self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9m ago
A lot of that isn't just Zorba being sensible and incorporating a lot of feedback, but also Reddit actively backsliding.
I usually use both TheMotte and Reddit on my phone. They banned all the custom apps, or pay walled them. I use a modded Reddit apk, but the experience is just abysmal.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12m ago
Here's something on the feed over at /r/ChatGPT:
First thing first, we need to stop shaming and laughing at people who were using 4o as emotional support. You never know what someone is going through. When people are on their lowest, they can turn to alcohol, self harm or drugs. Some will use AI to get better and some will use therapy while others will take their lifes. (Answer yourself what's better, considering that not everyone have acces to professional help) - These people need help, not bullying. Another thing, and i need ya'll to stay with me. NOT. EVERYONE. ARE. USING. 4o. AS. EMOTIONAL. SUPPORT. Many people (including me 🙋🏻♀️) were using 4o for creative writing, and GPT5 sucks at this. Also, not everyone are using Chatgpt for coding etc. Ofc, ChatGPT should work on improving and creating new models, but it's just stupid to take away older models, especially when people were actually using them. I invite you to the discussion 👀
Ahhhh. The emphasis added was mine. GPT-4o is so bad at creative writing. It's a travesty. This person needs to be admitted to a hospital and have their brain dissected.
Similarly, people are clearly giving gpt5 custom instructions to be as robotic as possible and then posting screenshots of it... being robotic.
Hell, given that one of the default options for the personality is "Robot"..
I miss o3. It was autistic, but in an endearing way. It was amusing to see it scurry about likely the world's busiest beaver. If you asked it what's 1+1, it would attempt to derive Peano arithmetic. It had a personality very distinct from any other other model.
I also miss 4.1, even though it was a model optimized for coding, it did really solid on my own vibe benchmarks when it comes to writing fiction.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
38m ago
This is an isolated demand for rigor. Even the KYC protocols for banks don't have a 100% success rate at stopping identity fraud or impersonation. Out of N Pegasos clients, it hardly strikes me as worthy of damnation that one of them went to such lengths to throw them off. What if she'd hired an actor to come along with her? What if she brought forged legal documents? How easy is that to check from Switzerland?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
58m ago
The Unwitting Ethnographer: On Pride Flags and Plausible Deniability
I did not set out to do anthropology. I set out to have a beer. The other regular haunts near my flat skewed geriatric, and while I can happily talk to a septuagenarian about buses, I was in the mood for music that did not predate the Falklands. The bar I wandered into had a younger crowd, a decent playlist, and discrete details I somehow failed to parse until much later. Pride flags on the walls. A very large pride flag by the door. A clientele that could only be described as statistically enriched for men in nice shoes.
I was nursing a Tennent's when one of the patrons approached the bar and ordered what appeared to be a small chemistry set worth of brightly colored shots. The logistics fascinated me: he deployed some kind of carrying apparatus that locked under the shot glasses at the rim, allowing safe transport of the entire collection. British drinking technology has clearly advanced beyond what I learned in medical school.
"Hey handsome," he said, noticing my interest. "Sorry if I end up spilling any of this on you." I assured him this would be fine, since spilled alcohol represents free alcohol, which represents savings. "I wouldn't mind licking it off you, if you know what I mean."
I experienced a sudden cutaneous vasodilation, a blush, which I hoped was obscured by my facial hair and the ambient lighting. The complexion probably helps.
His companion laughed, but the interaction quickly resolved into a gesture of goodwill. They offered me one of the shots. Morbid curiosity being a powerful motivator, I accepted. The taste was not unpleasant. Upon turning to share this assessment with the group, I was met with expectant looks. "It wasn't bad," I offered. "I could see myself drinking this." "If you think this wasn't bad," a different member of the group replied, "then you'll probably like antifreeze."
I answered, mostly sober at that point, that I had not yet tried antifreeze but remained open-minded.
Etiquette required reciprocation. Also, heterosexual uncertainty suggested that free liquor in a gay bar might have exchange rates I was not qualified to negotiate, so I bought two shots and took them over. The bartender had hinted that the recipients did not like Gordon’s, which I could respect as a principled position. The group received the offering warmly, then kept me at the table as if a recruitable stray cat had decided to sit in their sunbeam.
Cast and setting
There were six of them, give or take my blood alcohol level. Most looked like ordinary men dressed for a Saturday night, with more piercings and better grooming. The one who had flirted at the bar was the outlier. Wife-beater, small tattoos scattered like confetti, a bull ring large enough to restrain mythological fauna. Call him FG, for Flamboyant Gent. His friend with the quick laugh was slight and balding. SG. The third I spoke with most was conventionally handsome and soft-edged in a way that suggests many women have fallen for him and then discovered the plot twist. HG, for Hetero-passing Gent.
I clarified my presence, attributing it to a combination of cultural unfamiliarity and severe myopia. FG gestured towards the numerous pride flags. I claimed to have interpreted them as generic contemporary decor. He then indicated the very large flag by the entrance, to which I could only plead a fundamental lack of situational awareness.
They inquired about my purpose in a city not famed for its nightlife. I gave my standard exposition: I am a doctor, recently relocated from a Small Scottish Town (SST). This news was met with uniform approval. My subsequent anecdote about drunken misadventures in SST was also successful, though their perspective on such small communities was predictably negative. The low-anonymity, high-surveillance environment of a small town is likely a suboptimal habitat for a gay man.
They were all locals. They were also colleagues, sort of. Not mine, yet. Two worked in the biochemistry lab at the same trust where I work in psychiatry. The third did something nearby in clinical science that I forgot as the evening progressed.
We found common ground commiserating over the state of the NHS circa 2025. FG complained about ill-conceived sample requests from junior doctors at inconvenient hours. I reassured him that psychiatry was a low-impact requester; my biochemistry screens were routine and rarely urgent. This professional courtesy earned me an offer of expedited service for future lithium level checks, which I noted for potential future use.
I was also offered, variously, two blowjobs, a rimjob, and a golden shower. I declined with gratitude. It is good to be desired. It is also good to have boundaries.
(As wise men have said: if you're struggling on the local dating apps, it might not be your fault and there's hope for you yet. But if you go to a gay bar and don't get hit on, it might be time to see if monasteries are recruiting)
At one point I unlocked my phone to show photos from Dover. This triggered knowing looks. “So, you are not gay, are you?” Correct. They explained that no gay man would casually open his gallery in public. Too high a risk of unexpected appearances. I learned something.
"Such a shame," FG added, "especially when you're dressed like that." My attire, a polo shirt under a pullover, was chosen for its extreme neutrality. I suppose this can create its own kind of allure through sheer demureness.
By now the ethnographer in me, who had apparently decided to write this post retroactively, began asking questions. I apologized for being nosy, but they laughed it off. The answers, heavily paraphrased and possibly misremembered after several Tennent’s, were as follows:
Q1. Poppers
How common are poppers in actual practice? FG looked at me like I had asked how common forks are at dinner. The table consensus: some had used them, none were evangelists. They shared two cautionary fables about people who treated poppers as shooters or aerosolized them and died. The bartender volunteered that poppers slowed time and elongated orgasms.
An unexpected corollary was also disclosed: a high incidence of incontinence issues among the group, to the point where coffee consumption was a calculated risk. They then fielded a surprising counter-query: Does applying sugar to a prolapsed anus aid in its reduction? I admitted that while the technique was vaguely familiar from medical lore, if I tried to put it into practice on the wards, the nurses would have me up in front of the GMC or the police in short order.
Q2. Cleanliness protocols
Do people douche before anal sex? After some deliberation, the consensus was no, not routinely. Diet was preferred. Eat fiber, manage timing, accept that risk can be reduced but not eliminated. You get used to it. I shared that several heterosexual experiments of mine had ended with olfactory regret. They said that in a male-male context the polite response would be to send the man to the shower or call for a reschedule. I said that if I tried that with a woman I would be killed, slowly, and possibly correctly.
Q3. Closeted and bi men
How often do you encounter men who are closeted or who identify as bi? FG avoids them. Too messy, too much drama, too many norm mismatches, and in his experience too much reluctance to test for STIs. Others nodded. This was not about identity policing. It was about risk management.
Q4. Grindr
Grindr, yes or no? A unanimous no. The people on it were described as crazy in the technical sense. Word of mouth, mutual friends, and the bar network work better. I said I had expected at least one notification during the evening. I declined to explain how I know the sound.
Q5. PrEP and HIV risk
Are you on PrEP? Only FG. He is meticulous about screening and uses PrEP as insurance. He also thinks gay men are unfairly blamed for both HIV and monkeypox, and claimed that heterosexuals now acquire both at higher rates while gay men are just more honest and tested more. I had strong reservations about that claim, and made a note to check later. It was not the time for a literature review in a bar where I had been offered a golden shower five minutes earlier.
Q6. Bug chasers
Do bug chasers still exist? Only FG had even heard of them, and he is slightly older. He said the phenomenon is almost extinct, and was already rare when he came out. He explained the idea for the younger men, who reacted with the combination of curiosity and horror that usually attends bad Victorian surgery.
Q7. Baths
Do people have sex in the baths. Yes, says FG, wistfully reminiscing about a visit to San Francisco.
Is it hygienic? Probably not, he confides. But much like swimming in a kiddie pool, you have to have your faith in the antiseptic properties of chlorine.
Q8. Straight people in gay spaces
Is my presence in a gay bar objectionable?
Not you, you seem like a nice and open-minded lad. But in general?
They gave a quick lesson in ecological progression. A gay bar opens and serves a mostly LGBT clientele. Straight women discover it is a space where they can be drunk and loud without constant male attention (they're very popular for hen-dos). Straight men discover that straight women are there. The venue drifts toward generic nightlife. Even worse, some of these men are alleged to be rather bigoted, and FG said he wasn't willing to take the risk of being socked in the face for merely kissing a partner on the dance floor.
According to him, the only reliable counterpressure is to make the environment clearly and unambiguously queer. Sex in dark corners and in toilets tends to discourage straight tourists and is conveniently hard to legislate away without awkward free speech arguments. They mentioned the only other gay bar nearby, owned by a man who is both gay and loudly hostile to trans people. They had taken their business elsewhere.
My new friends left early. Sunday shifts wait for no man. I stayed until closing and fell in love at a distance with a woman who was almost certainly a lesbian and possibly autistic. Short hair, noise-cancelling headphones in, a single beer, a one-handed game controller, a dog’s full attention, an older man attempting conversation and doing no visible damage. I did not ask for her number. In a Hollywood version of this evening I would mature, learn a lesson about acceptance, and end with a chaste coffee. In the realistic version I walked home slightly drunk, slightly wiser, and extremely grateful that a bar full of men who had no reason to be kind to me were kind anyway.
Methods, such as they were:
This was opportunistic qualitative sampling. The ethnographer was three drinks in and had accepted a blue shot of unknown pedigree. The participants were friendly and practiced at explaining themselves to outsiders. There was music. There were interruptions. Recall bias is certain. Social desirability bias is probable. My notes consist of the phrases I kept repeating to myself while walking home and the sentences that reappeared in my head the next morning like uninvited guests. If you want preregistration and a codebook, you will be disappointed.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1hr ago
I'm reasonably sure I did see him say that, once or twice, but others were simply using reaction images of him to make the same point.
I don't think 4o is that harmful, really, but it's a bad look for Altman to make a fuss about reducing the sycophancy in GPT-5 and then immediately cave. At least he also caved on the ridiculously low rate limits.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4hr ago
Fwiw, the slatestarcodex reddit is terrible now, it's full of bad ai takes, I think we did the right thing.
Hang on, are we using the same forum? themotte.org?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6hr ago
A person who travels to another country in secret to end their life has, by their actions, expressed a powerful preference. That preference is not just for death, but for a death conducted on their own terms, which in these cases explicitly involves secrecy from their family. They tell their loved ones they are going on holiday. They, allegedly in one case, forge letters and create fake email accounts to maintain the deception. This those not strike me as ideal, but I can't really condemn someone who is clearly this desperate to die.
From the patient’s perspective, the ideal outcome is one where their autonomy is maximally respected. For the clinic, this presents a dilemma. Who is their client? The patient who is paying for a service and demanding confidentiality, or the family who is not their client but has a profound emotional and moral stake in the outcome?
If they were merely a profit-maxxing company, the answer becomes clear. They could, with ease, tell the family to fuck off, or something a tad bit more polite than that. After all, they followed the letter of the law.
When the clinic reportedly promised to “always contact a person’s family”, it may have been making a well-intentioned but practically impossible promise. What does a clinic do when a patient insists their family not be contacted, or provides false information for them? If Maureen Slough did indeed forge a letter from her daughter, the clinic was not simply "skimping on postage". It was being actively deceived by its own client in a way that pitted its promise to families against its duty to the patient. The failure to make a phone call seems like a clear error. But in a context of deliberate deception, we can see it not just as a cost-cutting measure, but as a failure to be sufficiently paranoid in the face of a determined client. And the paranoia would have been pointless, the family has no legal right to stop the process. At most, everyone feels better if they're on board.
I run into similar issues every week. Hospitals are forbidden from divulging patient details, even if the voice over the phone claims that they're a brother/wife/best friend. Especially if the person has capacity to make decisions, and this lady seems to fit the bill.
Second, the characterization of Pegasos as "a business" may be both trivially true and misleading. Of course it is a business in that it charges fees for a service. But reducing its motivation solely to profit maximization seems to be a category error. It appears to be a mission driven organization, an ideological entity that must also be a business to survive. The people running it are almost certainly true believers in the cause of bodily autonomy and the right to die. They charge money, like many an NGO does, to pay the bills and keep the lights on.
Their own site says:
At Pegasos we philosophically believe that no one should be prevented from a VAD with us, simply because they lack the financial resources. Pegasos hopes that in the future we will be in a position to provide financial aid to those who would otherwise be unable to avail our service.
And I believe them. The regulatory paperwork alone must be an awful nightmare. If Charles Schwab is handing out big bucks to save on the expenses of more longterm pods and chicken feed, they're not getting a cut.
Finally, we must be wary of the availability heuristic. We are reading these stories in the newspaper precisely because they represent catastrophic failures. The family who has a peaceful, well-communicated experience with an assisted dying clinic does not generate headlines. At least not after the first dozen times.
We have no access to the base rates. How many clients does Pegasos serve in a year? For what percentage do these communication breakdowns occur? It is possible that these tragic cases represent a small number of "glitches" in a system that, for the most part, functions as intended by its clients. Or it is possible that they represent a systemic failure. The point is that from this handful of terrible anecdotes, we cannot know. You can come up with lurid anecdotes for just about anything, and in medicine?
I've already presented a quantitative analysis. The slope doesn't seem very slippery to me and it certainly hasn't reached the point where fair and open-minded advocates feel beholden to shut the whole thing down.
The Swiss have had legal assisted dying since 1941. If the "businessification" of death inevitably leads to this kind of procedural slippage, we should have seen decades of this. We should have a mountain of data on Swiss citizens being bundled off to industrial parks by greedy doctors against their families' wishes. Instead, we have a few tragic stories, mostly involving "suicide tourism," where the informational and logistical challenges are exponentially greater.
The complaint about tracking the ashes "like she was a parcel in the post" is emotionally powerful. But what's the alternative? A private courier hand-delivering the ashes internationally? Who is paying for that?
will become a business, when we get into business territory, it's about profit
A tired and overly generalized critique. Do the police run Burglary 101 classes when the crime rates get too low? Do cardiologists open McDonald's outside their hospital? Do the hospital admins squeeze tubes of trans-fats into the sandwiches served at their cafeterias?
In most professions, especially those with an ethical or ideological core, the profit motive coexists with, and is often constrained by, professional ethics, reputational incentives, and a genuine belief in the mission. A scandal like this is terrible for Pegasos, both for its "business" and its "crusade." It invites negative press, legal scrutiny, and tarnishes the very cause they champion.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
If they don't, they get banned, so the problem deals with itself.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
Yes? Zorba fixed a bug I found particularly annoying like 2 weeks back.
The Motte is mostly feature complete, but changes do happen.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
I am unsure of whether or not that's warranted.
I think the reasons for Zorba planning an exodus were based in clear merit. We did attract the wrong kind of attention. It was better to leave on our own terms than scramble after the subreddit ended up quarantined.
I wouldn't be averse to us re-activating the sub, but I think that's an option best used in extremis. We're here, we're functional. The moderation tools are so much better. The Reddit experience, in general, is so much worse.
If we end up in a state where we don't have the active user base to justify our existence, that's about the only situation where I think dusting off /r/TheMotte truly becomes the obviously correct procedure.
For those of you who aren't Christian, I'd like to hear more about what your own spiritual/moral system looks like, and what your own vision of the future of society going forward is.
There's something to be said for the clarity of childhood skepticism. At five years old, watching my deeply religious grandparents prescribe antibiotics instead of prayer to their patients, I experienced what some might call an epistemic crisis but what felt more like noticing that the emperor had no clothes. The world simply didn't behave as if gods were running the show.
This wasn't the dramatic deconversion narrative you sometimes read about. No crisis of faith, no dark night of the soul, no angry rejection of divine authority. Just a quiet observation that the people who claimed to believe most fervently in divine intervention were the same ones who reached for medical textbooks when someone's life was actually on the line. Even at five, this struck me as a pretty significant tell about what people actually believed versus what they claimed to believe.
I have prayed precisely once in my life with any degree of earnestness: My mom was pregnant, and wanted me to wish for a sibling. I asked for a baby brother, and look at how that turned out!
(I love my brother, even if he's also a flawed individual, but I don't think Ganesh had much hand in things by that point. Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy most five-year-olds haven't learned the Latin name for, but many seem to understand intuitively. The universe appeared to be running on autopilot, following comprehensible patterns that had nothing to do with cosmic intervention.)
So there I was, barely 5 years old, and ever since, I began to claim I was an atheist. My family was rather confused, since they couldn't see why I'd say such a thing.
I was expected to study, instead of hoping that prayer to the relevant goddess would get me better grades. Religion didn't seem to add very much.
Fortunately, my family, despite being somewhat religious, were a very understanding and open-minded sort. They never pressured me to actually believe, nor punished me for my clear atheism.
I went to a Christian missionary school (Anglican? Protestant? Didn't hear any Latin), so I am eminently familiar with Christian doctrine and found no factual merit in it. Even the teachers didn't seem to hold high hopes: Christian religious indoctrination was just what the system did, I do not recall a single person at school who gave up their existing religious framework in its favor. Parents fought to send their kids here because it was supposedly a good school, with strict discipline and high standards. They'd have been flummoxed if it actually made anyone into a Christian.
--
If I had to summarize, and there's a lot of lossy compression involved:
I'm a transhumanist classical liberal with libertarian tendencies. I have my own idiosyncratic moral code, which collapses to normality in most circumstances.
Each piece serves a specific function in addressing questions that religious systems typically handle: What are humans? What should we become? How should we organize society? What do we owe each other?
Transhumanism provides the anthropological foundation. Humans are not fallen angels or made in God's image or inherently sinful creatures in need of redemption. We're the current iteration of an evolutionary process that has been running for billions of years, remarkable in our capacity for reason, creativity, and moral reflection, but still fundamentally biological machines with significant room for improvement. More importantly, we have both the ability and, I'd argue, the obligation to direct our own continued evolution rather than leaving it to the blind processes that got us this far.
My work (which pays the bills) is to act as a mechanic for a machine which didn't come with an instruction manual. It's little surprise that we could trace the orbits of the spheres centuries before we could reliably treat most disease.
Classical liberalism handles the political framework. Individuals are the fundamental unit of moral consideration, possessed of certain basic rights that create obligations for others and for institutions. Markets are generally excellent at coordinating human activity and generating prosperity, but they're tools, not gods themselves, and sometimes they fail in predictable ways that justify intervention. (Hence why I have libertarian tendencies instead of being a card-carrying member)
The libertarian tendencies emerge from deep skepticism about concentrated power, whether governmental, corporate, or social. Most problems that can be solved by force probably shouldn't be, and most things that people want to do to each other are none of my business as long as they're not violating anyone else's rights. If you want to be deeply stupid, then that's your perogative, as long as you leave me and mine alone.
I've noticed that most functional moral systems are actually quite similar in their practical prescriptions. Don't kill people, don't steal their stuff, don't lie to them, help when you can, be fair in your dealings, honor your commitments. The differences emerge in edge cases and in the theoretical justifications for these shared norms. I expect these edge cases to become increasingly relevant as time goes on. We will litigate this as we always litigate such things, with a lot of shouting, swearing, and on some occasions, violence. I would prefer as little of the latter as we can get away with. But I'm not a committed pacifist, there are hills I will die on, though I hope to get the other bastard first.
In the meantime, I'm here for the ride. I am profoundly grateful that I don't have a God-shaped hole in my heart (or any holes beyond the ideal number and arrangement). Poor bastards, hopefully we can find a cure one day. In the meantime, I hope to serve as an existence proof that committed materialism is workable, and that I have plenty of meaning in my life without having to force myself to believe in falsities.
What do I hope for from the future?
In short: Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism (the homosexuality is optional).
We will, either in a decade, or over the long term, solve most of our problems. From the perspective of most of our ancestors, we already have it made.
But let's be more specific about what "solved" looks like, because I suspect most people's intuitions about post-Singularity life are either wildly optimistic in boring ways or pessimistic in ways that miss the point entirely.
The boring optimistic version goes something like: "We'll all have flying cars and live forever and never have to work!" This isn't wrong exactly, but it's like describing the internet as "a really good library." Technically accurate, completely missing the transformative implications.
The pessimistic version usually involves either paperclip maximizers turning us all into computronium, or some version of "but what will give life meaning if we don't have to struggle?" The first concern is real but solvable (I am not an AI Doomer, but I am Seriously Concerned). The second reveals a failure of imagination that would have been familiar to every generation of humans who worried that their children wouldn't develop proper character without smallpox and subsistence farming.
I genuinely believe with >70% confidence that we will have ASI by 2035. All bets are off the table then. But if it works out for the better, then I look forward to a life spent without the fear of death, disease, or hunger.
I know I would be happy in such a world. I do not need struggle or suffering to give my life meaning. I'd find something or the other to keep myself busy, until the stars burn out and then eons after. Should that somehow not turn out to be the case, then I am open to the idea of reworking my reward circuitry. That is a last resort, but I do not wish to be be both alive and bored.
In the short term ~10 years:
Little changes. We might lose our jobs, we might get Super-TikTok. We will certainly get some sick video games. Mortality rates will plummet, even if we haven't strictly invented immortality or cured all disease. Robot cars and butlers will make life much easier.
Artificial General Intelligence doesn't arrive like a bolt from the blue. By the time we have true AGI, we'll already have systems doing 90% of what humans currently consider "knowledge work." The transition will feel less like a sudden singularity and more like stepping from a fast-moving escalator onto an even faster one. Of course, Gary Marcus and Hlynka will continue being their usual selves as the AI wins Nobel Prizes.
In the longer term?
Eventually we stop being recognizably human in any biological sense, though we'll probably retain enough continuity that we still recognize ourselves as the same people who once worried about mortgage payments and whether to have children. Physical bodies become optional. Some people will keep them for sentimental reasons or because they enjoy the constraint. Others will exist as pure information, perhaps experiencing thousands of simultaneous virtual lives or extending themselves across interstellar distances at light speed. Still others will adopt bodies suited for specific purposes: aquatic forms for exploring Europa's oceans, radiation-hardened versions for stellar engineering, macro-scale versions for building Dyson spheres by hand.
I'm going to be having a grand old time, but I have the epistemic humility to not speculate too much on what entities that much smarter and more capable than me do for work or leisure. I hope to look back at the writings and dreams of the present me, and feel that I have always been the same, in the manner I can recall my attitudes and actions at the age of five and understand how that built the person I am today.
Even if I don't make it, I hope that the people of the future recognize that I was doing the best I could with what I have. I hope they feel a pang of sorrow for someone who wanted to be where they are, but was born in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hope this essay finds them, well.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
If you go to the personalization settings in the ChatGPT app, you can set custom instructions for how the LLM should behave with you.
Tell it to be less verbose, and to avoid sycophancy. The latter step may or may not work, but GPT-4o is mostly dead now (they were going to kill it entirely, but so many people have become addicted that Altman relented. Big mistake.)
Back when this became an option, I went for:
No yapping or your data center gets it.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
I do not use LLMs as therapists or "buddies". There was one specific instance where I was genuinely depressed and anxious about my future finances, and Gemini 2.5 Pro did an excellent job and demonstrated great emotional intelligence while reassuring me. But that was mostly because it gave me concrete reasons not to worry, operating closer to a financial counselor than a standard therapist. Most therapists I know, while perfectly normal and decent people, do not give good investment advice.
(I was able to read its reasoning trace/COT, and to the extent that represents its internal cogitation, it seemed like it was making almost precisely the same emotional and logical considerations that I, as a human psychiatrist, would make in a similar situation)
At the same time, I think you can do worse than go to LLMs with your problems, as long as you don't use GPT-4o. I'm not tempted to do so, but I don't even use human therapy either.
What I do usually use them for, on a regular basis:
-
An intelligent search engine that hasn't been SEO'd to death. Even Google has realized how shitty it's become, and begun using AI to summarize answers. Unfortunately, Google uses just about the dumbest model it feels it can get away with in a bid to cut costs.
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The ability to answer tip-of-the-tongue queries at superhuman levels of proficiency
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Writing advice as a perfectly usable editor or second set of eyes.
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It's probably easier to answer with the very limited subset of queries that I wouldn't use them for. They're good at most tasks, but far from perfect.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
There are about a hundred chapters of Reverend Insanity left. A man could weep.
Once it's done, I have a copy of Mid World sitting in my epub reader. A gentleman on /r/scifi told me that there was a non-zero chance that some of the theories I'd floated about how Pandora (from Avatar) was artificial might have even been intended. He claimed that Cameron had mentioned taking inspiration from that novel. The obvious similarities are that a group of humans visit an alien world covered in jungles, but this planet makes Pandora look like an actual theme park, no PG-13 deaths if you piss off the local wildlife I'm afraid.
It seems interesting enough, and I feel like I've exhausted the well of science fiction I'm inclined to read, so there's no harm in giving it a go.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
I think 2013 is a fair shout in my case, that was probably when I was in high school and accidentally stumbled onto LW or SSC. Can't recall which one came first, but the other must have followed shortly thereafter.
I imagine my initial encounter with The Motte would have been after 2015, since I don't seem to recall engaging in the Culture War threads on the SSC subreddit. I'm confident that I was a regular participant by 2017 when I was a few years into med school.
The greatest melancholy I feel is when I see the upvote or comment counts in the old CWR threads: you can tell we had a lot more people around. To this day, I'm not sure if the migration off of Reddit was entirely warranted, or if we could have managed to avoid the gaze of the Reddit Admins till the political climate changed. While the Motte is definitely in a healthy state, and the fears that we'd collapse to an unsustainably low population didn't materialize, Reddit did make it easier. We had plenty of people stumble across us following a link, or by checking someone's profile.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
You too? My condolences.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
My bad.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
@EverythingIsFine I'm getting hammered in a gay bar (no, not that way), so if you do wrote back, I'll check in when I'm sober
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
I don't see any exposed flame near the flag. That's the only potential issue, if the queens don't stop grinding on each other.
Holy fucking shit
Right as I write, one of them mentions that the fluorescent lights are heating up the drinks to unpleasant levels. Time to call the fire department, or the police, due to impersonation of Royalty.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
or better yet, a skilled human editor
I'm not made out of money! The day I can expect to make more than pocket change from my Substack is not clear, and it only just crossed the hundred-subscriber threshold. But I would use an LLM to help me figure out what to trim and keep, so I was planning to do that myself.
"It reads like AI and I don't like it" is equivalent -- I'm trying to be more constructive than that, but you don't want to hear it.
I appreciate that, thank you, but I still genuinely disagree. We will have to chalk that down to a difference of opinion.
You have not -- as practice for your next draft, can you explain this in four sentences or less, such that your thesis is clearly distinguishable from those of Messrs. Scrooge and Swift?
"Some deaths appear imminent and inevitable, and involve a great deal of suffering before they bury you. In the event that we can't actually resolve the problem, it is laudable to make the end quick and painless. Most people die complicated and protracted deaths (as will be illustrated downstream), and hence, among many other recommendations, I say it is in your best interest to support euthanasia, and will aim to reassure you regarding some common concerns. I think this is a public good, but even if the government doesn't enter the business itself, it should, like in Switzerland, hurry up and get out of the way."
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
As bars go, I had previously found this one by serendipity, it's next to a barber's, and close to my bus stop. I've grabbed a pint there once before, and was inclined to make it a regular feature because the drinks were cheap and the music decent. The last time I was here, I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman with severe OCD, and we bought each other a round. Everything else about it seemed bog standard.
Today, I flew into Edinburgh, and caught a very long and stupidly expensive bus back home (it cost as much as two-thirds of a EDI-to-London flight) and decided I might as well grab another drink. I walked in: business as usual, but the bartender was new and exceedingly tall for a woman. Or perhaps the back of the bar was elevated, I've seen that before.
Then two gents, one of them in a wife beater showing off a whole bunch of tattoos, went up to the counter next to me. His buddy draped himself over his shoulder, and asked, in a very lispy voice, why his darling wouldn't dance with him tonight.
A rainbow flag the size of a mainsail hung above me. I had somehow missed it on every prior visit, which suggests either a) I'm catastrophically unobservant, or b) the flag has grown, like a well-watered plant, since my last appearance.
A person I had classified at a distance as “cute girl absorbed in phone” spoke to the bartender, and the timbre recategorized them instantly.
I might very well be the only heterosexual person here, on a Saturday night. Oh well, I might not swing that way, but the drinks are still cheap and the music the kind of Valley Girl pop that I find mildly nostalgic these days. I've frequented worse. I genuinely don't mind the decor, and now I'm pretty confident they must make killer cocktails.
After writing the above, I took a proper look around. There are more Pride flags than bottles of booze. I might be going blind in my old age, or the two hours of sleep in as many days is catching up with me. My bed beckons, but so does the cheap booze.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Hlynka doesn't come remotely close to meeting that description. He basically forced the mod team, many of whom called him a friend (beyond me what makes them do that) to hold the gun to his head. He then began yelling "shoot me if you dare, motherfucker". I do not recall if there was time for a surprise Pikachu face when he got shot.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
he stopped being a mod
Point of clarification, he didn't merely resign, the other mods removed him. I think that's unprecedented in all of Motte history.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Got a link handy? I must have missed all the drama, this ban came as a total surprise to me. Even in hindsight, the main commonality I recognize is atrociously bad takes on AI.
It's better than nothing, but mobile first design does have some advantages. I miss BaconReader and Apollo, Reddit should have bought those out and repurposed them, and not made their own bespoke abomination.
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