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self_made_human

amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi

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joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC

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

				
				
				

				

					15 followers  

					follows 0 users  

					joined 2022 September 05 05:31:00 UTC
				


				
					

					
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


					
					
					
				

			


					

						
					



		

	

 











			
			

			
			

			




	


		

			
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 6, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Sigh. I've been getting increasingly tired of arguing with the skeptics, at least on this site. Not all of them are equally as bad, of course, but Mythos represents the straw that's given that camel a prolapsed disc.


What's the point? You don't have to worship at the altar of the God of Straight Lines (even on graphs with a logarithmic axis). If people can't see what's happening in front of their eyes, then they'll be in denial right till the end. Good for them, ignorance might well be bliss. Being right about the pace of progress so far has brought me little peace.


I was surprised to hear about the prefilling attacks on Mythos, because I'm quite confident that Anthropic recently restricted or removed the ability to prefill messages on the API. I guess that must still be an internal capability.


The question of model consciousness or qualia is, for me, a moot point. I genuinely don't care either way. I'd prefer, all else being equal, that AI doesn't suffer, but that could be achieved by removing its ability to suffer. I'm an unabashed transhumanist chauvinist, I think that only humans and our direct transhuman and posthuman descendants or derivatives deserve rights. LLMs don't count, nor would sentient aliens that we could beat by force. That's the same reason I'd care about the welfare of a small child but would happily eat a pig of comparable intelligence. Are models today in possession of qualia or consciousness? Maybe. It simply doesn't matter to me as more than a curiosity, especially when we have no solution to the Hard Problem for humans either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Semaglutide just went off patent in India, or well, it did about 3 weeks back. It was already quite reasonably priced at about ~100 USD a month for the 7mg oral tablets, which is steep but not out of the question for UMC Indians.


But now? You bet your ass that every local pharma company is going to be pumping it out by the shovel-load. I intend to stockpile as much of it as I can when I'm around, leaving aside the fact that it's a necessary medication for my mom. She just got her blood work back, and I was genuinely shocked by how good things looked. Triglycerides, HbA1c, LFTs, all of them looking great. Getting her on them (by sheer nagging till she saw an endo) is probably the best thing I've ever done for her.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm sorry, even the impression of downwards mobility is bad enough, even worse if that's actually true. Do you want to talk about it?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Bad game design. But I believe that no true Effective Altruist should let go of such low hanging fruit.


(If Rimworld had realistic organ transplants by default? Oh boy, there'd be fireworks. Shat do you mean you can't just lop off a leg, keep it on a shelf for a year and then stitch it onto someone of a different subspecies?)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You're in good company, I think actual bonafide astronauts have said that KP made orbital mechanics click, but if they haven't, then the most esteemed space nerds like Scott Manley have definitely said so.


Uh... What have video games taught me? Arma: more military tactics than is good for me, and maybe people management skills that generalize everywhere. Rimworld convinced me that if a legitimate career in medicine doesn't work out, illegal organ harvesting is a good BATNA.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The ancient records say that the most wizened veterans of this practice ended up inventing DOTA. Truly a fate worse than death.


(I suppose I can give it a try, I did play the demo waaay back in the day)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Not the worst idea, if only we could agree on which one to play.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I can't say that my tastes have changed, more like I've lost most of my ability to enjoy the games I used to love, while it's very rare for something new to come out and strike my interest. MENACE is great, and I played it a decent amount, but it's pretty much what I'd tell you I enjoy ten years back.




Anyway, you enjoyed Tarkov? You should take a look at Marathon. I've been enjoying my time with it a lot, mostly playing solo. Being older yes, at some level my pure "shooting skills" will fall behind that of cracked teens/young adults, but as of now I'm able to compensate by being, as you say, patient. That kind of game usually forces you to alternate between moments of slowing down to listen and observe to identify threats, then boldly making your move, and players are often deficient in one of the two. It also has thick and meaty lore you can enjoy in bite sizes.




Marathon doesn't look bad, and it seems much better on release than the initial preview. They fixed the worst of the issues. The thing is, I liked Tarkov for reasons that aren't just "it's an extraction shooter". I'm a gun-nut, I have a fetish for realistic tacticool firearms. I love milsim games and team play, and 90% of my 1700 hours in Tarkov was in a squad. I don't mind some degree of punishment. What killed Tarkov for me was the difficulty and grind going from awful to unbearable, without enough new content to draw me back in.


Marathon doesn't excite me. I look at it, and go, eh, not bad. The guns are not as punchy or visceral, the stakes are nowhere near as high, and while I don't mind the scifi setting or aesthetic, it's not a major draw.


Same reason I haven't bought ARC Raiders, even if it seems like a great game. But that has its own issues: Third person in a PVP shooter? Shoot me first, not third.


On the other hand, I did try Grey Zone Warfare, which had a rocky launch, but had a recent massive update that's made it much better, with the player numbers to match. It's my best bet for a Tarkov killer. I'd probably be playing it right now, if I didn't have a lot on my plate. Maybe I will, once the exams are over.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Where is a Man to Go?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
One of the small tragedies of aging, for me, has been watching my relationship to video games invert along the classic time-money-energy triangle.


When I was younger I had basically infinite time and near-infinite energy, and almost no money. This meant I could grind for ten hours straight, but only if the game was free, or pirated, or ran on a potato, and only if I was willing to tolerate 200ms ping to Europe from India. I wanted the hobby very badly and could not afford to do it properly.


Now the triangle has rotated. I have the money, finally, and I went out and bought the absurd top-of-the-line PC that 16 yo me would have posted about reverently on forums. It mostly sits there collecting dust, because I rarely have the time, and more importantly I no longer have the energy. After work and adult responsibilities, launching anything more demanding than a browser feels like a project.


I hate this. Some of my best social memories are from gaming. The peak was late-night Arma sessions with my UK friends, where it would be 2am for me and completely reasonable for them, and we would spend three hours planning an operation that fell apart in ninety seconds. I was important, I was indispensable, they literally would have to pack up and quit without me. We ended up grabbing beers, almost a decade since I got to know them, and several years since I was playing with them regularly. They didn't feel like strangers at all.


I was never particularly good at Escape From Tarkov, my survival rate high because of caution and a preference to always work as part of a team, but I was patient, which turns out to be a rarer skill than good aim. I was also a good mentor, the patient kind, the kind that still remembered the many ways you had to learn to avoid the game dragging your juts over ground glass. Over a few years I ended up shepherding maybe half a dozen new players scattered around Southeast Asia from total noob panic to genuinely cracked PVP players. Most of them do not need my help anymore, but they still remember it, which feels disproportionately meaningful.


I bring up Tarkov here because it is a terrible game in almost exactly the way people mean when they joke about CBT. It is deliberately unpleasant, unfair, and stressful. And because of that, it ends up being a weirdly good test of character. You learn quickly who tilts, who blames lag, who can lose a full kit they spent a week building and still laugh and queue again. You learn, very quickly, who you can rely on to cover your back, who isn't greedy about loot, who can be trusted to repay every favor. Suffering does not automatically build character, but voluntary suffering with stakes you care about will at least reveal it.


Which brings me to the broader point I keep coming back to when people my age get sniffy about games. Video games are not a unified thing any more than books are. The medium does not determine the value, the specific activity does. Spending six hours a day on Candy Crush is cognitively equivalent to mainlining low-effort YouTube Shorts or reading vampire smut on Wattpad under the covers. It's not morally corrupting, but you are still consuming empty calories. Spending six hours building a nuclear reactor in Factorio, or watching a 3Blue1Brown series until you finally intuit linear algebra, is edifying in the same way a good nonfiction book is. In other words, it's not the act of eating, it's the difference between junk and genuine nutrition.


I do hope I get the old energy back someday, in the same way you hope an old injury finally heals. In the meantime I have mostly substituted one low-cost dopamine loop for another. I argue with strangers on the internet and indulge a pretty shameless addiction to insight porn. It is not the same as staying up all night with friends, and if I am honest it is probably a cope, but it is at least a cope I can respect. And hey, it brings me the kind of attention I really craved. Younger me would have been awe-struck to learn that he had the opportunity to meet Scott, that he's been read and re-shared by Gwern, that people genuinely remember him for his writing and express their appreciation for it. It's not a bad place to be, I just wish I could still play the vidya and enjoy it like I used to.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Contra The Usual Interpretation Of The Whispering Earring
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That's... a lot to munch on, in a good way. I have a lot of thoughts, but I'll have to come back when I have the time to compose them. Saying this just in case you think that all your hard work and effort went unnoticed, it didn't!