FruitfulLemonyLemons
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User ID: 370
FruitfulLemonyLemons
18d ago
I just wanna know the chances of another Covid Era
FruitfulLemonyLemons
18d ago
Should I be worried about bird flu?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
22d ago
If Indian workers are so bad, why do tech companies keep hiring them?
I've heard it alleged that they are paid substantially less than American born workers, even guys on the same team in adjacent cubicles. Does anyone know if this is true?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
28d ago
Yeah, to a baby learning language, "mama" refers to the whole suite of feelings and sensations and needs and wants and other qualia associated to its mother. To an LLM, "mama" is a string with a bunch of statistical relationships to other strings.
Absolute apples and oranges IMO.
We don't learn language from the dictionary, not until we are already old enough to be proficient with it and need to look up a new word. Even then there's usually an imaginative process involved when you read the definition.
LLMs are teaching us a lot about how our memory and learning work, but they are not us.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
28d ago
Is NVIDIA really the only game in town here? No Chinese competitor giving them a run for their money, etc?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. Kind of neat so far, feels like Niven but updated for a 2020 view of the future instead of a 1970 view.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
In terms of raw, personal, I'm-not-going-to-get-this-because-it's-just-my-own-idiosyncrasy preference, I want standard time with an 8-4 work schedule. Like let's let noon be noon, but let the workday be from 8 to 4, let the schoolday be similarly DST equivalent, etc.
Never liked that we pretend to have the power to mess with Time Itself rather than admit what's actually happening is we're changing our schedules.
Second best option, let's switch to perma-DST but call 1:00 noon and midnight, and rotate any newly made analog clocks.
Third best option, ugh I guess we can just do perma DST and explain to our grandkids the history of why the twelves have a special name while the sun is at its highest/lowest point at 1.
(I like the DST schedule but I don't like the time nonsense.)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
I've never seen this when actually talking about God, it's usually for figures of speech that nonseriously invoke God, so as to avoid using the name of God "in vain", which violates one of the Ten Commandments
FruitfulLemonyLemons
1mo ago
I don't have enough insight into their inner workings to be able to answer this. But my guess is they are targeting some positive profit margin (since they would have to) and creating actuarial rules to target this number. Then claims etc are mostly following an algorithm. But then again given as I have alleged the "non-insurable" nature of health, they are probably having to constantly tweak this.
I doubt they're frequently making individual case-by-case decisions to deny somebody for the sake of let's-get-rich-and-do-coke, but maybe I inappropriately assume people aren't monsters.
In any case I'd want to see evidence of such backroom decisions because it's quite an allegation. But that would be hard because I'd also want to see that it's not just "this guy is trying to spend infinite money to eke out another month and unfortunately we don't have that" sort of thing. Like my point is it's actually really hard to prove actual malice here.
Being in charge of a health insurance company is like being a world leader: you are going to be making decisions that result in some people living and other people dying. There's no way around it. Your whole job is allocating scarce healthcare resources.
The scarcity is the real problem. But we'd rather murder a scapegoat, in cold blood, than face reality.
And scarcity is not going away. Not when it's possible to pour a near-infinite amount of money into eking out another year or two at end of life. Stop and think about what that means. I honestly question whether health is "insurable" even in principle.
Healthcare in America has problems but we cannot even begin as a society to discuss those problems with anything resembling sanity until we as a society learn to memento mori.
So if you're gonna murder a guy you might wanna have a better reason than some people get their claims denied.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
On further thought I take that back, a good college try at devising a "system" that prevents (reads: delays as long as possible) the inevitable corruption is a noble endeavor and I'm sorry for discouraging it.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
As much as the whole doge thing warms my millennial heart, DOGE just seems like a clone of Inspector General offices, no? And the main reason those have no balls is they're staffed by people who go to the same house parties as everybody else, right? (I am just assuming, here, this seems like a likely Schelling point over time)
So the most effective DOGE will be the Musk one since he's a true outsider, then they will be less effective over time until DOGE exists just to get paid to rubber stamp things.
More and more I think this stuff is really about the people and not the positions. You can create a "Department of Screw the ATF" whose whole job is to obstruct the ATF but if you populate it with people who are drinking buddies with the ATF people they'll coordinate on one or two "hard hitting" investigations (maybe to get rid of somebody the ATF wanted to fire anyway) to make the public happy and otherwise will be in lockstep.
Checks and balances are a cool idea but it's rare to get people who are true enemies. When that happened in the beginning it was such a crisis that we got the 12th Amendment. Not to mention a literal gunfight. Later we got Brooks/Sumner. It's ugly.
Speaking personally (and as somebody who has had libertarian leanings since the age of 16) I wish Musk the best and I think there is a unique window of opportunity here but I kinda hope DOGE just dissolves itself after he's done, there is no real need for a redundant Inspector General, in fact it would be the sort of redundant bloat that DOGE exists to remove.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
Murder is not a federal crime (with some special-case exceptions)
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
I think this change would make its availability feel less precarious than it does now.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
The incoming administration has promised to punt the issue of abortion to the States and I hope they go one step further and enshrine this punt with a Constitutional amendment that would keep the federal government out of the business altogether, including encouraging or discouraging States or individuals via funding, services, etc. And probably also prohibiting States from punishing abortion tourists in any way.
There are so many important issues of geopolitics and energy and trade and I'm so fucking tired of this issue being at the top of mind every single national election (for literally my entire life and I'm over 40!!!), and half the electorate being one-issue voters about it so you can't even have a real conversation with them about anything else.
It might also help heal relations between the sexes but I won't bet on that, let's not get too greedy now.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
2mo ago
I don't know, this one seems more subdued than 2016. IIRC people were on the streets pretty much the day after 2016, and there doesn't seem to be too much of that this time around. People seem... exhausted? Defeated? I wonder if the popular vote result has something to do with it. Or how sure everybody seemed on both sides of the aisle that Hillary had it in the bag—complete with prepared victory theatrics about breaking a glass ceiling etc—making 2016 an almost traumatic shock, which we don't have this time around.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
I'm not sure if anybody asked this yet but why does the mechazilla need to catch it? Instead of just landing like the Falcon 9? Is it the size?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
I know this is more of a "small scale question" and not exactly "fun" but it's also relatively time-sensitive and I want to pick this community's brain in particular (EA people might have thought this stuff through, etc): does anybody know the most bang-for-your-buck way to donate to relief efforts from Hurricane Helene? Any efficient charities that are trustworthy and have good scale and minimal grift/overhead?
FruitfulLemonyLemons
3mo ago
I don't have a take. I have issues and I'm tired of them.
I'll say this. Jung tends to be misunderstood IMO in the sense that he gets lumped in with mystics, and while he is something of a mystic he's actually really big on living in the external world, and the whole inner journey thing is only a thing you do when you have no choice and it's dangerous because you can get "stuck down there", i.e. so in love with your introversion that you get separated from reality and become increasingly useless even as you become so captivated and bedazzled by "insights" and imagine yourself to be specially favored by the higher powers.
Jung seems to be a proponent of "getting over yourself" and taking the slings and arrows of living as a person among the other people. When you do find yourself on the journey, he seems to be a proponent of caution, of a skeptical attitude toward the stuff you're being "blessed" with, of staying at all times connected with anything that keeps you connected to the real world (elsewhere, I think in his autobiography, he mentions that when he had his famous "encounter with the unconscious" he used his duties to his practice and to his children to keep him grounded in the external world), and of getting the fuck out of there once you find the thing you're looking for.
"Mommy issues" is not a term he uses in this book per se, but he talks extensively about the regressive longing for the warmth and protection of the womb and how dangerous this can be for an adult, and it made me think of my own cowardice, my tendency to want to be some sort of exception, my unwillingness to face the simple facts of my own external life such as my isolation and near-friendlessness and my unwillingness to do basic common sense things about these like taking up a hobby (Jung is big on common sense solutions and like being a normal fucking functional person in society, again very misunderstood guy). It's been a surprisingly effective wake-up call for me since there are few voices these days I'm actually willing to listen to but his is one of them for some reason.
Here's a fun quotation I just read from the book:
In reality the neurosis is manufactured anew every day, with the help of a false attitude that consists in the neurotic’s thinking and feeling as he does and justifying it by his theory of neurosis.
My theory of neurosis has been bad for me nooooo 😭😭😭
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
Symbols of Transformation by Carl Jung
If you like to read pages upon pages of "And in this culture they have..." to prove an archetype exists (I don't) then this is the book for you.
Nevertheless I have been trudging through it because interspersed throughout there are tidbits of information essentially about mommy issues (which I would say I and a significant portion of modern men have) so it feels like this weird job of like panning for gold or finding a needle in a haystack or whatever.
Worth it but it's been a slog. Can't wait to be finished.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
Wow. Kudos to SS
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
Alternatively, tweets can represent a person's tribal knee-jerk sympathies while their long thought-out works represent having done the hard work to transcend these. In which case there would be a sort of veritas in both, but a different type of veritas in each and arguably a higher quality one in the effort work.
FruitfulLemonyLemons
4mo ago
Yeah I get more Kantian by the day if only because it takes too many freakin clock cycles to manage all the noble lies
Like 10 years ago I used to frequently spend hours in a Starbucks, reading books or writing and getting wildly overcaffeinated.
I stopped in part because they seemed to be deliberately enshittifying the experience by replacing comfortable furniture with bare wood, and kinda making the overall vibe less inviting. Just felt like they were discouraging spending time there.
Reading this, I'm beginning to suspect why. My theory is instead of making a ballsy policy like they're doing here, they decided to just sort of passive-aggressively make the place less inviting in hopes the riffraff would stay out, of their own accord. Of course, that did not happen, but the good people stopped coming, so now it's all riffraff and no good people and the whole vibe of Starbucks is way off from what it used to be.
Somebody tell Brian Niccol to bring back the comfy chairs, maybe we can turn things back around.
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