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
6hr ago
My novel is up to 248k words and change. That's almost the length of the original Game of Thrones, and half the length of the entire LOTR trilogy.
Huh. It's the first time I've checked, and I genuinely wasn't keeping track. I guess I shouldn't feel so bad about the inconsistent update cycle when there's around 20 hours of material to read, which I've definitely spent hundreds writing.
I certainly don't feel like I'm near a conclusion, the main reason I opted for a web serial format is that it frees me from worrying about word count, and I can give every chapter and concept room to breathe.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
The subreddit is in a frozen state, with the only posts being Nara's links to our AAQC roundups. I wasn't keeping track of the subscriber count, so I don't know if 19k is a jump or just what we had when we turned off the lights.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
God, while I'm not happy about being paid about half what my US peers make, I suppose I should count my blessings in that none of this nonsense comes up in my actual job. And that's despite the UK being, in some ways, more Woke than even 2023-America.
(You can't pay me enough to work in the ER)
I can only hope that nobody takes away the message that this is a representative sampling of what actual ER doctors go through, or how they act, even if some of the specific incidents strike me as things that could have happened. Not an expert on the day to day realities of medical work in the States, so hopefully @Throwaway05 has something to add.
Though, to be fair:
We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky.
Are all things that do actually happen. The writers of the show have done at least some homework.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
7hr ago
A while back, when I was younger and less jaded, I did consider a career as a neurosurgeon specializing in brain implants. I (wisely) desisted, because neurosurgery is brutally difficult to break into, and I'd be in training or struggling to build a name for myself for a decade or more.
I wouldn't recommend anyone get their brain implants from me, though I will shill affiliate links when Neuralink cuts me a cheque.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
8hr ago
This rant was only 50% serious! Alas, transhumanist immortality is, at present, aspirational, and the weakness of the flesh as it inevitably decays and fails you is not.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
Happy birthday!
At the age of 25, you're at your physical and cognitive peak, and it's all downhill from here. Your mind slows down, though your productivity is kept up by knowledge/wisdom compensating for decreased fluid intelligence. Your body slows down, becomes weaker and frailer, but this can be temporarily alleviated with exercise and a fastidious attitude towards your health.
Don't worry, it doesn't become obvious until about a decade later. The initial slope of the decline is gentle, you can make a good picnic on that plateau.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
9hr ago
I could have sworn that I'd previously and seriously advised him to see a psychiatrist or therapist IRL. It certainly can't hurt. I'm not supposed to diagnose him with clinical depression, but let's just say it rhymes.
Alas, I don't know of any actual happy pills, but a small helping of magic mushrooms did wonders for me.
(This is excluding the possibility that his life and personal circumstances are utterly FUBAR, which happens more often than I'd like. But what can I do about that? I'm a shrink, not a miracle worker.)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
11hr ago
When you put it that way, I really can't disagree. I'll simulate 10^15 meatballs in the distant future to make up for present discomfort.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
12hr ago
It's not the same. Your wife might not miss those meaty balls, but I certainly do.
I was too busy to manage to go grab groceries this week and opted to order them delivered. I checked in a few minutes later to find that several items were flagged as unavailable, and the store were suggesting replacements:
In what universe is a pack of salami a substitute for Swedish meatballs?? Imagine a local family of Scottish-Scandinavians, pining for the fjords, unable to make their annual pilgrimage to the nearest IKEA. They've scrimped and worked hard, tolerated the sunburn and boiling heat, and decided to treat themselves with a taste of home. Alas, it was not to be..
Would the hypothetical clan of kilt-knitted, lingonberry-lonely expats be happy? They would stare at the salami the way one stares at a postcard of the Highlands when one had booked a week in Glen Coe: it is technically an image of the right country, but it neither howls with wind nor smells of heather. The children would ask, “Mamma, why are the meatballs in slices?” and Mamma would have to explain that sometimes the world is run by people who think “Scandi” is just a checkout aisle at H&M.
I can only imagine that they haven't experienced such disappointment since their distant ancestor, Björn, held his vegvisir or sun stone the wrong way, and thus took the wrong turn on his voyage to Normandy.
(I accepted the offer because it made me a net profit of about 50p. The replacement of cocktail sausages with chicken skewers, while somewhat saner, would have lost me twice as much, and was summarily refunded.)
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
on average
If we're only concerned with the most positive possible outcome, I guess you're saving for retirement by buying lottery tickets.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
You're correct in that perfect recall or retention isn't feasible when using a large number of tokens (in my experience, performance degrades noticeably over 150k). When I threw in textbooks, it was for the purpose of having it ask me questions to check my comprehension, or creating flashcards. The models have an excellent amount of existing medical knowledge, the books (or my notes) just help ground it to what's relevant to me. I never needed perfect recall!
(Needle in a haystack tests or benchmarks are pretty awful, they're not a good metric for the use cases we have in mind)
FanFicFare can do this for free. It's also available as a calibre plugin, if you want a gui.
Ah.. So that's how people were making epubs with ease. Thank you for the tip!
Though, bizarrely, Gemini (at least via Google AI Studio) doesn't support epub uploads. Concerns about appearing to facilitate the upload of copyrighted material? Kind of dumb considering epub is an open format and they allow PDF, but I could see how it might be spun in a lawsuit.
I don't think it's got much to do with copyright, it's probably just such a rare use case that the engineers haven't gotten around to implementing it. Gemini doesn't support either doc or docx, and those would probably be much more common in a consumer product. I don't recall off the top of my head if ChatGPT or Claude supports epubs either.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
Regardless of whether or not it's unkind to say the truth, it isn't up for debate that there are massive differences on average between the kind of child OP could have (if not infertile) and the kind up for adoption.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
In that case, people who would have been sysadmins are either paid to become brick layers or are forced to do it because that's the only job left.
There's a reason you rarely see Asian-Americans working low end jobs in the US, while those positions are filled back in their native countries. A society of Einsteins will have a need for janitors, until they automate the solution away. It is still better to be such a society with such a population.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
COD and Insurgency, while not quite as "Number Shooter" as say, Destiny, are still not that far.
You have small maps, predictable spawns and player behavior, and a constrained set of weapons. Said weapons can be somewhat easily modeled with DPS being the only really relevant property.
I play a lot of Arma, and you're not going to be able to do that. The bigger the playing field, the wider the space of strategies, the more simulationist the modeling..
You will have a hard time min-maxing Arma for the same reason nobody has solved IRL war, despite the obvious extreme optimization pressure.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
DOTA2
This strategy guide for DOTA2 players is the best around. Hope that helps!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
One of the reasons new multiplayer games are a lot more fun to play than old ones is that for the first few weeks after a game is released, or while it’s in beta, the nasty people, the min-maxers, the forum theorycrafters, have yet to ruin everything by Excel spreadsheeting statistical models of damage and critical chance and elemental resistance until they derive, mechanically, the ‘most efficient’ build, after which everyone adopts the new meta, increasingly of course because even the developers now design to it (see World of Warcraft’s designers building raids with the expectation that players will play the most meta builds, with all the most advantageous mods/addons). Why bother experimenting, playing, using your own intelligence when someone else who gamed the system with the ‘meta’ will curbstomp you for 1/10th the effort.
That's an artifact of playing Number Shooters (where enemies are transparently walking sacks of hitpoints you're trying to subtract), or Number RPGs/looter shooters where you're just trying to make Number Go Up. Everything can be easily reduced to metrics like DPS, to the detriment of having a game at all.
I'm grateful that I prefer my games to operate in a manner that obfuscates the fact that it's all 1s and 0s on a storage drive, and which remain fun even if you're not playing them like you're a glorified SAT-solver.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
1d ago
If you are a doctor and want your children to be doctors (an ancient professional right, just as the son of a blacksmith might become one), you will probably have to work them to the bone
If I want my (hypothetical) kids to be doctors, then I'd need to quite a bit of faith that there are Amish communities running around in 2050. I really don't see how it's feasible to be entering that profession otherwise, that's just not the way things are going.
One might argue we're already over Peak Doctor, we just don't know it yet. I certainly wouldn't want to even be just a bright-eyed student entering med school in the Year of Someone's Lord 2025.
At the end of the day, I'm strongly of the opinion that there's no point in worrying about the state of education if you're someone who has only young kids or no kids at all. Formal education as we know it will very likely not exist by the time they'd be old enough for it, and if it does, it'll likely just be entirely signaling as opposed to 75% signaling.
As others have already been kind enough to point out, the mod team asks that top-level posts within the CWR thread have more to them than a bare-link. Ideally, with more substantive commentary or an explanation of why this worth time and attention. At the absolute bare minimum, quotes of the source material and your thoughts on the matter where relevant.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Just wanted a tattoo because it felt cool lol. My best friend came up with a design I really liked, and on my deltoids it went. You could also consider it a getting into med school/becoming an adult gift to myself.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
Error rates have fallen drastically, and I'm someone who has regularly benefited from context windows becoming OOMs larger than the best 2023 had to offer.
I know specific questions, in programming and maths most obviously, but also in medicine, where I wouldn't trust the output of a 2023 model, but where I'd be rather confident in a 2025 one being correct.
Reasoning models are also far better at task adherence and thinking logically. Agents are still less than ideal today, but they were borderline useless in 2023.
Other very nice QOL features include image and file input and generation, artifacts, voice conversations etc. If I had to go back to a 2023 GPT-4, I'd be pissed.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2d ago
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Commoditizing their complements. This is particularly true of Meta, which wanted to use Llama to undercut competitors like OpenAI. Meta doesn't need their models to be profitable, that's not the core of their company. But OAI? Without people willing to pay for access to their models (or if they're able to clone them cheaper and run them elsewhere), they'd be utterly screwed.
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Gaining market and mind share, and either finding other ways to monetize (consulting or fine-tuning services), going paid and closed-source, or using the hype and investor confidence to raise money.
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Attracting talented researchers, who often want recognition and the right to publish their research instead of having it all be locked down internal IP.
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Actual ideological commitment. Or at least lip-service to help with points 2 and 3.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
Uh, I haven't specifically been keeping track of most suggestions I'm afraid. I tried to go through my chat history for specific examples, but came up short since it doesn't save conversations more than a week or two old. It did note some flaws that I personally agree with, such as a predilection towards run-on sentences or instances where I'm being unclear. Most of the time, I would have run across and then fixed the flaws myself, but this approach saves me a lot of time. Unlike most authors, I spend far less time editing than writing by default. I should probably be doing more of that, and the LLMs help.
I think I get the most utility when I ask the model to rewrite whole essays for clarity, or to see how some other author would have approached that. This occasionally produced novel (to me) insights, or particular turns of phrase I might feel tempted to steal.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d ago
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
I hate to break it to you grandma, but that show's over forty years old now. I'll have to ask my mom if she's heard of it, she was fond of the odd medical drama that somehow found its way to India back then, though the odds are against it.
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