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
7d ago
I have minor concerns about the advice given by the psychiatrist, but I'll hold back since I don't have the full picture and you're already doing the important things, like getting her speech and occupational therapy. The symptomatic improvement is heartening, and I can only hope it persists, And I do agree that this is more likely to be autism than ADHD (not that the two are mutually exclusive), and the presentation can be rather different in girls, which makes diagnosis unfortunately challenging.
I wish I had more specific advice to give in regards to where to seek therapy, but it's so US-dependent I wouldn't know where to start. I'd hope your psychiatrist and psychologist could point you the right way. In the meantime, please take care of yourself, I hope the dizziness is transient, but you've evidently been under an immense amount of pressure for a while. You might need a moment to breathe, and accept that some real hurdles have been overcome.
While I don't think a formal diagnosis is strictly necessary to absolve you of guilt, it's still a practically useful thing! Less judgement, not that you deserved any, and more access to resources at the least. I hope this keeps working out.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Comparable? Everything is comparable, even apples and oranges (they're both fruit). I don't claim that being punched is as risky as being shot or stabbed. But being punched can, depending on a variety of factors, cause permanent injury or death.
Since I think being slapped is so low risk it doesn't count for me (for almost every reasonable scenario), I'm clearly considering thresholds. Sneezing can kill you, and sneezing on someone can kill them too. I would rather that we didn't go around shooting people on the bus for not having a hanky at hand.
Note that I specifically suggested that actuarial evidence or a proper risk analysis be used to set the standards. In this particular instance, the facts (as presented here) would make me imagine that I would be in sufficient fear of permanent injury or death to not worry very hard about how I get out of it. I extend the same courtesy here, to people getting jumped by someone with clearly belligerent intent. Being tackled or shoved to the ground is rather different to being yelled at or having the finger flipped at you.
I also expect that the establishment of a norm that starting physical violence without cause might end in being shot would have a chilling effect. I can't recall the last time I attacked anyone in the past few decades, so I can live with the risk.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
"Deadly force" is such a badly defined concept, especially in the gray area between slapping someone and shooting them with a gun. And there are all kinds of unacceptable injuries that don't have a >10% risk of causing death.
It's a shame the law never does something as sensible as refer to actuarial tables, I suppose it's all up to the juries.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
any physical contact is a potential justification for use of deadly force in response
I've seen too many head injuries from physical trauma to think that a tackle followed by someone mounting me isn't an unacceptable risk of serious injury. One bad fall, you can strike your noggin and just die, and even a concussion is not pleasant nor harmless.
It's not like even doing it recreationally/professionally in full-contact sports doesn't cause serious harm, and that's with trained athletes in great physical condition.
Something like getting slapped in the face? I won't condone lethal force. But something like a serious punch to the face from an adult male or tackle and an attempt to batter me into submission is something I would excuse, even if I prefer less lethal options. Those who don't want to be shot in such a scenario should ideally not be committing such acts.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
It's 2025, I really expect devs to put more effort into it. After all, it has immediate gameplay/immersion effects, the recent Dooms can dispense with healthbars because you can visibly see demons losing chunks until they're glowing for a glory kill.
Smaller studios, like in the case of Hell Let Loose or Insurgency Sandstorm do it. It's really not an issue for AAA studios. You don't even need 18+ gibbing, even some kind of wounding or crippling effect works.
Hell, this leans into another pet peeve:
Healthbars. Accursed things, though I can excuse their use for players. They're often abused for artificial difficulty/laziness in bulletsponge enemies, and they encourage number-shooters or RPGs where the focus is on seeing number go up over anything interesting. I refuse to play Borderlands or Destiny because I don't want to see numbers flying off my guns or the enemies, I want to see the bullets, or the damage they cause.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
Exanima is jank.
You want Half Sword. I have watched an ungodly amount of footage, and it looks like the best medieval melee combat game ever made. I regret buying Chivalry and Mordhau, and I hope someone there's a multiplayer version one day. Making a good physics-based game is hard but absolutely worth the payoff. For what it's worth, I don't even demand pure physical simulation as long as the animation is sane.
(What do you mean I can't parry a greatsword with a dagger? Or that spinning in circles while breaking my spine isn't the winning tactic anymore? Or so I imagine the Chiv/Mordhau sweats crying.)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
7d ago
You know, you can have a good, challenging game without making it ALL about i-frames!
God I hate i-frames. Stupid, 'gamey' mechanic that should be replaced with actually reactive animations. If you dodge a hit, you dodge it by not letting it hit you.
The distaste extends to wonky hitboxes, I've seen some of the abominations in Dark Souls, where the hitbox of the weapon/projectile only has the vaguest resemblance to the model. It's 2025, we should be over this.
Since I'm complaining already, I hate games that replace visible damage to enemies with health bars. Stop being lazy, display damage that isn't more than a coat of red paint till the enemy suddenly goes from 100% combat capable to keeling over.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
I used to have cats in the house a long time ago, and it definitely helped with rodents. The dogs that replaced them were a... mixed bag. My first German Shepherd could rat with the best of them, and so could her son. The lab and golden that came after? They'd either try and make friends or run away in terror.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Deepfried sticks of butter are a form of indignity I wouldn't put past the Scottish. I believe I heard of someone actually make one, though I can't recall how they stopped it becoming oil in the process.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
peasant-maxx
My ancestors, including my dad, were born peasants. They tried very hard to ensure that I wouldn't grow up as one haha.
People ate better during the Irish famine! Well, minus the potatoes.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Uh.. I've been fond of a single meal a day of biryani, which is about £14 and is about 2k calories. That's around 142 kcal/£. It is also nutritionally complete, in the sense that I have had periods of months where that's all I've really eaten, without obviously falling sick.
It's also worth noting that biryani is a lot tastier than Huel. If I was optimizing purely for calories, I'd be eating sticks of butter.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Hmm.. My recollection is becoming hazy, but I recall that Meta would almost certainly have released OS models simply to get one in at Google/OAI. If they hadn't, then the Chinese would have, I don't believe that DeepSeek or the others all started as Llama forks (though I recall some did).
That reminds me that there's no word on new Meta models. I'm curious to see if Zuck's spending spree shows any dividends.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
I can confirm without a shadow of a doubt that Gemini 2.5 Pro (free on AI Studio) allows for a full million tokens of CW. That can fit a CWR thread, maybe every single one this year. The limiting resource is usually my phone refusing to copy and paste the entire text of a very long thread, which I could avoid by either linking or downloading a page as PDF.
I've had no issues with ChatGPT either, which I pay for, or Claude and Kimi which I mooch off.
I'd recommend Gemini on AI Studio. It's literally free, and unless you have excellent opsec, Google probably knows your precise bowel movement timings already. It also saves chat history to private G Drive storage, which means the verbatim conversations are deleted (unless they were trained on already, which is a much lossier process).
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Any particular reason you want local? I just copy and paste whole threads into Gemini, ChatGPT 5T, Claude or Kimi. I'd imagine they'd do far better at maintaining nuance than the tier of local models you're using.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
Europe is not a serious country (or collective of countries):
Meet EuroLLM: Large language model made in Europe built to support all official 24 EU languages
The largest model is a paltry 9B parameters. I could run something of comparable size on my phone (maybe larger depending on quantization). Small isn't necessarily bad, but the performance is abysmal to boot.
As someone on HN points out, it:
scores just above random chance for benchmarks like MMLU-Pro (17.6%, random chance is 10%).
Bruh. It's not like Mistral is doing so hot either. I suppose it's back to waiting for Gemini 3 and whatever else is cooking in Sino-American data centers. It's like the rest of the world is too poor or retarded to even try. I'd respect a Llama fine-tune more than this thing. Any decent model can handle all the EU "official" languages without breaking a sweat.
(In all fairness, it's a November 2024 model. They haven't done better, and it was trash even back then)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
8d ago
In a way, my time in London derailed things. I was too torn up by the visa rejection to study the 3-4 days I was there, and I lost a great deal of time traveling back. The bus tickets were an absurd £120, if I'd been a better planner, I'd have booked a flight to Edinburgh instead and saved half the money.
(No knock against you! I had a great time hanging out with you, I wouldn't have studied anyway haha)
Now, I get home, and realize that I have to redouble my efforts if I expect to get decent coverage before my exam date. There's just so much to read, much of it is the same kind of rote memorization I've been kvetching about, and some of it must have pronounced antimemetic effect given how the facts slough off my brain like water/milk off a duck. Eating well is a luxury.
I guess I'll look for chocolate milk or plain gallon bottles and tons of powder. I've eaten worse! Thanks!
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
Anyone here with experience when it comes to meal-replacements?
I have, on a few occasions, tried various flavors of Huel:
- It tastes like
asschalk. - A single bottle 500ml bottle is only 400 kcal, which is a fucking salad, not a meal as far as I'm concerned.
- I can get a 12 pack for £42 on Amazon, which comes to a stupidly low 114 kcal/£. And that's just a nominal two days of consumption.
A diet of takeout, even something fancy, will almost certainly beat it on calories per unit of currency. I don't really see the point unless I'm traveling and don't want to deal with a "normal" snack. It's very much not a full meal either way.
Why do I even ask? I'm consumed with exam anxiety, my meds suppress my appetite, and I can't be arsed to cook right now (even if, in all honesty, it won't cut down into study time). Plus a moderate caloric deficit is something I don't mind, from a weight loss perspective, I just don't like getting stiffed on the calories I get. I would be happy getting 1800-2000 a day, which is about what I can reasonably continue for days/weeks without feeling like I'm starving.
In other words, can you think of something superior on metrics such as taste, price per calorie, which I can stock up on?
(Please don't suggest sticks of butter, pemmican or drinking cooking oil. I'm only human. If all else fails, it's McDonald's and their shakes that have calorie densities comparable to nuclear fission)
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9d ago
God knows. The thing is, I'm not a permanent resident in the UK. I have a skilled workers visa, which is great, but beyond that, I have no permanent ties here. I presume that plays into their calculation of flight risk, though I don't know if they properly consider the fact that I'm a doctor on the middle of training who doesn't stand to gain much from cutting and running.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
Spoilsport, he's the one who's convinced me to carry a discreet plastic bottle full ot South African wine. In all fairness, it was his idea.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
It well might be, but I don't look rich/distinguished enough to know for a fact. I will keep an eye open for Latin chanting or naked women with knives.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
12d ago
I'm a simple man, and this doesn't change my usual strategy, which is to copy-all and paste directly into an LLM when I need them to opine on something. It's not pretty but it works.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
You're in luck, I'd probably do that anyway. I'm not sure I'll get to see the cages or nuns, I'm afraid, since that is very much invitation-only. Even my uncle has only been down there the once.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
In all fairness, neither do I. I would have expected a pig and/or a Prime Minister too.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
13d ago
I think a reasonable reader will interpret my statement as a claim that I'm making it in good faith.
Notice I said healthbars, not hitpoints! Computers run on 1s and 0s, so anything that models damage must be abstractable to numbers/points at some point.
If this is represented diegetically, as changes to the visual model, or by behavioral changes (limping when shot, degraded abilities, missing limbs etc) then it's immersive enough not to worry me. If it's a single number, or worse, a visible glowing bar with no other representation, then it's not for me.
Even breaking it down into (implicit) component hitpoints is enough to appease me. Think the damage model from Warthunder, or Arma Reforger/ACE mod, where the torso, head and limbs are individually represented and can be protected or not protected by armor and damaged accordingly. Shoot a leg, they limp, shoot an arm, they lose accuracy, shoot a head and they usually die.
Hell, I even consulted for an extraction shooter called Grey Zone Warfare, and they took my advice to absolutely minimize HP as a number to worry about, focusing on damage to vital organs or blood loss.
I've never actually played DF, though I'm familiar with it. I have played Rimworld, which uses component damage, and is rather similar in that regard, and I do enjoy it. I'll take it any day over simply trading HP from perfect performance till death!
More options
Context Copy link