewhere down the line since there's only a limited amount of fossil fuels in the ground that make economical sense to extract. AI on the other hand really has no clear off-path, at every point along the way it makes sense to invest more in AI. I think at best all we can expect to do is slow progress, which might just be enough to ensure the our generation and the next have a somewhat normal life.
My p(doom) is near 99% for a reason... I think that AI progression is basically almost a certainty – like maybe a 1/200 chance that no significant progress is made from here over the next 50 years. And I also think that significant progress from here more or less guarantees a very bad outcome for humanity. That's a harder one to model, but I think along almost all axises you can assume there's about 50 very bad outcomes for every good outcome – no cancer cure without super viruses, no robotics revolution without killer drones, no mass automation without mass job loss which results in destabilising the global order and democratic systems of governance...
I am prepping and have been for years at this point... I'm an OG AI doomer. I've been having literal nightmares about this moment for decades, and right now I'm having nightmares almost every night. It's scares me because I know all I can do is delay my fate and that of those I love.
You would if there was one other company with a just as capable god like AI. You’d undercut them by 500 which would make them undercut you. Do that a couple of times and boom. 20 dollars.
That's still assuming that they're competing as consumer tools, rather than competing to discover the next miracle drug or trading algorithm or whatever. The idea is that there'd more profitable uses for a super-intelligent computer, even if there were more than one.
But would miracle drugs and trading algorithms be as profitable as AI research/chip design/energy research? Probably if AI is by far the biggest growth in the economy majority of the AI's usage internally should (as incentivized by economics) in some way work towards making itself better.
Same!
I just finished the book a few days ago. The first half is really good, a cool premise and interesting story. The second half just got a bit too weird for me and by the final chapter I was happy it was finished lol.
The first few chapters of that book are some of the coolest I've ever read. I agree it really drops off in the second half, but would still recommend it to people.
They were being snarky about a comment when they literally didn't read the entire sentences they were being snarky about. No, I don't think I was unnecessarily harsh.
I had the same issue. I figured it out before I'd have commented similarly, but I completely understand where the confusion came from and I don't attribute it to your reading skills.
It's not pure hype. The linear trendline of AI in the last couple of years from chatbot to autocomplete to agentic coding does point to developer replacement in a couple years.
Now mind you a trendline is a predictor and the trends don't always travel in a line. The future is unknown but a trendline that makes the prediction of AI taking over in a couple of years is not an unrealistic prediction simply because of past progress. That is the most probably conclusion given the information we have.
Discarding that as just "hype" just means you're not being very rational or logical which is normal given we're on HN.
This is not true. In theory if the agent is smart enough it out thinks your ideas and builds the solution around itself so that it can escape.
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