self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
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!
User ID: 454
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3mo ago
This isn't fun, more wellness, but I am going to abuse the immense power invested in me by virtue of being an admin and post here anyway.
How do I become more independent?
I speak in a very general sense. For an Indian kid, your life is set out on rails by your parents till high school, at which point your intelligence and diligence will determine what career you land, your college further constraining your options, until you end up in a life that proceeds with getting promoted, married, kids, and then dead.
But I am a homebody. It reflects on how deeply I hate the circumstances of my life that I am willing to throw so much away to leave it all behind. My parents, who I couldn't ask more of (other than having gotten my ADHD treated when I had begged them to), my dogs, my comfortable house and ailing grandpa, with whom every year apart is a non-negligible chance I'll never see him again.
But I lack drive. Curiosity? Yes. Intelligence? A quite decent level of it, if not world shattering. But so far my life has been railroaded along, with my only real choices being to either study hard or not, at least till the end of med school. I did take charge once, brushed myself into shape, proved, both to the GMC and to myself that I am a competent doctor. Or at least I did that as the first of many more times to come.
And now I feel adrfit. I can't go the country I wish to dwell in more than my own, that forms the earliest childhood memories of mine (unless I join the other illegal immigrants headed to El Salvador), I am forced to confront a mediocre life in a country that is in visible decline, hoping it beats the comforts of home (and the horrors of postgraduate training here).
I see people doing things out of sheer tenacity and drive, whereas I've mostly done things because I had to, or because I find the default path unbearable.
I don't want to live alone. It seems overwhelming. I don't want a job that saps me of all my energy and interest in doing anything else, let alone doing that while giving yet more exams.
I feel, for the lack of a better word, broken. I was moderately depressed, a feeling kept at bay through overwork and stimulant consumption in the hopes I'd achieve a brighter future, but they're dimming the lights as I speak. Shutting doors ahead of me as soon as I stepped through the ones behind.
If you think the stimulants help with that? A little, I guess. I wouldn't have made it through med school or all the exams since without them. But it doesn't solve the problem I see of being entirely unmoored, and I am not quite ready to resign myself to this life. Ritalin does not make what I've spoken of seem any less daunting. And the anti-depressants didn't work in the first place, and I tried a bunch of them.
I want the energy to explore alternatives. I want a job that pays well and treats me like I'm a skilled professional. I want to run a house without feeling overwhelmed and letting it go to rot. I want to be a father, and a good one, an even better one than my dad was to me, because he sacrificed his life outside medicine to give me the option of choice later.
If anyone has any advice, please share. My tether, while not quite fraying, gets ever tauter. I want executive function god fucking dammit, and nothing has helped. I just want something to look forward to, a route to a world where I can be, if not happy, content.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
8mo ago
Posted here for new eyeballs:
For the past few months, my pc has been consistently crashing under heavy load, in graphically demanding games like Escape from Tarkov, Warhammer 3 etc. In normal use and less intensive games like Rimworld, no issues.
After about 15-20 min of gameplay, I get a full crash to a black screen with the pc powered off, and it refuses to post for several minutes regardless of what I do, at which point it often restarts on its own. The American Megatrends screen doesn't usually show up unless I cycle power, at which point it doesn't tell me anything useful either. (I had a similar issue around 5 years ago, but that was almost certainly CPU thermals, since the American Megatrends screen called out CPU overheating, and I've changed CPUs since then and don't get the same error)
The crash seems to be so total and abrupt that I can't find any useful logs to figure out wtf is going on.
I've run CPU and GPU stress tests on OCCT and furmark, and they only seem to cause issues unreliably.
It seems thermally related, since the problem is less severe when the AC is running, but unfortunately the AC is currently on the fritz exacerbating the issue, but fixing the AC isnt really a definitive solution is it?
I noticed >85° C temps on my Ryzen 5600x, so I changed the thermal paste just a few days back, and while temps dropped by 5-10 degrees, the crashing hasn't abated.
GPU temps hover in the 50s-60s range in Tarkov, which seems quite reasonable. It's a 3070 for what that's worth.
The other potential culprit is my geriatric 600w power supply, over 10 years old at this point, but why would it be thermally related?
I'm not running any OCs, and I've maxxed out my fan curves to help, not that it's doing much. My case has two extra blowers, and I even took off the sides to help with airflow.
Anyone have any idea as to how I can figure out what exactly is wrong? I can't really afford to replace my GPU, but I could consider buying a new PSU if need be.
This issue didn't plague me when I first built this current setup with the same components, but it's been several months and I'm losing my mind :(
What I've tried:
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Switching GPUs with my brother's pc. Couldn't reproduce crashing.
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Dusting pc
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Repasting thermal paste
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Checking for any OC (none)
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Stress tests, which are unable to reliably cause crashes while games can.
Fun test linked from Twitter, it's a test of your vocabulary relative to others and displays your percentile score:
https://www.arealme.com/vocabulary-size-test/en/
Most people were bragging about their 0.10-1%Ile scores, so I rolled up my sleeve was all, "you are like a little baby, watch this:"
/images/16856192262800865.webp
I would have been disappointed with anything less than the limit of their results, I consistently beat out millions of international competitors in a pure test of English ages back, and it seems I've still got it baby.
I read an excellent review dissecting the rather bankrupt worldview underpinning The Good Place somewhere, but can't really recall where that was. It might even have been the Motte.
is that in the end, after uncounted millennia of perfect happiness, the characters finally choose non-existence because they've had it all. The writers seem to have presented that as the most desirable end, and not true eternity. But I think it's interesting that even there, the same message is in the water: without the supernatural, purely natural felicity will eventually pall and satiate.
It absolutely makes me seethe when I imagine people being given the gift of immortality (or merely a very long and indefinite lifespan, like we're talking astronomical figures here) be such utter nonces about it, and succumb so quickly to boredom and ennui.
A modern human living say, 80 years or so is nowhere near done trawling the vast expanse of interesting environments, ideas, people or concepts that even our limited baseline human minds can experience. The reason most people today might possibly lose the will to live is their bodies failing them, such that they can't actually get out there and do more of it without it being infeasibly difficult or painful.
I fully support the right of any sane sapient entity to self-terminate for any reason it chooses (without classifying the desire for suicide as insanity itself), but even then I can only groan at the sheer lack of vision or imagination that involves.
Mere millennia are grossly insufficient to do or feel all the things worth sticking around for, and humans consistently expand that space faster than we can consume it already. As evidence, go find the last person who read every book worth reading, it's certainly centuries ago, and maybe half a millennia.
To them I say:
How dare you get bored when you have everything you need, when billions of your ancestors fought hard against the cold to bring Utopia to you? You ungrateful fucks, if you haven't outlived a few stars, what makes you so old and world-weary that you'd rather end it all?
And even if you have, and after about 20 billion years your brain has cycled through every possible interesting thought and emotion available to grey matter (or a simulation of it) constrained to 20 watts and the volume of a cranium, have you even considered expanding your horizons and augmenting your consciousness so you can find new and amazing exercises to do?
A human being has exponentially more pleasant (or at least interesting) experiences and thoughts at their disposal compared to a chimp, and the larger your brain equivalent, the faster the combinatorial equations explode.
Try upping a couple hundred IQ points or petaflops of computational power and then try again you weakling.
Fine, your computational substrate has exceeded the size and mass limits that make it inevitably collapse into a blackhole? And your cumulative lifespan needs to be expressed in Knut Arrow notation? You get a hall pass to off yourself knowing you've known everything to know and seen it all. Don't talk to me till you're there, because I'd kill to be.
Even the latter belongs to the unlikely scenario where humanity solves everything, including infinite energy and resources. You're not going to get there in practice with merely all the matter and energy in the observable universe.
And mere boredom has technological solutions, I'd happily undergo a procedure that could erase it if I was convinced that it was outright counterproductive. Or I'd erase my memories and start again, anything but consigning to oblivion this infinitely lucky instance of sapience that was fished out from the endless ocean of All Possible Minds to enjoy its day in the sun.
The writers of The Good Place are small minded scum crying sour grapes at a prospect they'd be far too lucky to actually experience. I'd even deny it to them on principal if I was feeling mean.
Ah, I never liked Narnia. The whole franchise was too fucking twee and preachy to appeal to even childhood me.
"Yes," said Eustace, "and whenever you've tried to get her to come and talk about Narnia or do anything about Narnia, she says 'What wonderful memories you have! Fancy your still thinking about all those funny games we used to play when we were children.'"
To me, the "problem with Susan" seems to be that she's literally retarded. You spent half of your life in Narnia, and then claim it's some kind of funny game? When you can confirm for yourself by just opening that wardrobe?
Hell, even if you want to fit in with your peers, that is not the behavior of a sane person.
The biggest issue with that line of sophistry is that it precisely nothing to imbue the definition of "God" with other relevant properties, such as the whole omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent shtick.
Great, you've shown there "must" be an Unmoved Mover/Uncaused Cause. What exactly does find and replace with "God" for "the Big Bang" lose out on?
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
There seems to be an epidemic of low decouplers on the Motte, most obviously notable by their inability to entertain hypotheticals the moment they become controversial in the least. Perhaps it's always been that way, but it stands out to me and I've been here for years, if not right from the start.
And the Motte is better in terms of quality of discussions than any other place on the open internet that I'm aware of, just imagine how awful it is elsewhere!
At any rate, I agree with Singer that by most formalized standards of morality endorsed by most people, it's farcical that eating non-human animals is widely acceptable, while having sex with them isn't.
However, modus ponens and modus tollens apply, so my take is that it's okay to do both! As is sadly necessary for topics such as these, while I accept people wanting to fuck nonhuman animals, that doesn't mean I want to do so myself. The fact that this disclaimer is even needed is yet another sign that the low decouplers are multiplying.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
8mo ago
Hi Vivek, nice to meet you!
(Leaving aside the arguments made within, this came across as rather fawning to me.)
At any rate, he'd have my vote if I was in a position to do so, he seems saner than the overwhelming majority of Republican candidates, and I think his claim to believe in God is one of those useful lies to the voter base rather than anything he sincerely believes in. If we were to ding politicians for being slightly two-faced, we'd have to elect only those who had half their face mauled by a pitbull to compensate.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
While I'm not a utilitarian (I was credibly convinced that I was misunderstanding the position, I'm just a humble consequentialist with my own bespoke utility function), I completely agree with Singer here.
Babies are not sapient, not for months after birth. The majority of the harm in killing them is the waste of time, effort and grief on the part of the parents. When it's the parents doing the killing, it's morally neutral as far as I'm concerned, or outright laudable if the child has debilitating conditions that are incompatible with a normal life.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1yr ago
The FairTax proposal aims to replace the current income and payroll tax system in the United States with a national consumption tax. The idea behind it is that instead of taxing income, it taxes consumption, so people are taxed on what they spend, not on what they earn. This proposal is intended to simplify the tax system, increase economic growth, and promote fairness and transparency. FairTax supposedly works like:
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Elimination of income and payroll taxes: FairTax would eliminate all taxes on personal and corporate income, including capital gains, dividends, and payroll taxes. This means that individuals would no longer have to file income tax returns or pay taxes on the money they earned.
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Replacement with a national sales tax: To make up for the lost revenue due to the elimination of income and payroll tax, FairTax would implement a national sales tax, which would be levied on all new goods and services at the final point of purchase, meaning that it would apply only to retail sales (business inputs would not be taxed). The proposed tax rate is 23% on a tax-inclusive basis (this translates to approximately 30% on a tax-exclusive basis).
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Prebate program: To counter the regressive nature of a sales tax, FairTax includes a "prebate" system, where every household receives a monthly tax rebate based on family size. This prebate would be equal to the amount that a family living at the poverty level would pay in sales taxes. This aims to prevent low-income families from being disproportionately burdened by the sales tax and to, in effect, make the first portion of every citizen's consumption tax-free.
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Elimination of corporate taxes: FairTax would eliminate corporate taxes, resulting in a more competitive business environment, both domestically and internationally. This could encourage foreign investment in the United States and reduce the incentive for corporations to move their operations to countries with lower tax rates.
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Border adjustment: The FairTax system would impose taxes on imports but not exports, known as "border adjustment" or "destination-based taxation." This means that exported goods would be exempt from US taxes, while imported goods would be subject to the FairTax, thereby leveling the playing field for domestic producers.
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Simplification of the tax code: By eliminating income and payroll taxes and establishing a single sales tax, the FairTax system would simplify the tax code, potentially reducing compliance costs and tax evasion.
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Encouragement of savings and investment: By taxing consumption rather than income, FairTax would encourage people to save and invest more because savings and investments would no longer be subject to taxation. This could lead to higher economic growth and prosperity.
Proponents of the FairTax argue that the system would lead to increased transparency, economic growth, investment, and job creation, while reducing the power of special interest groups and eliminating loopholes in the current complex tax code. Critics contend that FairTax might disproportionately burden lower-income citizens, fail to generate sufficient tax revenue, or even unintentionally incentivize a thriving black market.
At any rate, the simplification of the US tax alone system seems worth it, regardless of the other benefits!
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9mo ago
And they're not exactly wrong : it's rude to make guesses about people before/unless they come out, but the transhumanist philosophy (and even transhumanist aestheticists) has had no small number of people who have had decades-long fascinations with body transformation as a form of self-improvement who weren't exactly a surprise when they turned out to be trans.
I'm a transhumanist, and my position on the whole trans issue is that I sympathize with their goals, but simply disagree that they can be realistically achieved with the current science and engineering of the time. The day when it's possible to turn a natal male or female into the other gender while being biologically indistinguishable on the metrics I care about, we have no room for disagreement at all.
I'm certainly not trans, for what that's worth.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
10mo ago
Not a wellness question, but I don't want it to get lost in the old small scale question thread:
I've always been mildly interested in programming, but my formal training in it was only in the absolute basics of Javascript in school. We didn't even get to pointers in C, to give you an idea where I bottomed out.
However, my fondness for rat-adjacent spaces makes me probably one of the people who sorta somewhat understand programming concepts as much as possible without actually being able to code well.
I can mostly follow code or pseudocode, but I've noticed that programmers mostly leverage existing functions in libraries or APIs to massively abstract their work.
My issue is that I simply don't know most of the interesting functions that might be relevant if I have a specific concept in mind. I don't know whether there's an existing function I can call, let alone something I can import as a library, like math.js. I know that there's plenty unknown to me, and unknown unknowns I couldn't possibly estimate.
I can definitely ask GPT-4 about such things, but leaving it aside, how do I understand the options available to me as best as I can?
For example, when I look at a little of the code for the few ML models I've learned, it seems simple enough if you can abstract a lot of it. I simply don't know what to abstract.
How do I build this fundamental knowledge? I suspect it involves something I'd find mildly unpleasant like reading documentation, textbooks, or trawling through code on Github. But I'm asking just in case a more interesting alternative exists that I'm not aware of.
I'll pre-emptively tag @DaseindustriesLtd, because of course I will haha. But I know there are plenty of you programmers out there, don't be shy!
If it helps, I have the following concrete interests-
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Modding games. I'm aware reading documentation or code is mandatory here. I'm sure @ZorbaTHut would be mildly pleased to hear that I'd like to make small mods for Rimworld, especially if AI makes generating art assets easier.
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Small automation tasks on my PC. GPT is helpful here if I know what to ask.
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ML, just enough so I could apply it to medicine if I needed to. I'd like to think upskilling myself there might lead to more money if I can leverage my medical degree into a career involving it.
I've been thinking about Indians today.
I guess someone has to.
What is going on in India with their leadership? Why are Indians so bad in India but ones that come hear and get a taste of American corporate structure so good? I know this is probably a best fit for the questions thread, but this legitimately puzzles me.
Filtering. Filtering. Almost there.. No, you've still got coffee grounds left over. Keep at it champ.
The average Indian who arrives in the US is not representative of a random sampling of the native population. I'd know, I am one (Indian that is, I haven't been in the States since the NY skyline was a tad bit different).
The number of would be immigrants is far larger than the number that get through. You're filtering for IQ, conscientiousness and a million other things, leaving aside differences in drive that can motivate someone to cross a couple oceans and establish themselves far from home. That's before even getting into sociocultural aspects.
Leadership is certainly a part of it, at least if you're imagining just taking the same group of people and transplanting them under new management. Indian managers, in India, suck ass. They're mostly stick and little carrot, when they're not sodomizing you with it. Our societal norms and governmental system, while not outright dysfunctional, are still glaringly suboptimal in many regards. Being an entrepreneur is god knows how many times easier in the States, and so is relying on talent and work ethic to pay dividends.
The worst part of India, as most Indians who've escaped would tell you, is all the other Indians. The systemic failings are so coup-complete that the best recourse for a talented Indian is to take his talent elsewhere.
This strict system of skimming off the top is how a country that has, the last time I checked reliable figures, an average IQ in the upper 70s or low 80s, manages to contribute the single most successful ethnic group in terms of average income in the US.
There are plenty of other HBD-related factors, IQ here is not distributed as it would be in a homogenous population. I have good reason to believe that the upper caste/Brahmins are smarter on average, and I'm not one myself, just a cut above what would count as so underprivileged that I'd get AA in India. Millennia of strict endogamy and self-selecting for intellectual pursuits does funny things, just look at the Jews (though they were forced into their role more than willing adopters). And these upper caste people are disproportionately likely to be immigrants to the US. Sadly the matter isn't remotely as well researched as HBD in the US, not that I'm not convinced by available evidence.
Presumably this also answers @sickamore 's question, so I'm not going to duplicate it.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
I don't particularly care Hlynka, if this Thanos snapping managed to take both of us, you included, I'd consider it a net positive!
But I fail to see what the difficulty of Turing-testing random pseudonymous accounts on a text-based forum has anything to with it. Last time I checked, we're both operating according to the laws of physics and biology. Your analogy of how ML works is simply painful.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
9mo ago
I’m a believer that ignorance is bliss on these issues. But that becomes a very difficult position to hold if the left wants to expose that noble lie. Because the intellectual argument and reality is replying that blacks are heavily low IQ and not capable of competing at executive levels especially at anything close to equal representation.
I think ignorance is the opposite of bliss in this case. If you naively hold that all races are equal in terms of cognitive potential (as almost all "respectable" sources have stridently proclaimed since, idk, the 1960s), then you are absolutely setting yourself up to be furious about the glaring disparity in outcomes.
The end result is the carcinous growth of ideologies like CRT which are on the desperate hunt for racism-of-the-gaps (as I prefer to call systemic racism) in order to explain why despite the enormous effort put into mitigating said disparities, they still persist.
They're searching under the lamp post of their ideology, because it puts blinders on their ability to even conceive that group differences exist, and this lack of conception prevents them from even looking at the glaring evidence all around, and motivates them to attack those who'd shine a scientific torch on it.
The only actual answer to the question of why Whites typically do better than Blacks is the YesChad.jpg reply that it's because they're better in all the ways that matter outside of sports and entertainment. You can further assuage accusations of White Supremacy by pointing out that Asians beat them too.
Recognizing that HBD is even an option immediately dissolves the puzzle, even if it's outside the window of polite conversation. Unfortunately, that's not where society as a whole is at, outside primarily pseudonymous spaces or hushed conversations with people who think much the same but are unable to speak up.
Disbarring perfectly competent Asian people because they "harsh the vibe" is one thing, and then going onto admitting a qualitatively lower crop of blacks (at least the ADOS, I'm sure the Nigerians are doing better) who act as the DIE equivalent of fake succulents on a shelf is another.
I despise the former, but the two combined makes me see red. I never had any aspirations of going to Harvard, even if I guarantee that I could write a sob story of an essay and make even a few of the more cynical marms grading them mist up, something akin to this one, albeit I had no such intentions at the time of writing it.
I come from a country that still takes meritocracy seriously, tarnished as it is by our degenerate brand of AA. My father went from being a penniless refugee fleeing a genocide to a famous doctor held in high regard amongst his peers, and as such I have no choice but to fight for the system that helped put me where I am today, even if I represent a regression to the mean in some important ways (maths talent for one, his teachers used to call him up to solve problems for the older students when they couldn't, he'd have taken up maths if he didn't have a starving family to feed).
We've fucked a lot of it through AA and explicit quotas, quotas that are long past their legal expiry dates or relevance. Even then, our local wokescolds still pay nominal homage to egalitarian and meritocratic ideals, they simply claim against all evidence that the people they forcibly try to uplift are just as good and talented as the broader sample they replace. Our system is legible, and its sins don't hide in the dark.
I'd like to see it burned down on principle, but with $50 billion in their endowments, they couldn't care less what I think.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
1yr ago
As a bunch of very niche memes have illustrated, the process used to "align" ChatGPT, namely Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) amounts to pasting a smiley face mask onto a monstrously inhuman shoggoth. (Not that it's a bad strategy, it's one of the few concrete ways of aligning an AI we know, even if not particularly robust.)
As far as I can gauge, ChatGPT is working as intended:
When OpenAI researchers attempt to make it "helpful and harmless", they're concerned with actual use cases.
I very much doubt that anyone will ever end up needing to use ChatGPT to defuse a racist nuclear bomb, whereas leaving loopholes in the model that allow bored internet users to make it spout racist content is very much a real PR headache for OpenAI.
It's nigh inevitable that attempts to corral it will have collateral damage, with the sheer emphasis on never being politically incorrect hampering many benign use cases. But that's a tradeoff they're willing to make.
I would hope that a future model that might plausibly end up in high-stakes situations would be trained to be more nuanced, and willing to kill sacred cows when push came to shove, but for the niche it's being employed in, they're playing it very safe for now.
I MADE IT
FUCK THE HATERS
Ahem. Sorry. Got a bit too hyped up, but I've gotta be my own hype man, it's 11 pm at the hospital.
@Throwaway05, @TheDag, @AhhhTheFrench, @faul_sname, @whoeveritmayfuckingconcern (there's a lot of people who've egged me on over the years, I'll get to you all):
I got a match offer in psychiatry! While Scotland might be a little bit on the dreary side, well, endless exams are even drearier.
I was in an awkward position. If I'd done a lot better, I'd be confident in an offer. If I'd done way worse, I could have washed my hands of it and resolved to grit my teeth to prep yet another year of my short life. But I did well, but not so good that I wasn't on tenterhooks.
Most British doctors don't match on their first try, barring the least craved options like GP.
But psychiatry went from having a competition ratio lower than 1, to 9:1.
The exam got ten times harder since I began planning for it. Doubled in the span of a year. Yet I beat it. Beat all the bastards.
No more wannabe psychiatrist, upgraded to shrink-in-training. Then, barring an act of Satan, a bona fide shrink and not a LARPer
I might hold the current offer in the (mildly vain) hope that I get an upgrade to somewhere less rural, but I'll still take it. (Hmm, it seems that the hold window is already over, it seems to be take it or leave it, but I'll still ask around)
Fuck yeah. Gonna drink a lot of scotch and fuck a lot of bitches. I'm getting out.
Now, it's shame I've got 9 hours left at work, and while its going to be a slow night, I'd rather not lose my Indian license by drinking on duty. That can wait till the morning.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
6mo ago
Cell phones are pretty great, I even write my novel on one and pretty much use it for everything other than pc gaming. There's little meaningful tradeoff past the entry level or midrange, they all have good screens, cameras and battery life that lasts a day at least. They might be stagnating, but I'll probably buy a foldable next, probably a Samsung since I crave the pen.
Ozempic looks like it's the real deal. I don't put much stock in people who keep muttering under their breath about some hidden catch, as if the universe works that way. A cure for obesity, as well as seemingly effective against other disorders of executive function like gambling and alcoholism? Hell fucking yeah, maybe it'll turn out to work for ADHD, but that would actually be even more surprising. It's going to get cheaper, nothing has economies of scale like a weight loss drug, there are other companies rushing out comparable drugs, and you can get generics through dubious sources if you wish.
Can't wait for it to get cheap enough for us poor Third World bastards, I'll be putting my mom on it ASAP, and then myself if I can shake enough change out of the cushions. I'm not obese, but I have gained like 10 kilos from my habit of having ridiculously cheap and ridiculously greasy biryani as comfort food, even if it's my only meal of the day (!). I've lost said weight before the hard way, through exercise and dieting, and I found both to be too painful to bother with unless I'm desperately single. Give me a pill or give me a jab, I'll take it and I couldn't care less about sanctimonious looks.
Less important, but cool: VR is a thing. Yeah. The Quest 3 looks great, even if I sorely miss the potential of eye tracking, but at that price something had to give. Shame it turns out I'm too lazy to play much, but it's a tick off the bucket list until we can control our characters simply by thinking.
To elaborate on AI:
I've found GPT-4 to be invaluable, the idea of simply googling anything complex fills me with a headache, even if I append a site:reddit.com at the end. God knows I'd spend more time staring at the summaries on UpToDate and Co, I can trust the answers most of the time, even if I make sure to check where I'm not confident in it.
Image generation is almost solved, like 90% there except for the most baroque prompts. DALL-E 3 can understand semantics for multiple characters engaging in different actions, even if it's not quite as aesthetic as Midjourney. Shame they went ham on the safety filters lately, but I already have hundreds of pieces, many of which I've sprinkled into my novel. A luxury, yes, but very nice to have, since I have no intentions for paying for an illustrator.
AI music is coming around nicely, I unironically listen to SpongeBob and Patrick rap Niggers in Paris, and it'll be simple enough to throw the name of your favorite artist who no longer does their old style and get something decent out of it. (I'm looking at you, Alex Turner. AM was the peak, fight me.)
There hasn't been a better time to be alive, we can potentially solve ~all our problems in a few decades. While I've gone from P(doom) of 70% to around 30%, I still take AI X-risk as the most pressing concern of the day. And I certainly don't look forward to AIs taking my jerb, I even spent about an hour chatting with the one person more fucked than I am, a med student. I might get to enter training and progress a bit with a lot of luck, he's going to be lucky to have training programs by the time he's going to sit the exams, worse case is he never finishes the post grad courses before they become obsolete.
Even if I am quite depressed, I'm confident that it's worth sticking around to see the future, we're on the cusp of great or terrible things, to the extent that that classification depends on your POV.
An Indian Abroad in Thailand
After a pretty enjoyable time in Phuket and Pattaya, I find myself on the highway heading back to Bangkok, and ended up deciding to pen some of my observations along the way.
To wit, I visited Thailand while being quite ignorant about it. As a holiday destination, it's become quite cliché as a haunt for upper middle class Indians, and my residual snobbery kept me from really looking into the place or culture.
If I had been asked about my knowledge before the journey, I'd have scratched my head and gone, "Uh, ladyboys, beaches, Buddhist temples? Weren't they once conquered by some of the more entrepreneurial South Indian kings? (🇮🇳 Jai Hind!)"
Which isn't wrong, per se, but hardly comprehensive.
Since I don't want to bore you with the travelogues of a homebody, I'll stick to simply listing things that surprised my preconceived notions:
Firstly, I was taken aback by how fair Thai people tend to be. I thought they'd be swarthier, akin to Malaysians or Indonesians, but quite a large fraction could easily pass as Caucasian if not for their facial features. The ones who are really tanned seem to be people who work out under the sun, having skin tones I expect.
I find this rather perplexing, given that Thailand is at a latitude lower than the bulk of India, and their counterparts are unapologetically brown.
Secondly, they're piss poor at speaking English. In my entire time here, I have yet to encounter one person fluent in the language, even at places catering to tourists, including at the 5 star hotels I lounged at. The majority only understand a few words or key phrases, about enough to herd tourists or figure out if you want a taxi or a handjob.
I reckon this is due to colonialism, or rather a lack of it. Thailand is practically unique in SEA in never having been conquered by a European power, which usually inculcates more interest or tradition in speaking English or other tongues. Certainly the modal Indian speaks a great deal better English than the Thai do. I'd have expected to be doing somewhat better, but I guess they're getting by with tourists, so kudos to them.
On the topic of tourists, there are loads of Indians here. I mean tens of thousands at the minimum, while Phuket was more cosmopolitan, Pattaya's beaches are 50:50 Indian to local Thai. This translates to about 20 Indian restaurants in spitting distance of my hotel, and tour guides so used to wrangling Indians that they picked up some Hindi and play Bollywood playlists on boats.
Another fixture are the hordes of Russian tourists, to the extent that most of the signage in the cities include Cyrillic. I'm given to understand that a large fraction are draft dodgers laying low in a low COL locale, while sipping cocktails and getting good head. Plenty of families too, either in toto or just vacationing. (A question to @DaseindustriesLtd, what is it with Russian men and the most unflattering buzzcuts?)
Thailand is really clean. Now, as an Indian I admittedly have low standards, but I did spend a while in the UK, so I have a fresh benchmark to judge by. The streets are spotless, the beaches largely free of rubbish, which is a surprise because Indian tourists aren't known for their civic sense, at least back in India.
The roads are in great condition, to the extent that I need reminder that I'm not in a First World country. People keep their cars in great condition, and love ricing them out out too. Traffic is quite civil, and people are quite loathe to use their horns, whereas that's the microwave background radiation of Indian cities.
But the most perplexing thing is the sheer number of pickup trucks here. Seriously, I thought I ended up catching a flight to Texas, a quarter of the cars here are pickups, and I have yet to see the majority being used as utility vehicles. It's not like they're lugging anything of note around, most of them seem to be people carriers and nothing more. (One can argue that's the case back in the States too, at least I haven't seen any truck nuts!)
When it comes to culture, well, I've never seen a more permissive society in my life! Sex work is absolutely normalized, and I find myself scratching my head as to how this state of affairs arose when the country lies so close to significantly more conservative societies to the west and east.
I managed to ditch my parents back at the hotel, and went on a walking tour of the red light district literally next door to where we were staying (an upscale place mind you). There was a street about 300 meters long jam packed with titty bars, strip clubs and miscellaneous hangouts for ladies of the night. Far from the bars being a front for prostitution, the prostitution was a front for the bars. It was like a buffet table of women beckoning you over to grab a slice of ass, they're just sitting on bar stools and trying to outdo each other, or taking turns dancing (rather shittily) on the streets. Now, my parents would probably disown me if I took a hooker back to my hotel room next to theirs, not to mention I have a girlfriend, so it was all look and don't touch for me. I did get a hoot out of seeing several pairs of Russian women scrambling to get through the street, probably on the way back to their hotel. They were blushing so hard you could grill a steak on their cheeks.
Funnier still were the morbidly obese Western sexpats trying to hire a bike to drive them back, when they got on the back behind the tiny Thai drivers, the vehicles often threatened to rear up in fright.
Weed's been legalized here since 2019, but apparently smoking it anywhere in public is a crime. Given that I can never be arsed to roll joints myself, and I could get bhaang for about a hundredth the price of edibles there, I didn't really bother.
If you check my post history, you'll find my tale of attending a cabaret show, one run by ladyboys. And I genuinely couldn't tell that they weren't real women, despite straining my eyes trying. Is there something about the Asian physiognomy that makes it easier for them to pass? The closest thing I found to a tell was the waists, but even then they were well within the range for natal women. The railway community in the West take note, that's how you pass with flying colors.
A lot of the country seems really familiar to Indians. The vegetation is largely the same, albeit we haven't been graced with durian (which doesn't smell nearly as bad as I've heard, not that I tried it). It's funny to see Westerners fawn over elephants, monkeys and sedated tigers, when I was yawning hard at the idea. It was supremely funny to have a tour guide stop our boat to show off mudskippers, as if "walking fish" were a big deal. You can get some mild deja vu from seeing the clear influence of Indian culture in Thailand, though the vocabulary has diverged so far from the old Pali and Sanskrit roots that it's not really legible. Their Buddhist and Hindu syncretic religion is recognizable at the least, but they don't really seem all that religious.
Overall, I've been quite impressed with the place, and I can only hope that Indian cities resemble their Thai cousins. That's still quite an ask, since Thailand is nowhere near as crowded as India, there's room to breathe. But they're far better positioned to appeal to tourists, and I wager that it's only the massive injections of cash into their economy that allow them to have such a higher standard of living.
I'd be tempted to live here, if there was anything to do outside cater to tourists, and it wasn't abominably hot and muggy throughout the year, not to mention that you can't really get by with English alone. Still, I see why it's so popular with Western expats, and Chang beer is certainly everything /r/5555555 hyped it up to be.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
I've never accused him of being concise and clear, or having a point.
Am I supposed to sob in horror at the idea of replacing humans with soulless automata instead? He doesn't provide any reason to think that humans or LLMs can't both be represented as the output of statistical processes occurring on computational substrates, even if said processes and substrates are very different.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
5mo ago
Assortative mating is a real deal, so if you want to bag a wife you'll be proud of, then you need to work on yourself too, presuming your profile picture is you, unless you get really jacked you'll have to rely on something other than good looks carrying you (a problem I share, I'm just being honest here, not attempting to call you ugly, even just being plain means you need more in hand).
You're 26 years old, and don't have much in the way of qualifications. Well, I'm 26 years old, and despite "lacking the discipline" to pursue independent tasks, Ritalin proved to be a sufficient aid to get me through med school.
That is not a route I would recommend to anyone today (unless they're at just the right age to get in), because I think there's a very high chance you will be effectively obsolete and unemployable (for current wages) by the time you're done. This is true for most professions, not just medicine, not that you suggested you were inclined towards it.
IMO, you should aim for a career where minimal credentials and maximum selling your skills applies, programming is one that comes to mind, perhaps a trade if you're willing to go down that route. I would strongly advise against anything that needs a Bachelors, then a Masters and a PhD, you simply do not have the luxury of that much time (though being a student in a promising course is a good way to get a girl! At least you'll be in an environment where they're present, programming excepted).
You raised concerns of delaying having kids later being bad because of aging related degradation of your seminal genetic material, which honestly isn't that big a deal for men. The most pertinent reason to avoid delaying past your 40s is that you will likely just lack the energy to handle kids, even if that's not something that can't be overcome.
So my advise is, get into a Bachelors in whatever you think you have the aptitude for, perhaps consider a Masters if you don't find a well-paying job straight away, and use that time to expose yourself to women your age with the traits you desire.
People I otherwise respect cock an eyebrow when I point out that GPT-4 being a competent clinician and programmer is a cause for concern, reasoning that since it lacks appendages or a means of communication outside text (multimedia output aside), it can't replace human labor or human hands.
Firstly, they're the SOTA today, anyone wanting to bet that GPT-5 won't be another leap ahead within a couple years is welcome to take it up with me, I could use the money.
Secondly, advances in both soft and hardbody robotics continue apace, including hooking them up to LLMs, such as PaLM-e, at which point the LLM is also writing some of the code for controlling the robot, giving it goals, and using it to manifest itself in a live environment.
I've certainly expounded before on why demographics are unlikely to matter in the least, since as you've also pointed out, automation and widespread robotics will make an aging population much easier to bear, let alone retain the need for large numbers of skilled and unskilled immigrants many nations have come to rely on to bolster their numbers and maintain their QOL. Be it industry or military might, we're unlikely to be competing in either by throwing humans at the problem.
As usual, you pack the citations to back up the intuitions and fears I've developed from years of being an observant bystander, so I can only endorse this wholeheartedly.
From a personal standpoint, all of this is concerning to say the least, I am a skilled immigrant to the UK, and on one hand, Rishi Sunak and co are trying to desperately alleviate Britain's ever greater irrelevance by jumping on the AI bandwagon first, and on the other hand, threatening their uppity doctors that they better accept their lot in life, because they'll be replaced with cheaper AI and bots if they don't behave. Said British doctors are laughing at the threat, I could only wish I was half as blasé about it. They might not be able to pull it off today, but in a handful of years? 5 years? Yes. Add in the trained monkeys in lab coats who are already undercutting doctors, PAs and NPs, who will be able to compete with us on manual dexterity when the easy job of merely thinking is better done in a datacenter on the outskirts of London. Or imagine a deskilled doctor who uses AR glasses and AI-cues to do pretty much everything, with any attempt at deviation or display of artistic skill being a strict negative in terms of outcome. 90% of us becoming useless is almost as bad as 100% of us. Curses that the one place where the British government shows a degree of foresight and wisdom is the one that fucks me over the most. They've already shown their willingness to screw over their own doctors, hence the rampant demand for IMGs like me, who still see even the declining NHS as an upgrade, albeit a less appealing one each day.
To the extent that the immigration pathways I have rely on me bringing in great value as a trained and ready to work doctor, my impending economic obsolescence threatens all available pathways to remaining in a Western country, barring throwing my lot in with outright refugees.
Things like a need for human interaction or touch don't matter, when the economic incentives are so gargantuan, and especially since we already have a paucity of doctors globally, with new human ones needing to go through a lengthy training and deployment phase. You've already gone from the genteel days when most doctors could take their sweet time gossiping with patients and sipping tea, to a far more aggressive and target oriented approach where most people are given just as much time as needed. The market bore going from half an hour consults to 5-10 minutes with a frazzled GP, it'll go from 5 to 0 even faster. Even the people with a sentimental attachment to us can't keep us going, since they're likely to become economically obsolete themselves.
I can only hope I make enough money to insulate myself from the coming troubles, or at least become a citizen somewhere in the West so they'll put me on UBI. Ah, what I would give to be 5 years older, with enough runway to mess about and take my time. But at least I have alpha in knowing what's coming, and that puts me miles ahead of those who will be introduced to automation-induced unemployment when it comes for their "skilled" job.
You guys have no idea that how terrifying it is to see the curtains drawing close before your eyes, without the modest safety of a government committed to taking care of you when you're nothing but a drag. The Indian government certainly engages in welfare, but it has absolutely no hope of doing so when literally >90% of its citizens will end up unemployed, and even the UK will have to cut down on people who've outlived their usefulness. All I can say is that I'm grateful to have gotten this far, when I still have a fighting chance. God knows my little brother will likely never get to specialize into anything, if he even manages to practise as a junior for a handful of years.
I wasn't born a Doomer, quite the opposite. I spent most of my life looking forward to the bright future that technology can bring about, where we come to rule the Earth and the stars, and I still think that's more likely than not, it just comes with a significant risk of killing or starving me along the way. Pour one out if I don't make it, if you do, you can afford it.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3mo ago
On a very tangential note, I saw the Twitterati point and laugh at that upcoming movie about an American Civil War that somehow has California and Texas on the same side. Ignore the fact that that happened in my novel, but it was more that they both happened to oppose the Federal Government (well, you'd resent them a bit if they nuked every data center around to contain an AGI getting uppity, and Texas is surprisingly popular for those, not to mention glassing SF).
As such, if these secessionary sentiments ever become something more than posturing, at least I can get points for prescience.
Notes from Hinge and Bumble's Unpaid Psychiatry Services
Right. Putting doctor/psych trainee in my bio may or may not have been a mistake. I wanted to make it clear that I'm not going to be in India for more than like 3 or 4 months, just about long enough to die from heatstroke and land when it's wet and drizzly in Scotland.
The GMC frowns strongly on a violation of a doctor-patient relationship, especially when the doctor is screwing the patient. In India? Who gives a fuck? A friend of mine, a lawyer, reported that she went with her mom to see a shrink for her depression, and the horny bastard said she didn't need treatment, just an ice cream date.
Now I'm certainly not going to date someone under my care, even in India, only 30% because they're usually grannies with terminal cancer. And their cute granddaughters are probably too distraught to appreciate it, not that I'd be so uncouth as to try.
Unfortunately, I've become convinced that either I'm drawn to crazy women, or they're drawn to me. Or at least 80% of the female population on said apps needs a therapist more than a boyfriend.
Sadly, I nurse a weakness for cute girls who desperately need my help, and my dad-energy manifests so strongly that I've matched with med students to yell at them for being on the apps when their finals are ongoing. More than once. Certainly more than twice.
In no particular order:
Med student I yelled at for being on the apps. Turned out to have abruptly discontinued her SSRIs and having a meltdown. She got yelled at more, since I've been on that campus and know there's a pharmacy outside her dorm. Proceeds to inform me she suspects she's autistic. I say, sure, you're a final year med student giving said finals, you can probably tell, not that a diagnosis is going to do you any good. She then goes on to reveal to me that she's been formally diagnosed with BPD. I'm screaming and reacting with a 💀 emoji. Proceeds to tell me it's not that bad, to which I earnestly disagree. Then reveals that she harbors thoughts of stabbing her classmates with HIV contaminated needles. If it wasn't obvious to you, the deal was off the moment I heard BPD. There are many kinds of crazy, but that is what I'm not going to fuck with. Then "she" proceeds to tell me she's trans, which I genuinely couldn't tell at first on a quick skim (it was obvious later, presuming you knew what to look for, but I mostly matched to yell at her). Shoulda guessed from her being 5'10 in the bio, but at any rate, time to dip. Don't stick your dick in crazy, especially not when they can stick theirs back in you.
Another med student. Clearly in need of therapy, my attempt at psychoanalyzing her after a brief conversation was hilariously accurate in retrospect. Sadly, in the end, all I could provide was a good time. I was kinda serious with her (before I found out that against all odds, I did match into psych), even saw a buddy of hers, yet another med student, admitted to the ICU. Cue her falling for me after seeing my counseling skills with the distraught family and friends (it's a good way to dodge the malpractice suits). Sadly the buddy died, pontine hemorrhage and rebleed, no comorbidities or predisposing factors. Barring a love of biryani, and if that alone was lethal, I'd have passed away a decade back. Anyway, the girl had failed an exam from a prior year, and I was losing sleep trying to convince her to study for her next attempt. She told me not to worry about it, though my genuine concern meant I still did. Lo and behold, a 55 yo married professor with a daughter her age wrote her paper, in front of the entire exam hall, and submitted it in her name, this, in combination with her family being filthy rich and politically connected, meant that I left my concerns about her academics at the door. Then it turned out that she was the kind of party girl who had both a low tolerance for liquor, and a tendency to get frisky with anyone in sight. And said person wasn't necessarily always me. Some drama later, we weren't a thing, both because I simply couldn't trust her, and because she was growing crazy over the fact I was inevitably leaving. Long story, cut very short. I think I lost my most expensive watch, and she hasn't been so kind as to check.
Gyno final year trainee. I hit her up primarily because I was bored, and wanted to see if the uptick in market value from me being a post grad trainee extended that far. Older than me. I was justifiably incensed on her behalf and talking to her when she told me the orthopod she was seeing had dumped her over a text after seeing her for 6 months. Further conversation revealed that she's probably autistic, or just plain weird, being infatuated with me two phone calls in. Still dodging her calls with excuses of being too busy doing unpaid surgery with my dad (he's a Gyno surgeon who also happens to teach laparoscopic surgery to gyne trainees and even other consultants, I wanted to get him a new student if nothing else). But I understood why the previous poor bastard ran for the hills and didn't leave an address.
Fashion designer. Very cute, very sweet, very depressed. I had to talk her out of committing suicide, over the phone at 2 am after counseling another, actual suicide survivor, who wasn't my patient either. But working productively with her issues, seeing a therapist, actually listening to my concerns. Nice girl, I'm kinda sad she has to see me go, especially when she said I actually look good in Hawaiian shirts. I always suspected, but it's good to have a second opinion from an authoritative source.
Law student. Cute. Top of her class. Survivor of multiple suicide attempts, because she didn't take biology lessons past tenth grade, and Google wisely doesn't return results for "painless ways to commit suicide". Asked me on the first date how much paracetamol it takes to off oneself, for purely academic reasons. I had the sense to tell her I categorically refuse to answer that question. Has multiple psychiatrists and therapists. Refuses to see them, or follow their advice. When they do see her, they get depression, mine only gets exacerbated. Also, I suspect they're incompetent, or consider international consensus more of a suggestion. I've seen some absurd prescriptions, including longterm use of a combination of an SSRI and a benzo. Her anxiety is bad, but only in episodes, whereas I think she'd be way better served with a normal SSRI and benzos rarely on a PRN basis. Bunch of other medical comorbidities, but thankfully dodged the genetic mutation causing ADPKD that killed her father early and will probably get her siblings. She's pulled my hair and slapped me on a first date, the only saving grace being she's so weak only the former kinda hurt (and I need to keep my hair). As allergic to medical care as I am to textbooks, and prone to turn violent and call me old should I express any concern for her lack of care for her health.
A rather sweet psychologist doing a fellowship in Psycho-Oncology at another hospital. Met up after work for a date and to talk shop. Then she sees a text from her ex, and proceeds to have a full blown panic attack.. Slept with said ex recently, in the on call doctor's room at their hospital. I could tell she wasn't in any position to date from the moment we met, so I wish her well in figuring her shit out.
And so many more. And some of them, I assume, are good people, who do need a date more than counseling.
Yeah, I'm going to administer all my future dates a mental health questionnaire in the future, I pray that doesn't constitute a therapeutic relationship in the UK, especially when I get up mid date and run myself.
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