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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
2d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d 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
3d ago
DOTA2
This strategy guide for DOTA2 players is the best around. Hope that helps!
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
3d 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
3d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d 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
5d ago
Or American. It's not an ethnicity, and even Native Americans can be ambiguous.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
I can't think of a single use case where Gemini 2.5 Pro isn't superior to Kimi (it says plenty about the model that I have to compare it to SOTA), including cost. Google is handing away access for free, even on the API. It's nigh impossible to hit usage limits while using Gemini CLI.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
A God-tier shitpost I am memetically compelled to spread due to the worms in my brain:
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
I'm not Dase, alas, but I want to say that I was profoundly surprised that Diffusion as a technique even works at all for text generation, at least text that maintains long-term coherence. I'm utterly bamboozled.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
Excellent work as usual Dase. I was sorely tempted to write a K2 post, but I knew you could do it better.
challenges the strongest Western models, including reasoners, on some unexpected soft metrics, such as topping EQ-bench and creative writing evals (corroborated here)
I haven't asked it to write something entirely novel, but I have my own shoddy vibes-benchmark. It usually involves taking a chapter from my novel and asking it to imagine it in a style from a different author I like. It's good, but Gemini 2.5 Pro is better at that targeted task, and I've done this dozens of times.
Its writing is terse, dense, virtually devoid of sycophancy and recognizable LLM slop.
Alas, it is fond of the ol' em-dash, but which model isn't. I agree that sycophancy is minimal, and in my opinion, the model is deeply cynical in a manner not seen in any other. I'd almost say it's Russian in outlook. I would have bet money on "this is a model Dase will like".
Meta's AI failure are past comical, and into farce. I've heard that they tried to buy-out Thinking Machines and SSI for billions, but were turned down. Murati is a questionable founder, but I suppose if any stealth startup can speed away underwater towards ASI, it's going to be one run by Ilya. Even then, I'd bet against it succeeding.
I don't know if it's intentional, but it's possible that Zuck's profligity and willingness to throw around megabucks will starve competitors of talent, but I doubt the kind of researcher and engineers at DS or Moonshot would have been a priori deemed worthy.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
5d ago
I don't think anyone nominated me for a UVP, so I haven't had the opportunity. I probably would nominate you if it came up.
(Maybe you're thinking about the doge contest)
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.
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