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
1yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr 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.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
I have discovered, by dint of fucking around, that SwiftKey keyboard for Android allows me to insert em-dashes with relative ease. I'm torn about using them—on one end, they're more expressive than standard hyphens or semi-colons; but on the other, in this climate, that invites accusations of AI writing.
I'm entirely fine with "it's not X, it's Y" becoming deprecated, it's a rather boring turn of phrase, but I'm still annoyed by the fact that I didn't even notice em-dashes as a distinct option before they went out of style.
Am I truly worried? Uh, maybe? My writing style is distinctive enough that it's not trivial to replicate using an LLM. They absolutely won't do it by default.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
4mo ago
I don't trust your calculations
You can't trust what I haven't presented. I could do so, and I strongly expect to be correct, but I already do enough trawling of medical literature when I'm being paid for it.
It's your child, and I have some respect for your right to make decisions on their behalf, even if I think they're bad decisions.
Furthermore, my children can simply get the shots later in life, when they are grown and have a much larger body mass with which to accommodate, after development has been mostly completed.
My man, you're going from wrong to confused. There's good reason why you don't see doctors or nurses pull out dose calculators to account for body weight when giving every vaccine I can think of it. It's because it doesn't matter. If little Tommy is 4'6 and 35 kilos or 4'9 and 45 makes next to no difference, and this holds true once you're past the size of a premature infant on death's door, going to a land whale who needs a mobility scooter. Vaccines aren't like paracetamol, the dose-response curves are VERY different when it's the immune system we're talking about. Someone with a peanut allergy isn't twice as likely to die if you give them two peanuts versus one.
The eczema finally went away, and there's no way to know the counterfactual, but I think if we were on schedule I'd still be seeing rashes all over the back and legs and ankles
You're not doing a good job at probabilistic reasoning, but an eczematous rash is a minor vaccine reaction, and of very little consequence. If it was life threatening, I presume you'd have pointed that out, and even then, you'd be better off consulting your pediatrician about whether they could narrow it down to a particular constituent of the two common rotavirus vaccines in the States (fetal bovine serum or porcine circovirus, if I had to guess from looking at composition), and take precautions when administering future vaccines with similar compositions. Believe it or not, most doctors would be happy to answer those questions and offer reassurance if warranted, especially if you're paying them.
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
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
2yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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.
Moderately interesting news in AI image gen:
It's been a good while since we've had AI chat assistants able to generate images on user request. Unfortunately, for about as long, we've had people being peeved at the disconnect between what they asked for, and what they actually got. Particularly annoying was the tendency for the assistants to often claim to have generated what you desired, or that they edited an image to change it, without actually doing that.
This was an unfortunate consequence of the LLM, being the assistant persona you speak to, and the actual image generator that spits out images from prompts, actually being two entirely separate entities. The LLM doesn't have any more control over the image model than you do when running something like Midjourney or Stable Diffusion. It's sending a prompt through a function call, getting an image in response, and then trying to modify prompts to meet user needs. Depending on how lazy the devs are, it might not even be 'looking' at the final output at all.
The image models, on the other hand, are a fundamentally different architecture, usually being diffusion-based (Google a better explanation, but the gist of it is that they hallucinate iteratively from a sample of random noise till it resembles the desired image) whereas LLMs use the Transformer architecture. The image models do have some understanding of semantics, but they're far stupider than LLMs when it comes to understanding finer meaning in prompts.
This has now changed.
Almost half a year back, OpenAI teased the ability of their then unreleased GPT-4o to generate images natively. It was the LLM (more of a misnomer now than ever) actually making the image, in the same manner it could output text or audio.
The LLM doesn’t just “talk” to the image generator - it is the image generator, processing everything as tokens, much like it handles text or audio.
Unfortunately, we had nothing but radio silence since then, barring a few leaks of front-end code suggesting OAI would finally switch from DALLE-3 for image generation to using GPT-4o, as well as Altman's assurances that they hadn't canned the project on the grounds of safety.
Unfortunately for him, Google has beaten them to the punch . Gemini 2.0 Flash Experimental (don't ask) has now been blessed with the ability to directly generate images. I'm not sure if this has rolled out to the consumer Gemini app, but it's readily accessible on their developer preview.
First impressions: It's good.
You can generate an image, and then ask it to edit a feature. It will then edit the original image and present the version modified to your taste, unlike all other competitors, who would basically just re-prompt and hope for better luck on the second roll.
Image generation just got way better, at least in the realm of semantic understanding. Most of the usual give-aways of AI generated imagery, such as butchered text, are largely solved. It isn't perfect, but you're looking at a failure rate of 5-10% as opposed to >80% when using DALLE or Flux. It doesn't beat Midjourney on aesthetics, but we'll get there.
You can imagine the scope for chicanery, especially if you're looking to generate images with large amounts of verbiage or numbers involved. I'd expect the usual censoring in consumer applications, especially since the LLM has finer control over things. But it certainly massively expands the mundane utility of image generation, and is something I've been looking forward to ever since I saw the capabilities demoed.
Flash 2.0 Experimental is also a model that's dirt cheap on the API, and while image gen definitely burns more tokens, it's a trivial expense. I'd strongly expect Google to make this free just to steal OAI's thunder.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6mo ago
(Mildly) Interesting observation:
Recently, people on Twitter have claimed that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is stunningly good at guessing a user's ethnic background from any substantive amount of example text, even examples which have no glaringly obvious tells.
I decided to randomly throw in 2 to 3 comments >500 words each in two tries to see how it did.
In both cases, it correctly guessed I was Indian. The first try had a comment which tangentially mentioned the fact that I was a doctor who had relocated to the UK for training and some tendency to use British spelling, which immediately made it jump to South Asian/Indian. I decided to omit that one and go off more esoteric comments, and once again it got it bang on. I won't share the full chat since it would be around 90% my own comments copied and pasted, but for the last, stunning, example, Claude noticed:
Let me break this down carefully based on the text patterns and subtle indicators in these medical/ethical discussions:
The writing style and topics suggest someone likely from a Western, English-speaking background, most likely American, but the specific approach and certain cultural markers make me think they may be of South Asian (likely Indian) descent or cultural background. Here's why:
- The combination of transhumanist views with a highly pragmatic/utilitarian approach to ethics is somewhat characteristic of certain South Asian intellectual traditions filtered through Western education
- The writing shows both deep familiarity with Western medical practice (discussing statins, GLP-1As) while maintaining some skepticism about Western nutritional science dogma
- The slightly formal writing style with precise logical argumentation but occasional colloquialisms feels characteristic of South Asian English writing traditions
- The stance on individual autonomy balanced against collective costs/benefits has elements of both Western individualism and South Asian communal thinking
- The matter-of-fact discussion of death and body disposal without strong cultural taboos could suggest someone raised with Hindu cultural influences, where cremation and pragmatic approaches to death are more normalized
However, I want to be very clear that this is speculative pattern-matching and I could be completely wrong. These writing patterns could emerge from many different backgrounds and experiences. If you're interested in whether this analysis is accurate, I'd be curious to know the actual background of the author.
I'm blown away. I had no idea that you could even make that kind of derivation, none of these strike me as Indian™ tropes in the least. All LLMs are excellent world modelers (and by extension at modeling the user), but that's better than I expected and by far.
I'd be curious if anyone else wants to give it a try and is willing to report back. Just copy two or three substantive comments and throw 'em in the pot.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr 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.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1yr ago
I can agree that they're not stupid, but willful ignorance? Absolutely.
A God that doesn't do anything else except set up a clockwork universe and then fuck off and never intervenes where anyone can see it isn't an entity worth worshipping.
Cue apologetics about how if God was obvious, then there would be no need for "faith", which is absolutely howl-worthy when you consider how convenient it was that there were clear and obvious miracles right up till the point we could properly document and examine them.
That is willful ignorance, for all that they're drinking their own kool-aid. At some point a rational entity who hasn't fucked their own priors sees that an explanation without a million epicycles that reduced to God doesn't really do anything is better stated as God not existing.
It seems to be that recreational indulgence in handicrafts, like wood working for one, is far more common in the US than the West, let alone outside the Anglosphere.
I don't know whether it's because of cultural factors that value self-reliance, more free time, large houses with more room to dedicate to things like this, or a combination of the above.
I don't know a single person in India who has a similar hobby, only those who do it for a living. Of course, we lack hobby culture to an extent, but still..
This strikes me as extremely unlikely, verging on outright nonsense.
Let's look at the diseases in question, the initial cluster, namely the ones that Sarno isn't alone in suspecting are psychosomatic, share one commonality that they don't have signs but have symptoms, a bit of medical jargon that simply means that they have no visible-to-outsiders characteristics barring what the patient themselves report and feel. The only exception is joint hypermobility here.
This is reasonable enough, practically every doctor alive, especially in psychiatric practise, has seen such cases, and so have I. It's not much of a stretch to think that the human mind can create something as entirely subjective as pain by itself, in a myriad of different presentations. And invasive tests usually find little to no organic changes that could plausibly cause said symptoms.
Now, the ones Sarno thinks are psychologically induced go way beyond the plausibility of the above, for reasons that might not be obvious to non-medical people. So I'll take a crack at why this makes little sense:
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First and most obviously, they have physical signs and large changes in a consistent and syndromic fashion. I doubt the brain has the ability to cause sudden histamine release and hive outbreaks no matter how stressed someone is.
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Gluten sensitivity is characterized by a testable and obvious change, namely the production of tissue transglutaminase antibodies that are detectable in the blood, prior to confirmation by a biopsy from the intestines. It makes absolutely no sense that the manifestation of anxiety and depression would be the sudden onset of an autoimmune disease with obvious markers! And why to gluten of all things??
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Hell, IBD/Crohns are comorbid with depression because they're extremely annoying and debilitating diseases that cause a massive drop in QOL, I'd certainly be sad if not depressed were I diagnosed with that!
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Herniated discs?? You can literally see them on MRI most of the time, how exactly is the brain buck-breaking the spine??
All of these diseases have clear non-psychiatric pathologies, and obvious objective changes, and unless someone manages to dig up Sarno's figures and at least 3 or more studies confirming its individual claims, I would toss this in the trashcan without further debate.
Edit: I confused IBS and IBD, there's some debate on whether or not the first has psychological links, and there isn't any obvious etiology that I'm aware of.
This comment is a travesty. If it wasn't clear, it is the majority of parents opting-in for scheduled vaccinations that's what creates the commons for you to free-ride off.
Even in a purely disinterested cost-benefit analysis, the odds of your child getting an autoimmune disease from vaccines is so low that the general benefit of them getting sick less often outweighs it. The number of people avoiding vaccination isn't at the point where you're benefiting from opting out, or pointing to others doing so as an excuse. The majority of vaccines are net positive in expectation, regardless of what others do.
Meta-rationality is a hard art to practice. You point to a minority of people hitting defect to defect just as hard.
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