domain:drrollergator.substack.com
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
The courts aren't part of the government?
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2hr ago
What do you think the intended use case was?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
I've cried myself hoarse trying to reason with people who reflexively think LLM=bad. They're tools, tools that have serious flaws, but which are so useful it makes you wonder how you managed before. It's like trying to navigate the internet before Google.
I suspect that if Scott, Gwern, or any of the other big names were obscure today, and broke containment, they'd go nuts trying to fend off accusations of being AI. There is good reason why the LLMs were taught, intentionally or inadvertently, to mimic such a style. Nearly formatted essays with proper markdown are not the sole domain of AI. They make things more pleasant, at the cost of a very small amount of individuality. I promise you that every one of my essays screams self_made_human regardless of how many models I ask for advice. You should take it as a compliment, in this particular scenario.
SnapDragon
2hr ago
Eventually, most of the "real" challenges that humanity faces will be, at least in my opinion, rendered obsolete. That leaves just about only games to pass the time. They can be complicated games, they might be of relevance to the real world (status games, proof of work or competence), but they're still games we play because we've run out of options. I think this isn't a thing to complain about, once we get there. Our ancestors struggled to survive so that we wouldn't have to.
Forget "eventually"; I think we often fail to appreciate that we're already there, in the first world. Almost none of the "challenges" that our primitive ancestors faced are in any way familiar to us. They worried about whether they would starve next winter; I wonder whether I can justify being lazy and ordering Door Dash today. They might have been permanently crippled from an uncleaned surface cut; I would slap a band-aid on it and take a Tylenol. They banded together and learned to fight so the next tribe over wouldn't kill them all and take their stuff; I put my money into a stock brokerage.
Aging is IMO the one major challenge that hasn't been conquered yet (although we're still living twice as long as evolution intended). In almost every other way we're living the lives of Gods.
fmac
Ask me about bike lanes
2hr ago
So MAID is the "poster child for assisted suicide abuse" because the government, who lost a court case forcing their hand, is doing what they can do delay expanding eligibility to it?
Seems very abusive lol
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Yeah the environment couldn't be more different - stress is going to be the same (not even long hours depending on the country) but the way US physicians have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt, can be compensated very well (depending on speciality), have to deal with the nonsense of the U.S. health system, wearing of multiple hats and so make them functionally a different class of job.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Yeah I've heard Pilots and Flight Attendants are basically fuck city. In truth I've never heard an IRL doctor make any kinds of claims about rampant sleeping around or cheating in the departments. I've heard patients who work in aviation tell me about their and their coworkers exploits totally unprompted.
Corvos
2hr ago
I thought the same FWIW.
It was sold as ‘if you have a terminal illness, you are going to die in a few weeks, you are in terrible agony and there is no way of alleviating your pain or saving you’ which I would expect to be 0.1% max. Hence calling it ‘assisted dying’.
I think that this was never the intended use case and that those politicians who advocated for it on these terms were being dishonest.
wraelk
2hr ago
About 70% of our effort-posts, if posted on Reddit, would immediately face accusations of being AI. Even things written in, say, 2020.
I actually had this happen to me!
I made a detailed comment about a particular video game strategy in the game's subreddit, probably around 2020, long before writing it with AI would have been plausible.
This year someone responded with "if this wasn't written when it was I would think it was AI"
I guess given the context that's a compliment?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2hr ago
I don't think they are the same things.
Trump got arrested, but they didn't have the balls to stop him from running. They didn't literally cancel an election. The penaltues for speech aren't legal, as far as I can tell. I suppose they have their own panopticons, but I don't think they compare to what the UK is doing, or what the EU is working on right now.
This correlates with being anti-anti-gun-regulation and therefore with gun presence but is not caused by it.
Has anyone tried verifying that? I say we need a Universal Basic Guns program, in order to make sure.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
Who am I to tell you what's massive or not? When you see how the elderly, who make up a very large chunk of all deaths these days, actually go out, it really doesn't surprise me. I would start raising eyebrows past 20%, and be alarmed past 30. This is implying business as usual, not something like the Culture's post-scarcity, where people almost never die natural deaths, and euthanize themselves when they're bored. We'll figure that out if/when we get there.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
This is akin to going to a waterslide at a theme park and complaining the slope is slippery. You do not know how bad mental illness can get if you think "mental illness" is some privileged form of disease. I'd take many forms of cancer over schizophrenia.
The government of (the Republic of) Ireland has chosen to impose rent control on literally the entire country. (83 percent of rented properties in Ireland already were in rent-control zones before this law went into effect.) Rent increases now are capped at 2 percent per year nationwide.
Note that the government of Ireland currently is a coalition of two right-wing parties. The most prominent left-wing party has openly stated that it would ban all rent increases for three years if it were in power.
(found via this article)
Ireland has 5 million people, in comparison to the 8 million people that live under New York City's rent control.
The government of Italy has approved a plan to build a bridge across the Strait of Messina, between Calabria and Sicily. Completion is scheduled for year 2032.
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
When they're canceling elections because the wrong candidate won, arresting opposition candidates, legally penalizing speech, and building government-run digital panopticons, the claims of "civilization-preserving" start looking more credible.
I find this difficult to believe, at least in the case of Western Europe. British police are rarely armed. The idea that, if UK citizens fought back against the censorship laws, the government could bring lethal force to bear against the unarmed crowd is… I mean, I just don't think it's in the Western European Overton window. It never gets as far as asking if the citizens could fight back.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
So life sucked for her. Life sucks for a lot of people.
I stubbed my toe this morning. That puts me in the same category as people screaming from the agony of testicular torsion, childbirth, or a subarachnoid hemorrhage. It is helpful to deny them painkillers because I've walked it off.
I do not understand how you fail to see that the degree of sucking matters. If your mother complains of a mild headache, you pop down to the chemist for some Tylenol. If she is screaming with an arrow in her guts in the middle of the Amazon, you would be very kind to give her the opportunity to extend her life for a few minutes or hours, at least an opportunity to let her demonstrate moral character in the face of adversity.
WhateverHappenedToNorman
2hr ago
Am I severely miscalibrated? Over 5% of total deaths sounds like a massive amount to me.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
American healthcare is not anything like European healthcare— ours is a private, for-profit system designed to cut the costs of healthcare and to ensure profits for hospitals and insurance companies.
Oh no. You're taking the claims about the American healthcare system at face value.
I'm going to dial @Throwaway05 for backup/moral reassurance. I'd say *page */bleep but the US is a more enlightened regime:
The American healthcare system is incredibly socialist. Is there a better word for a regime where you can walk into any hospital clutching your gut, and they legally must treat you, even if you look and smell like a hobo and throw feces at them? Where the hospital isn't allowed to throw you out, or means test you for such trifling things as the ability to pay for care? Where hospitals, and by extension, actual paying customers, must subsidize/swallow losses in case their patient wanders out and says fuck you to collections? Assuming you even got an address or ID to send those?
Buddy, that's socialism masquerading as capitalism, with only the polite and respectable actually going through the whole charade. You should see what happens in India, where we're not quite so keyed into the kayfabe - despite having both entirely free public care as well as a booming private sector. We'd laugh at the softness. They'd kick your ass to the curb, and the cops would come and laugh.
Treating cancer is expensive: hospital stays, chemotherapy, pain management, in home care between visits, blood work. Giving an elderly cancer patient an overdose of morphine is cheap.
The government, and by extension, the humble net tax-payer, faces the same dilemma in the UK. We do not kill people just to save money. To the extent that mere prioritization of finite funds kills people, it's in the name of saving more lives than we let die. My bosses do not get a raise or a cut of the savings. To murder anyone would take the collusion of, at minimum, the nurses and resident doctors on the ward. Worst case you rope in the family and pharmacy. It takes working here to truly grok how ridiculous such a proposition is, the nurses will throw you under the bus for looking at the patient wrong, let alone killing them.
FtttG
3hr ago
the people that (in his light) insist on believing provably wrong things
Do you agree that the people he disagrees with believe in provably wrong things? If so, what are they?
Tractatus
3hr ago
No, this is not Bullverism, which is not a logical fallacy, either, not even one of the bs "informal fallacies" (a categorically invalid concept, made up whole-cloth by rhetoricians to steal valor from logic.)
Freddie is not in a moderated debate; he is not required to relitigate the arguments on AI from scratch in every single article he writes, before he's allowed to wonder what's wrong with the people that (in his light) insist on believing provably wrong things. He is a writer, and is free to let the gallons of ink spilled on the matter speak for itself. To qualify as Bullverism, he - and more importantly, his side - have to have never engaged with the merits in the first place. For that matter, you, and any AI doomers, are perfectly entitled to accuse Freddie of having his head in the sand, without the need to prove Skynet is coming any day now every time you do so.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3hr ago
I'm lucky. By the time they end up in the dementia wards (autocorrect really wanted to make that dementia wars, which is a colorful turn of phrase), they're too far gone to beg. Most of the time. I assume if I had spent a year in your shoes, I actually could retire.
FtttG
3hr ago
It's a piece of legislation I fully support. Some Irish legislation carries a whiff of nanny-stateism, but I really can't imagine why a household would ever need more than 24 paracetamol pills in a week. I think implementing something similar in the US would be a no-brainer, especially when you consider paracetamol poisoning is the leading cause of death by acute liver failure. I assume a significant portion of that is accidental: because it's an OTC drug, a lot of people severely underestimate how toxic it is. My dad (PhD in organic chemistry) says there's no way it would have been made available OTC if it was discovered today. I always urge people to use ibuprofen instead when possible.
I understand. The only reason I don't fear dementia more is because of a genuine confidence that it will be a solved problem by the time I'm old enough to be at risk. This almost certainly holds true for you too, modulo all the assumptions that lead me to have that belief in the first place. A mere example would be the recent discovery that semaglutide reduces the relative risk of developing Alzheimer's by 50%.
I have seen so many people utterly hollowed out by the illness. It is an unavoidable perk of the psychiatry of old age. The lucky are those who are far gone, they are past all but the most primal of pain or pleasure. The prick of a needle, as I pull blood like an anorexic vampire, the recognition that a smile means friendliness. Their inner world seems to have shrunk to a point. It is often better for them, and certainly for everyone else, when they are physically frail. A robust body attached to a shattered mind is a uniquely challenging combination.
We had a gentleman who was 95, and as strong as an ox. He broke two noses on the ward before nearly dying of a stroke. I went on vacation and had every confidence he wouldn't be around when I came back. Nope, he shrugged it off, and everyone was happy to have him back even if it came at the cost of their facial features. It takes a certain kind to work in that field in the long-term, I'm not cut out for it.
My own grandpa, who I love dearly, is at the same age. Covid killed him, if not physically, then the enforced idleness killed the man he was. More man than me, mostly gone now. It was the clinic and regular interaction with his patients that kept him truly alive, and the decline was obvious when it stopped. It's enough to make me cry, and I try not to think about it if I can help it. When he sees me, all he remembers is that I'm back from the UK, and his only concern is when I'll visit again. This loops every five minutes. It is enough that he can do this, and I get to hold his hands one more time. They're very similar, those hands. His and mine. He had a good run, almost 92 years of putting others to shame. 3 where the survivors finally lapped him. Outlived his enemies (the very few he had), most of his very many friends, but not his family. He has the comfort of his two daughters these days, if not the grandson he loves the most. He was the kindest man I know, he used to feed honey to the bees by the window sill, and the angriest I've ever seen him was when he tried to do the same to a wasp and it stung him for his kindness. God, I wish things were different. The universe is cruel, and physician heal thyself? Fucking hell, I can't heal the people I actually love. What good are these hands after all?
I digress. It is easier to talk about the problems of others. It helps me pretend to have a degree of clinical detachment, and gives time for the tears to dry.
The worst-off are those who know, or even suspect. The disappointment on their faces when the diagnosis is disclosed, the scans finally in. The furtive glances at their loved ones, the attempts to put on a brave front. Some sob. Some smile and talk about the weather. None really withstand the blow, but most come to terms with it. Then the dread sets in.
Putting myself in their shoes, it is the present, horrifying knowledge of what they are and what they are becoming, a slow-motion unraveling they are forced to witness from the inside. They are passengers in a vehicle that is slowly, but unstoppably, falling apart around them. Is it any surprise that many come to terms with the inevitable, and see to go out on their own by wresting the wheel into the nearest tree? Can't blame them, poor bastards, even if it's my job to stop them. I wish it wasn't my job, and I wish my job allowed me to let them exercise the last bit of agency they have left.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
I mean it’s been generations in Europe. Like everything else context matters. American healthcare is not anything like European healthcare— ours is a private, for-profit system designed to cut the costs of healthcare and to ensure profits for hospitals and insurance companies. In a taxpayer funded system like NIH, I’d agree that the slippery isn’t that steep, it’s probably a little steep depending on who’s caring for the patient, how difficult that care is, and the ability of the family to either provide it or pay someone to do so. In America, everything is mediated through health insurance, and as for-profit companies, those companies have every incentive to not cover treating elderly patients who might not live long anyway. Treating cancer is expensive: hospital stays, chemotherapy, pain management, in home care between visits, blood work. Giving an elderly cancer patient an overdose of morphine is cheap. Few extended families in the US can afford to pay out of pocket for cancer treatment, it’s simply too expensive, so if the insurance company refuses to cover it because the cancer treatment is expensive, there aren’t any options, either the extended family spends themselves into poverty to pay for granny’s chemotherapy, or they let her get her OD of morphine and convince themselves that she — and they — chose “death with dignity.”
At the end of the day, most moral systems reduce to normality, outside of edge cases which are, well, edge cases. If you're not cooking my dog, and I'm not feeding yours poison, we'd get along regardless of the underlying reasons.
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