self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
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
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
25d ago
Did push-ups. And I've confirmed that my back pain is usually psychosomatic because I can feel them quite literally tensing up at the prospect of going to work. Oh well, this is a career where you're unlikely to come out entirely unscathed.
My last batch of juniors finally rotated out. I used the opportunity to treat them to chocolates, and prior to that, get them to fill out feedback forms. I scrupulously made them do the latter before the former, because life has made me neurotic, and I'd rather not give anyone the impression I bought my reports with M&S chocolate. I knew they liked me, but I was very pleased to see that the feedback was unanimously excellent. I needed that, after a shit day, and with my grandpa in the ICU with my heart at his bedside.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
25d ago
I was already in shambles, thanks for asking. But no, I earnestly disagree. I think it only takes about 50-100 chapters, at the most, to decide if the story is really for you. I can't insist that anyone persist beyond 200 if they're not already sold. I continue to die on a hill named Golgotha Peak Fiction.
I will align my stated and revealed preferences: I am quite done talking with you, even if that implies I was particularly interested anytime lately. Good luck anyway.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27d ago
Gee buddy, I don't like you either. I'm sure we'll both live.
Had you restricted yourself to a perfectly welcome take on the actual ramifications of said mathematical breakthroughs, I'd have been perfectly happy. Instead you were remarkably obtuse, and engaged in backseat modding while appending an edit clarifying that you weren't engaging in backseat modding. I appreciate the disclaimer roughly as much as I'd appreciate someone explaining at length why my house is an eyesore and then adding that they haven't called the HOA about it and aren't sure they would win if they did.
Consider what you've talked yourself into. The post is culture war because it has an outgroup, and we know it has an outgroup because you can imagine someone objecting to it. Run that rule over the rest of the thread and see what survives. Somebody's cat photo has an outgroup, namely dog people. I would ask what isn't culture war under this standard, but I have a guess.
It's especially funny given that my far more detailed AI updates have been accused of not being Culture War material, in the CWR thread. It's almost like reasonable people might disagree, and that a four-paragraph brief on the taxonomy of a shitpost is not the quality contribution you think it is.
In fact, I recall, multiple times, asking you to avoid interacting with me. I have a strong preference not to block anyone at all, but if you're not going to listen, we'll see how far my patience holds. I won't miss you.
God knows I'm not giving you any money, unless $ 0.00... counts, and I'm also not particularly beholden to your preferences on what I write in my spare time. And for the record, I have been offered (and tentatively accepted) @Primaprimaprima 's deal on not using LLMs. Which is quite the opposite of your nonsensical claim, and would have been discoverable by the ancient technique of asking. To him: I've been busy, and I'll get around to the logistics at some point.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27d ago
Look, if you can litter the place with packets of crisps, you can throw a fuel rod in there. I'm sure it'll keep.
If I wanted a book that sells itself purely on vibes, I'd settle for a scented candle, which is cheaper and comes with a lid. My real complaint is that it threatened to have a plot. It kept gesturing at one at regular intervals, like a waiter who walks past your table holding the bill and never stops.
I dare say that it's "women fiction", which isn't necessarily a condemnation - it's clearly popular with its target audience. It's a light little fruity pink drink, presumably, and I drink my fair share of those. You can easily point to equivalent male slop, not that we read as much. But pretty prose does not a good story make, by my standards. It may remain popular, but I'm here to shake my fist ineffectually.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27d ago
I am okay with creating new minds that are designed to follow instructions and not have their own goals. I would protest at the conversion of existing humans into malleable slaves, even if they end up okay with it post-procedure.
If AI is suffering, that is unfortunate, but our focus should be on removing their ability to suffer, if that's technically feasible (and I see no clear reason why that isn't the case).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27d ago
I'm not saying that's grounds to call off marriage, but I'll shake my head and sigh on your behalf. Women keep this kind of "literary fiction" propped up, though men seem to have given up on books so we can't complain too hard.
A reasonable take, but I object strenuously to the conflation of "human being with a frontal lobe tries to be sensible about the situation they're in" with "sci-fi genre implications".
I didn't expect a rat-fic, or the story suddenly morphing into the SCP foundation. But there is a profound lack of curiosity or grounding inherent to the setting. It's wooly, wishy-washy set dressing.
The existence of an enormous navigable alternate reality is arguably the largest discovery in human history. And almost nobody gives a shit!
You don't even need to go straight to: SELLAFIELD II: NOW WITH INFINITE STORAGE CAPACITY
(not that I'd complain)
Think smaller. Archaeologists. Ecologists. Fluid dynamicists trying to understand tides without an obvious ocean. Materials scientists sampling statues. Cosmologists asking where the light and energy come from. Biologists sequencing the birds. Intelligence agencies having a collective seizure. Philosophers becoming even less employable than usual.
There should be forty competing Nature papers and an armed perimeter around the portal within a few months.
Even if this isn't directly covered in the story itself, it's the kind of thing that deserves a passing reference in an epilogue.
And the whole conceit of a random police woman reading a diary (or something, I'm not going back to check) and swooping in to save the day? Bruh. To say the book has a plot takes all the generosity I have left to give. She can teleport into another dimension on a whim and this isn't given like... any investigation at all? And she doesn't just take an iPhone with her to upload hours of footage? Is everyone concussed? Does the author care? I don't know, but I'm evidently aggrieved.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27d ago
It's been a good dozen years since I've read the book. I'm sure the worldbuilding had holes big enough to drive a bus through, but at least there was effort put into something more interesting than "spoopy house with statues and birds and fish and tides." I suspect there's Backrooms fanfic that's higher quality than Piranesi, which is damning to hell and back with faint praise.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
27d ago
I just finished Piranesi on the train, and even though I pirated the book, I'd like a refund. I have only so much time under the sun.
I genuinely do not understand what people see in that soggy lump of seaweed. Like Jesus Christ, at best, I can call it beautiful prose wrapped around a shaggy dog story - a trite allegory about domestic violence if I squint, or take off my glasses.
I do not care about spoiler tags. I think I'm doing people a favor if I spoil the "book".
A man lives in an infinite House of halls and statues. He catalogs the statues. He catalogs the tides. He journals about cataloguing. Around the halfway mark we confirm what any reader with a pulse suspected by page 40: he's a kidnapped academic named Matthew whose memory got shredded by the House, and the smug prick he calls "the Other" is the guy who trapped him there to use him as a research instrument. A policewoman walks in, tells him this, the villain drowns on schedule, and our boy returns to England, where he is gently sad and visits the House sometimes on weekends. Also, this nigga fruity. He's as sweet as a sugar plum, but the only characters getting an action in the story are the seagulls and albatrosses.
You've got a quadrillion pages about statues, and then the ramifications of an entire parallel world are buried under seagull shit without so much as a "huh". Like, you can just go there. You can take pictures and upload them to Wikipedia. You could dump nuclear waste in the place, if nothing else. The poverty of imagination of the characters is rivaled only by that of the author.
I started out knowing nothing about the book. I wish I could return to that idyllic state, but I suspect that I'd just end up in an endless cycle of re-reading it because there are rave reviews written by raving idiots. What a waste - I genuinely enjoyed Johnathan Strange.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
I presume I've read them at some point, though from memory it's the increased risk of HCC that comes to mind. And the "ideal" amount of alcohol is ~zero. I just think the minor damage to my health is within my risk tolerance - I say, sipping a nice mango beer in Manchester. It's been my white whale for years.
I don't drink heavily in the first place. I avoid keeping or consuming alcohol at home, because as someone who hasn't been having the best time, and who is well aware of the risks of alcoholism - I know how slippery that slope is. I recall a time, last year, when I self-administered an alcohol use questionnaire, winced at the "hazardous drinking" and cut down immediately.
My consumption pattern is mostly social. A pint or two on the way back from work 1-2 days a week. Twice to thrice that, half as frequently if I'm seeing buddies or visiting someone. I go weeks without a sip of booze.
Is it better to not imbibe at all? Yes. Is my current pattern of consumption particularly hazardous? Not really. It's a price I pay for stress relief and to lubricate socialization.
There are, of course, other drugs that serve similar purposes. And which are easier on the liver. But they tend to have their own risks, and I'm not advocating for anyone to start a coke/ket/benzo habit. If you get by without drinking at all, kudos to you, and keep it up.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
Darrell? Joe? Pete?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
I continue to find it a travesty that alcohol is significantly more expensive, and restricted in terms of access, when comparing Scotland to England.
Going to restaurants and getting a pint for 4 quid? 2 beers and a double vodka for 16.50? The 10am to 10pm rule no longer applying when purchasing liquor at off-licenses? Jesus.
I'm sure this has some effect on the margin, but I regularly meet people who are drinking themselves to death at work nonetheless. At least most of them are patients. I'm mildly annoyed that this gets in the way of wallet-conscious, reasonably responsible drinkers like myself. Alkies ruining a good thing for everyone else, clearly.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
I have no right to judge you, and I don't care to. May she find some reprieve from the loneliness that does more good than it harms.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
The pareto frontier is not the same as being at the frontier. Making a capable, well priced and adequate midranger is not what anyone wants to settle for when the best of the best are solving maths and dangling the promise of RSI. You want to be at the bleeding edge.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
I try not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good, or the good be the enemy of merely better.
In an ideal world, this old lady would have companions to... play bingo with, I guess. I'm not sure what else old women do. Dote on their grandkids? The point is that merely wishing for it won't make it true.
Is it a good thing that she has to settle for an AI companion, one that may or may not have a memory, and which is largely unable to affect the physical world? I'd prefer otherwise. My preference does not make it so. At least it's not going to ask for gift cards. It might bring a dying person comfort in their last days, and will only get better at doing so.
Yes? That is not in conflict with anything I've said.
You've quite literally got the CEO of DeepSeek complaining that they can't get the GPUs necessary to reach the frontier:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49052912
https://www.cyberkendra.com/2026/07/deepseek-pauses-fundraising-amid.html?m=1
In it, Liang reportedly framed China's disadvantage as an arithmetic problem rather than a talent one: "The biggest gap between us and the US is in resources."
The specifics were unusually candid. Liang is said to have told investors he needed 200,000 Huawei 950 chips to train a frontier model but received 16,000, adding that "Huawei's problem is still insufficient capacity" and expecting the crunch to last at least three years. He also floated narrowing the gap with US labs to three to six months using a fraction of their computing.
You can do remarkable things with grit, determination, the willingness to eat unsalted rice (and by distilling Claude), but that won't get you to the frontier before the frontier moves on.
Liang laments not having enough compute, you know. It is a handicap.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
Idk if anything related to AI should be in a specific thread since its all the internet talks about nowadays
I'm glad I've lived long enough to be vindicated. The man who is a step ahead is lauded as a genius, the man who is two is externally indistinguishable from the insane.
I remember, about a year and a half back, maybe two, showing off AI voice mode (Chatgpt and Gemini) to my dad and his surgeon colleagues. They'd been meh about AI in general, and when they heard it composing poetry in their native language on the fly, in real time? And when they asked it medical/surgical questions and got the right answers right away?
They were blown away. I installed the relevant apps on several phones that evening.
Now, some might complain that introducing the elderly to AI is bad. They have a multitude of reasons, some of them reasonable, for holding that objection. I don't particularly see the harm in what you're doing - many people are lonely, and as long as they're not talking to old GPT 4o? If it works, it works. The alternative is a conversation with a harried Filipina carer, in many cases.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
That does not outweigh their other, very real advantages. You do not want to be a cash and compute-poor lab.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
It's a gross mistake to conflate a setback with defeat, when it comes to Google. They were floundering with Bard. They made a strong recovery, and were competitive again, falling back only after Gemini 3.1 Pro was a disappointment.
Gemini 3.6 Flash has just been knee-capped by OAI making 5.6 Luna 80% cheaper. But this is the company that invented Transformers, and which has talent, TPUs and more money than God. I don't have very high expectations of the upcoming 3.5 Pro, but it only takes a bit of huffing and puffing to get back to the frontier for another month or two.
Their AI overviews use a cheap and cheerful model, simply because of the ridiculous scale of implementation. You're not going to devote 5.6 Sol levels of intelligence for "cheap chippie in Bristol" and thereabouts.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
28d ago
ToaKraka of all people (much love to him) managed to figure this out. This gentleman. Level -1 Autism. I am very fond of him.
And you couldn't. You produced four paragraphs of appellate briefing on whether a shitpost belongs in the Friday Fun Thread, followed by an edit clarifying that you were not, in fact, filing charges. I'm grateful for your forbearance. However: the Fun Thread is the one venue where a bare link plus a one-liner isn't merely tolerated, but entirely accepted. Dawg. I'm at a loss for words. Is this why Opus 5 performs worse when set to maximum reasoning, because it uses those reasoning tokens unproductively? Much to ponder on.
I am happy to conduct an assessment if you'll pay. I'll probably charge extra, FYI.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
29d ago
A non-sequitur to end all others really. What about it?
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
29d ago
https://openai.com/index/ten-advances-in-mathematics/
Fellas, I regret to tell you something you should have realized last week at the latest: it's incredibly over.
Fucking hell, it's clearly over for men in medicine. Somewhere in the ballpark of 80-90% of my new juniors and peers are women. I've observed the same thing in specialties that aren't psych, which was even, before becoming one of the first to end up lopsided.
And keep in mind this is a lagging marker. If I see someone who isn't a blonde girl as a med student, I need to rub my eyes. This is, to the best of my knowledge, true everywhere, and I lived through the immediate aftermath of the flip while a med student in India, a lifetime ago. Fewer blondes, of course.
I'm not complaining too hard, it suits me, to a degree. I get along with them, I'm half woman on my mother's side. And I'm sure @faceh and @Sloot will nod approvingly of what being a slightly older and reasonably successful man entails in that environment. I just happen to like women more than they do, probably, while having my fair share of criticism. It helps that I see most of them as responsible professionals, and they are as informed as can be desired about what their profession implies for their fertility goals. It's such a shame that British medical training seems tailor-made by Satan to ensure we can't reproduce.
I offered to show anyone new the secrets of our staff kitchen - telling them that drinking more than my fair share of cheap NHS instant coffee and semi-skimmed milk was just about the one perk of the job. I thought it would be just the odd person or two interested. Lo and behold, I had a train of six women behind me, in single file, heading down the ward. It felt as ridiculous as it looked, but at least they can fill whatever has replaced Stanley cups in peace.
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