dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
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User ID: 583
I don't understand the implication of a medical right in this context. For instance, you don't need a medical right to buy a plane ticket and pay out of pocket for whatever cosmetic surgery you want.
I mean doctors will give you the sex change hormones or surgeries you ask for if you pay them their fee.
Are you okay with laws banning these trans medical practices or are you okay with consenting adults doing these things?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
2d ago
I appreciate this argument but I would also like to push back a bit.
How do you feel about women whose breasts grow grotesquely huge after childbirth and they have breast reductions so they can regain range of motion and feel less bad about how they look? Most insurance actually covers this.
What about dudes who feel very scrawny and not manly enough who take steroids and hit the gym and get swole? Doctors will never prescribe steroids for this even out of pocket and even if the guy feels suicidal.
What if trans rights groups stopped at simply demanding the medical right to have access to hormones and trans surgeries but didn't demand health insurance or social medical plans cover it. Is that okay?
Let's talk about your penis. How do you feel about it on a scale from 1 to 10 where
1 is "An appendage I associate with great fun and joy especially when it's very hard and having an orgasm and ejaculating inside of a female"
and 10 is more like "A fleshy ugly cockroach-like thing sticking out of my body that I would cut off at the first opportunity if I could find and afford a doctor willing to do it"
Do you find yourself flip flopping much between those? Do you think you should trust your belief less if you are firmly at #1 rather than scoring your penis a more even and sober #5?
There are a lot of narcissistic tourists to trans stuff that cloudy the discourse considerably but there are honest to goodness people that are at #10 and have been for as long as they can remember.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
You say fantastical global regulatory regimes and I hear big kid threatening to blow up the Three Gorges Dam if they don't comply.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
The nuclear non-proliferation treaty was not about preventing nuclear apocalypse. They just wanted a fantastical global regulatory regime.
My steelman of @sarker is: yeah LLMs are cool but the real advances come from RL which is narrow and special and difficult to do in non-easily verifiable contexts. General superintelligence is therefore not coming soon.
My counter is something like: just from pre training alone we see huge leaps towards general intelligence and some glimmers of superintelligence. LLMs even in GPT4 era are surprisingly good at chess despite no specific training in chess, for example.
We may not need RL across every possible domain to get general superintelligence, just poking at enough diverse points in the frontier may solve the whole.
And there's lots of room to poke at it through RL approaches: revisiting the DeepMind stuff for example, build a bot that can kick ass at every video game with the same training set. Including building a robot hand that can operate a controller and robot eye that sees what's going on by watching the TV. (Despite all of the hype DeepMind was nowhere close to any of this). I have a hard time believing that nailing that narrow seeming RL problem can't generalize widely.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
3d ago
But LLMs are getting freakishly good at things they haven't been specifically trained on. Their intelligence does generalize.
Such as?
This already seems like such a skeptic's lens that any example I provide will be dismissed as "but it was in the training data lolol".
I meant to use "warehouse" to de-hand wave "an academy". Like just put robots in a big space far away from people and give them diverse tasks to train on. I did not mean to literally imply we'd put them to work in a warehouse and simulate them.
The aim is not directly "build better box stacking robots", it's "we're reaching limits on what we can teach by training on words/code/math so maybe we can get the rest of the way there by doing enough different real world tasks and just from having robots amble about in an environment that we unlock general intelligence".
Training on words on the internet has limits so next lets train agents embodied in spaces, virtual and physical.
I would say Fable is already superhuman at software in general. It's much faster than I am at writing and debugging code and exhibits a high degree of decent taste. The only problem is I run out of tokens so fast. The writing code part is impressive enough but the way it can just look at buggy programs and bang out 50 line test scripts to isolate bugs and test hypotheses is something else entirely. I just watch in astonishment as it does debug cycles that would take me 1-3 hours at a time (plus one coffee) that it does in a minute or two. This is all from my weak user reports like "it doesn't work when I do thing X".
If I were an employer I would definitely pay something like $500-1000/day to arm a senior developer with Fable than I would hire a second senior developer.
What is the bull case, beyond drawing lines on a graph, for AI achieving superhuman, or even human, performance on tasks that are not quickly verifiable?
But LLMs are getting freakishly good at things they haven't been specifically trained on. Their intelligence does generalize.
Perhaps we only need to RL them in a few more domains to clinch the rest of generalized superintelligence. E.g. you can have them pilot robots and put them in virtual environments and RL fast them there, or real environments like an academy (a warehouse) a bit less fast.
Partly this is a sample efficiency question - there simply might not be enough data for them to learn this stuff to human level, and architectural advances that improve sample efficiency may lead to huge gains in quality. But it's not clear to me why people expect this to happen.
I agree the sample efficiency is terrible and a large limiter and it falls back to RL and we need at least one more architectural breakthrough. But in 2026 I certainly wouldn't bet against AI labs with armies of Fable agents at their disposal and seemingly infinite investment dollars sorting this out.
Christ I resemble this article. I do like the overall life lesson though.
You come at the King, you best not miss
You decide to have an MMF threesome with your wife you best not freak out when you see the other man's dick
If you're gonna be Napoleon, you best not be sick about it for six days
Generally: if you're going to claim the exemption, you best actually be exempt. One is not granted the exemption by merely claiming it.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
4d ago
Great post. For context, I would just like to add that I also enjoyed reading Kitchen Confidential and also binge watched a bunch of No Reservations episodes and would do it again.
Do you think I'd piss on Ram Dass' grave too? Did I pick on Iggy Pop?
I pick on Bourdain because he's so widely celebrated and because I think it's misplaced. If you're going to be an advocate for the Hero's Journey, I require you to at least not die pathetically.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
5d ago
You gotta try Claude in voice mode. I read the glazing in its sanded down Manchester accent now and it makes it extra special.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
I missed it, but what does Bazzite Linux mean to you?
Also
Calling all AI boosters, I've had the ChatGPT moment. All of the running down of the local LLMs set some pretty low expectations for me, so I was surprised when I found lots of utility there. Yes, I'm sure it hallucinates way more often than the better online stuff, and buddy, does it like to hallucinate here and there, but it's usually blatantly obvious that it's off the reservation anyway. Yes, mode collapse can be a Thing, especially in certain situations, as can verbose mode, and yes, there are only so many tokens that can be processed locally, and yes, the token limit really sucks, comparatively speaking. But with all that said, this ain't ELIZA with extra steps, and running llms on an RTX 5080 seems to be thoroughly... mid? And I'm still more than a little shocked that I can get half-decent images out of a local instance of Stable-diffusion. I was not expecting that.
IMO local LLMs are a 100% waste of time compared to Fable, if you have access to Fable. Thing is freakishly smart, and solves problems Opus routinely struggles with. Which is wild because 2 months ago I was impressed with Opus, and now I'm so goddamn bummed if I run out of Fable credits and have to use Opus.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
Presuming her account is the fact of what happened, sure that's rape.
It's plausible it's closer to he forcefully advanced on her and she didn't clearly say no. Rightly or wrongly, a lot of men consider this hot consensual sex.
Affirmative consent workshops teach you to look for an explicit yes and it you don't get one assume the answer is no.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
We bought a fairly small house for Americans when we first got together and the error of having our bedroom right next to the kid's bedrooms has not been more clear. Next house we are going to be floors apart.
Is it consensual unless you stab him or call 911? I sympathize with not trying to escalate if you're in a room with a man who could easily overpower you and kill you and be an ongoing source of misery in your life.
That all said, I love how Democrats really badly need a normal salt of the earth white guy who codes blue collar that you could have a beer with, but it turns out those kind of guys don't attend enthusiastic affirmative consent workshops and "I got this Nazi-looking tattoo when I was drunk in the Marines, what's your fucking problem" doesn't travel well among people where symbols can have meanings.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
I didn't know Bourdain apart from his reputation as a chef, and let's face it, celebrity chefs are not role models for stable, happy lives.
He's a role model in the progressive sphere for a lot of reasons. Honest blue collar work in a kitchen, diverse cuisine enjoyer, sneers at McDonald's, successful writer (the only way to get rich without exploitation under capitalism), had a show where he travels the world and advances the multi-cultural project.
All of these things are apparent virtues, but they weren't enough to save his life and maybe did him in instead. Maybe loser is the wrong word, but my claim is that the mental illness <-> lifestyle causal arrow might point both ways. What word would you use?
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
6d ago
Was just an act as a revealed preference, perhaps as the weight of it all caught up with him. But I think it would have ruined his image considerably if Iggy Pop's albums in 70s all included a little card that said "time traveler from the future confirms in 2026, Iggy Pop will be 79, still alive, living ascetically, vegan, no drugs, pursuing the simple pleasures where he values love and connection above all".
That is arguably a good first line approach.
But what if you're the person suffering from this kind of body dysphoria and you've tried a number of psychological interventions, nothing works, and you also have bouts of self harm because of how upsetting it is and you're pretty damn sure if you could just have it removed you'd feel a lot better about yourself and there's countless reports on Internet forums from people like you who went through the same thing and life got way better for them?
You know there's a risk it might not help but you're willing to try because you just find yourself wishing you could die with increasing frequency?
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