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
5d ago
I'm A) Jewish and B) Once did a shitload of ketamine and... well, describing the experience probably won't make sense to anyone who isn't Jewish and who hasn't done that, but suffice it to say I'm entirely convinced that the holocaust did happen roughly as commonly described in the broadest strokes -- that does fit the Pattern of Reality and, uh, ancestral memory that I encountered
It's the second time today when I semi-sincerely wonder if someone on this forum needs a psychiatrist. I'm very cheap, I even do it for free.
(I hope this is a joke and that you're not looking for historical insight from a dissociative drug. Might have cured any depression, if you had it.)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
I'm not sure how feasible that would be. We don't have many mods, and activity varies widely depending on availability.
I can, however, tell you that we do our best to voluntarily recuse ourselves from moderation decisions where we have a conflict of interest. Usually because someone had exhausted our patience.
Case in point, when Hlynka flamed out, I chose to refrain from actively encouraging his ban. Never liked the guy, didn't see what others saw in him. He got banned by his fellow moderators (as an ex-mod himself), which I can't complain about. I know the others have similar stories.
At the end of the day, mods have a great deal of autonomy, should they choose to exercise it. Controversial decisions are hashed out behind closed doors.
From ordinary user perspective there seems to always be one or two mods who are way too trigger happy in non-obvious janitorial duties.
It's those "one or two mods" who actively hold down the fort. For example, I go long periods between officially donning the mod hat, even if I'm quietly doing spring cleaning and admin work in the background. We really don't have manpower to spare, and before you ask, during the last round of recruitment, we had lots of other candidates who turned down the offer because they simply didn't want to take on the burden. Jannies do this for free! That's a miracle! Give us money!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
Ozempic Update:
I think I've been on it for over a month now. Down 3 kilos and change. No real negative effects noted. I estimate I eat at about a 30% caloric deficit, though I haven't been explicitly counting.
Unfortunately, it's been rather difficult getting back in to working out at the same time. I'm having a hard time eating enough, be it protein or otherwise, and the last time I went, I decided to try and beat my PR on the leg-press and almost passed out. Not sure whether to attribute that to slacking for the week prior, not eating enough, not hydrating enough, or skimping on the electrolytes. Lifts stalled too.
If I had to choose one over the other, I'm going to err on the side of losing more weight. In the meantime, I'm hoping the extra fat allows for some body recomposition despite the rather inadequate diet. I've been having creatine powder on the side, but irregularly.
Some have claimed that Ozempic helps with willpower in general. While I'm sympathetic to such, I can't say it's made any difference for me. It's certainly not going to replace the ADHD meds.
Y'all looking for a psychiatrist? I'm cheap.
Ahem. A position I semi-endorse is that most liberals tend to be more neurotic, and less likely to post here if the waters aren't welcoming. Plus, most of the internet is liberal-aligned by default, why would they be specifically drawn here? I imagine those who do are attracted by the quality of discourse, if nothing else.
I don't fit neatly into most political categories, on a political compass scale, I end up in the middle by virtue of multiple extremes canceling out. I'd call myself quite thick-skinned (a common trait in our most prolific posters), but I'd probably not engage at all if all the feedback I received was negative. So I can't really blame you for having some degree of dread. I've submitted comments where I was confident I was right, but I certainly didn't look forward to the task of wrangling all the people convinced otherwise. It's an acquired taste.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
I'd call myself a gun nerd, and I'd say that the first John Wick treated firearms with respect. It all went downhill there after.
I don't care what your "bulletproof" suit is made of, if it's any durable fiber I'm aware of, it's not going to stand up to rifle caliber rounds. Kevlar? Aramid? Not happening. Not without looking more like a bomb suit with plate inserts, at the very least.
Guns became a matter of convenience later on. At just about the same point the blind assassin was up to his nonsense, you had bows and arrows versus guns. What.
Right now, it seems that John only gets hurt when it suits the plot. He doesn't feel like an ultra-lethal human operating within range of plausibility, he's just a superhuman with chronic constipation, which is why he doesn't seem to enjoy his prowess.
The choreography also went to hell. Everyone stands around waiting for John to act, more often than not. That visceral sense of fear, the impression that John was going up against competent foes and beating them through sheer skill? Gone.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Welcome to The Motte! We've got cookies--
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave.
Oh.
You seem like a nice person. You've politely framed your discomfort and concern without flaming out, which is more than can be said about some of our longtime users with plenty of AAQCs. Some of them even come back whistling away, hoping nobody remembers their peformative crash out.
I think I can speak for the other moderators when I say that we'd like to have you around. Everything that follows is an attempt at an explanation for why The Motte is the way it is:
Look, no forum is perfect. The Motte tries to find a delicate and hazy balance between freedom of expression, politeness and avoiding the FBI raiding Zorba's home.
There's no other place like it. Believe me, I've looked. You can drop the restrictions on politeness and most pretenses of moderation, and you end up with 4chan or Kiwifarms. You can tighten the screws, and end up with a nicely mowed lawn like Scott's substack comment section, but at the cost of killing a whole swathe of politically incorrect worldviews. (Though he has slightly warmed on the whole no discussion of CW thing, but you can't really run a community off substack comments, the layout sucks).
This is what motivates me to stay, and to take on the occasional unpleasant task of mowing the lawn myself. With a light touch; one man's weed is another man's wildflower. There's no other place like us, and what we have is worth expending the negentropy to keep going. Yes, even if it's herding cats, and often cats with rabies.
And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards.
Our forum, like any place that does more than just pay lip service to freedom of speech, has one principled libertarian and a zillion witches.
I'd call myself the principled libertarian, but I think there's a mugshot of mine next to a stall selling signed copies of the Malleus Maleficarum. Perhaps it's a rotating, honorary position.
What we succeed at, mostly, is getting the witches to temporarily LARP as "principled libertarians", sometimes with the same disgruntled attitude as a rambunctious boy forced to sit through Mass, when they'd rather be calling people slurs or setting houses on fire. If you can be polite and not break the rules, then the candy you get is access to a rather thoughtful and discerning user base willing to seriously engage with just about any topic under the sun.
(Sometimes, if they do this long enough, the mask sticks)
@SecureSignals is our resident antisemite. Yet he mostly behaves. Not always, he's been rapped on the knuckles often enough, and banned for significant amounts of time. These days, he even talks about things other than the Jews, because we were quite clear that this forum isn't his personal hobby-horse, and he needs to figure out some other way to pay rent.
That is why you see SS. What you don't see are the dozens of people who can't keep it in their pants at all, who DM insults to people like @2rafa. They get caught in the filter, and are swiftly banned.
but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards.
Keep in mind the very important distinction between the moderators tolerating something, and the denizens of this forum doing so. We don't control upvotes, we can't compel people to engage with tracts they hate. We choose what gets rounded up as an AAQC, but the initial reports as such? All you guys.
Yet, more often than not, articulate and reasoned claims get their due.
I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
Us mods take such claims seriously. We would appreciate examples, and if it became clear that we were egregiously biased, we would seek to correct ourselves.
We're not monolithic. There are significant differences in personal opinion, though we aim at consensus.
We are also not omniscient. If one side is consistently getting their rage-bait reported, and the other isn't, the odds of us noticing decline dramatically. There was once a point where I could claim to ready every single comment posted on this site, but alas, due to gainful employment, that's no longer feasible. The other mods probably have even less free time. We also impose significant costs on ourselves by seeking to explain ourselves in warnings and ban messages, instead of just firing them off from on-high.
That being said, there are probably hundreds or thousands of kind, well-spoken people who we would have loved to keep around, but who were scared off by the topics (and less commonly, the tone) of what's discussed here. That sucks, but to an extent, that's a price we have to pay to keep The Motte open for most, if not all. We also keep away a whole lot of witches so vile that they're not tolerated by us witch-adjacenf folk. You really can't please everyone, not even nice people with reasonable desires. But we've kept the lights on, and us mods have a vested interest in preventing this from becoming a dead and desolate place racking up unjustified AWS bills.
We would hate to see you go, and I hope you can find reason to stay.
You're putting far too much into your interpretation of what I initially said. That's the polite way to put it, because it's a lot of putting words in my mouth that I never said.
In the context of:
Even the best models will confidently spout absolute falsehoods every once in a while without any warning.
My point is clearly that humans, even the "best" humans, aren't immune to the same accusation.
You did not say "no", as such i find it disingenuous of you to suddenly back-pedal and claim to care about reliability after the the fact.
What are you on about? If my only option was that faulty calculator, then I would use it, after making every attempt to mitigate its shortcomings. If it was worth my time to do the calculation by hand, I'd do that instead. Yet for anything more complicated than 5 digit sums, I'd be better off working around the faulty calculator. That is the same approach I use with LLMs, to excellent effect. Verify everything that is worth the effort of verifying.
Why would you assume that I don't care about reliability? A perfect calculator beats a faulty calculator. Multiple faulty calculators beat a single faulty calculator. A faulty calculator beats no calculator at all.
Humans are unreliable. You are a human are you not? You have not given any indication that you care about accuracy or reliability and instead (by chosing to use the trick calculator over doing the math yourself) have strongly implied that you do not care about such things.
Once again, your insistence on dividing the world into "reliable" vs "unreliable" is a choice you're making, and not one of mine. If you, instead, assume that I'm the one making such a claim, you're off by light-years.
Humans are not perfectly reliable, and we have entire systems meant to address that. That's a significant purpose behind the whole civilization thing.
Are human pilots perfectly reliable? No, hence we have copilots, flight computers, and check-lists.
Are human mathematicians perfectly reliable, even working within the rigorous confines of mathematics? Nope. That's why we invented calculators, theorem provers like Coq, and so on.
Am I perfectly reliable? I wish. That's why I make sure to fact-check my own claims and use Google, and yes, LLMs, because I expect the combination to be more robust as well as faster than figuring out everything from first principles myself.
Our entire civilization is a human-fallibility-management-system. So when I say "Buddy, have you seen humans?", I'm not making a "fully generalized argument against 'true' and 'false'". I'm making the opposite point: The pursuit of truth and accuracy is so important that we've spent millennia developing robust, multi-agent, error-correcting systems to compensate for the fact that our base hardware (a single human brain) is unreliable.
Cost and speed are factors too, and one that can be meaningfully traded off with reliability if you can't have it all.
You have not given any indication that you care about accuracy or reliability and instead (by chosing to use the trick calculator over doing the math yourself) have strongly implied that you do not care about such things.
Hardly. If, for some reason, normal calculators weren't an option, then I offered ways to mitigate the failures of even the faulty ones you conjecture. That steps adds extra time and headache, but if you really cared to, you could get indistinguishable results.
Even if were to grant your framing of LLMs as less than perfectly reliable oracles, then I obviously endorse working around those failures. I also point to the fact that humans are less than perfectly reliable.
Besides, you're the one who made the entirely unfounded claim that:
As a math nerd I seriously despise this line of argument as it ultimately reduces to a fully generalized argument against "true", "false", and "accuracy" as meaningful concepts.
What does you being a math nerd have to do with anything? Without further justification, it's an argument from authority, and authority you then didn't demonstrate. You have yet to remotely demonstrate that I am making a "fully generalized argument" against those concepts. Everything you said afterwards is, at bare minimum, tangential to that point.
Im not claiming that LLMs are unreliable because they are "less than perfect" i am claiming that they are unreliable because they are not only unreliable, but unreliable by design.
Without quantifying "reliability", or even quantifying one's willingness to tradeoff reliability for other things, such an argument is pointless.
Modern electronics are some of the most robust and error-resistant physical devices to ever exist, with more sigmas of accuracy than I care to count. Yet, they're still at risk of failure or inaccuracy, if some random cosmic ray were to hit them during an operation. In situations where you absolutely need to reduce this to the bare minimum, you can pay for ECC memory or run computations in parallel. This still doesn't entirely mitigate the risk, but it reduces it to levels that aren't a concern except over periods of billions of years.
Does this mean that modern computers are "unreliable by design"? Absolutely not. It means that some unreliability is, unfortunately, unavoidable, but can be reduced to tolerable levels. They were designed, in the human-intent sense, for reliability.
You claim LLMs are "unreliable by design". This is a misunderstanding of what they are. LLMs are stochastic by design. This is a feature, not a bug. It allows them to produce a diverse range of outputs from the same prompt, which is essential for creative and exploratory tasks. This stochasticity is controllable via sampling parameters like temperature. If one requires deterministic output for a given state, one can simply set temperature=0. The resulting output will be the single most probable completion. It may still be factually incorrect, but it will not be randomly incorrect in the way your trick abacus analogy suggests. The unreliability is an emergent property of imperfect modeling of the data distribution, not a deliberate design choice in the sense you imply.
The argument "humans are fallible too" is not a "fully generalized argument against 'true' and 'false'". It is the establishment of the relevant baseline for performance. To hold a new technology to a standard of flawless perfection that no existing system (especially its human predecessors) can meet is not a rigorous critique; it is simply moving the goalposts.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
That's fair, o3 has a conversational style that is rather unique, even when considering other SOTA reasoning models. It's like a bright zoomer intern with ADHD who will try just about anything.
if you’re not a domain-specific expert
I would hope that a doctor using o3 would be able to parse the jargon! If not, they have bigger issues than merely using an LLM. 4o might be more conversational, but for knotty problems, I'd rather use o3 itself to explain arcane terminology or have another model break it down for me.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
That is not an explanation for:
As a math nerd I seriously despise this line of argument as it ultimately reduces to a fully generalized argument against "true", "false", and "accuracy" as meaningful concepts.
You're arguing that since LLMs are not perfectly reliable, therefore they're unreliable. There are different degrees of reliability necessary to do useful things with them. It is a false dichotomy to divide them so. I contend that they've crossed the threshold for many important, once well-paying lines of cognitive labor.
Besides, your thought experiment is obviously flawed. If you're sampling from a noisy distribution, what's stopping you from doing so multiple times, to reduce the error bars involved? I'd expect a "math nerd" to be aware of such techniques, or did your interest end before statistics?
If I had to rely on an LLM for truly high-stakes work, I'd be working double time to personally verify the information provided, while also using techniques like running multiple instances of the same prompt, self-critique or debate between multiple models.
Fortunately, that's a largely academic exercise, since very few issues of such consequences should be decided by even modern LLMs. I give it a generation or two before you can fire and forget.
I have no objections to my own doctor using an LLM, and I use them personally. All I ask is that they have the courtesy and common sense to use o3 instead of 4o.
Besides, the contraption you describe is quite similar to how quantum computing works. You get an answer which is sampled from a probability distribution. You are not guaranteed to get a single correct answer. Yet quantum computers are at least theoretically useful.
Hell, as a maths nerd, you should be aware that the overwhelming majority of numbers cannot be physically represented. If you also happen to be a CS nerd on the side, you might also be aware of the vagaries of floating point arithmetic. Digital computers are not perfect, but they're close enough for government work. LLMs are probably close enough for government work too, given the quality of the average bureaucrat.
Humans are fallible. LLMs are fallible, but they're becoming less so. The level of reliability needed for a commercially viable self-driving vehicle is far higher than that for a useful Roomba. And yet, Waymos are now safer than humans.
I rest my case.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
The left can, occasionally, meme.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
I absolutely fucking hated Prometheus, but to my surprise, I did mostly like Covenant.
It had some major stinkers, like the
Yet the movie had a vibe, and the action was great. Some of the ideas were even cool! That's far more than can be said about Prometheus.
(Give Romulus a watch, I enjoyed it)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
Of course you've been enjoying this. (So have I)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
I'm particularly annoyed by the decline within the John Wick franchise.
The first movie? Goes hard. Taut cinematography, pacing, and music. The bathhouse shootout still gives me bumps. A+. It even manages to stay somewhat grounded, allowing for the Secret Assassins stuff.
And then it goes downhill from there. Half the population of New York shot dead with no repercussions. The lore getting ever more convoluted while simultaneously becoming nonsensical. The fight scenes got way worse.
The last mainline JW movie I saw, which must have been number 4, I gave up on halfway through. When the story wants me to believe that a blind man somehow manages to be a dangerous assassin on part with John Wick, I fucking give up. The man uses a katana most of the time. Has nobody tried shooting him from more than 20 meters away? How is he not hard countered by a JBL speaker blasting Fetty Wap?
It's no surprise I barely watch movies these days.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
Wasn't the last Alien movie decent? The one where it was a bunch of teenagers trying to make it off a colony by looting a space station? I don't recall any obvious idiot-balls being kicked around, though, to be fair, I have very low expectations after the first Prometheus.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
I might know much less off the top of my head, but my confidence calibration will be through the roof. Those topics are just begging for hallucinations.
If knowledge isn't a concern and all we care about is a Brier score, I must regretfully inform you that a rock saying "nothing ever happens" has you beat.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
I invite further clarification.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
I wonder how well you'd do if asked to opine accurately on the range of topics that people demand of their humble chatbots. Better yet, how would you fare if you didn't have access to Google? Search is a relatively new feature for LLMs, and they do better with it enabled.
I doubt you could accurately answer questions regarding astrophysics, botany, niche psychological theories, Color Revolutions, the sexual habits of Australian Indigenes and Ska music.
You would definitely not fare better when it came to specifics like dates and names.
LLMs have grossly superhuman world-knowledge, but not crystalline intelligence. I don't care who you are, not even Gwern could match them.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
Policy-wonk khakis ass stretched like taffy
I'm sorry, are people expecting me to believe that LLMs can't write? Those are sublime turns of phrase.
On a more serious note, this is very funny. I look forward to seeing what Grok 4 gets up to. 3 was a better model than I expected, even if o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro outclassed, maybe xAI can mildly impress me again.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
6d ago
Buddy, have you seen humans?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7d ago
Ask nicely or bribe a friend who has a decent phone or camera. Unless you want to pay for a professional photographer.
(Girls have it so easy. Women be taking photos of each other.)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7d ago
I would presume the Masgrave option would be able to activate LTSC without issue. Look it up, since I can't share a link here.
Looks like you linked to it! I've used them before, worked out fine.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8d ago
Occasionally we get reminded that even our most destructive wars barely hold a candle to a single "act of God."
WW2 killed more people than any "act of God" in recorded history. I'd be more concerned about a nuclear exchange than I would about any natural disaster that's likely to happen during my life expectancy.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8d ago
While I certainly endorse the principle, shouldn't the figures be much higher because the relevant population are people who even have to seriously consider the risk of drowning due to a flood? The risk of being attacked by a shark per capita is pretty low, but most people don't live next to an ocean.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9d ago
I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the majority of white-passing "aboriginals" simply have negligible or <10% Caucasian ancestry. At that point, what's surprising about the fact that they look white?
That's a better reason than most, and one I share.
To me, a great deal of the attraction of The Motte is the opportunity to lock horns with intellectual peers. If my ideas can't stand up to scrutiny, I owe it to myself to find out.
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