Balgair

In regards to AI, it feels like I have finally been given the tools. For me, the world now feels so open. I can make websites now, I can do the things I have always wanted to do with computers and code. Your world is finally accessible to me.

In regards to you, I think you should read 'What Color is Your Parachute?' again. Yes, that sounds trite and glib, I am sorry. And yes, it sounds like boomer advice, I know. But the exercises in that book really are great stuff. There is a reason it's one of the best non-fiction sellers for like the last 40 years. And yes, I know, NPC-level advice here

I really hope you find your path again. The world isn't going to turn into paperclip maximizing AI gods (Look, Claude gave me $1000 for free the other week. Aint no one do that if they aren't scared shitless that the music is about to stop). We're going to be fine, so will you. You got this, I believe in you.

I remember the first semester in the dorms was mostly the sound of coughing.

Building up the immune system takes disease exposure and that takes time.

Addnib all the immune system depressants and increased exposure events there at Michigan - booze, pot, late nights, hookups, crowds, stress, etc - and you get a perfect storm for the immune system to take a beating.

A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.

The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.

I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.

Reacting to the article and not OP here, also spoilers:

I'm sorry, I know the movie was long, but did OP miss the Bronze-age Darth Vader with bones on his head? The very classic Nolan ending twist that Athena was a PTSD hallucination of the Trojan woman they killed? The constant and obvious murdering and pillaging that Odysseus and his crew do? That the Trojans were wearing white and the Greeks were wearing black? The very obvious scene where all the people that they have killed tell Odysseus that he is a bad guy and then they all go running after him and the crew?

Like, to me, I felt that it was over-the-top obvious, almost embarrassingly so from such a director, that the Greeks were the bad guys. He could not have communicated that more or better to my eyes. He comes out and says so at the ~90% mark. It is very clear.

But, and I apologize if I am also guilty of this sin with the article, it seems that he does not even still do enough to communicate that to many viewers.

Now, can this interface with Libby? The worldcat interface is, well, confusing. I can't figure out if it knows libraries near me exist.

But yeah, if I learned that a potential match did this to me, well, I think that would change a lot in my evaluation of that person as a partner.

reminds me of this Key and Peele skit

No, really, I mean it.

For decades, the healthcare complex has been exploiting these workers to our detriment.

The supply of workers is really high, typically, as there is this nobility to the professions. You are a 'helper', you are 'doing something with your life', you have a 'calling'. That extra feel-feels accounted for a lot of extra people in the workforce and that depressed wages as it increased supply. The actual work itself suffered too, as we all had to deal with burnt out healthcare workers with too many bills and not enough dollars. Even a pandemic barely hurt he business model (as far as I can tell from a quick googling).

But if workers start caring about the money more, then the wages will rise (hopefully), and that will attract better workers and not ones near the near of their ropes financially. We all will be better off. I think this goes for teachers too.

-George Orwell, You and the Atomic Bomb

I think AI now belongs in this dichotomy too. And we know that they are more like alarm clocks than battleships. Most of us do not need to learn the bitter lesson, we just need a little droid that turns .xlsx documents into .pdf documents for our client, an average here, editing out the ham sandwiches there. Simple little actions that take time and human-like effort but not human-like creativity and conscious thought. Things we used to have literate slaves and serfs do back in the days of triremes and guncotton.

Sure, the large battleship like LLMs will have some need, but the alarm-clock like LLMs are going to be good enough for enterprise-grade.

Essentially, we've been humans for about 200,000 years. But only in the last 5,000ish years have we done the whole civilization thing. Why?

Climate has a lot to do with it, we know that, but about 195,000 years is a lot of time too.

Quite the mystery.

It's a status thing, right?

Audiobooks have been a god send and then the Libby app manna from upon high. Free, high quality, adult-level infotainment?! I'll never go back.

One thing if do is up the reading speed. It takes time but I'm comfortable at 2.6x these days, even on the fragmented sleep a teething toddler grants you. For really in depth stuff I'll slow it down a lot, but a Stephen King dime store novel or John Grisham thriller? Oh yeah, speed it up no worries

Never meet your heroes is just great advice, same as it ever was.

It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.

No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.

Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.

Again, it's a weird little sub domain.

The way one of their employees told me it to me as like a dishwasher.

Of course the dishwasher should be more expensive. When you add up the hours in labor saved and multiply by the hourly median wage, you get something in the $50k to $100k range.

But it's essentially just a sprinkler.

Ain't no one going to to pay the cost of a new BMW for a dishwasher.

Same thing here for the laundro-bots. Their competition isn't against the time saved for a person to do it themselves. The competition is a maid that does your whole house for $70.

I know that they went out of their way to a company that does not store genetic info for their sequencing.

In talking with them, they are also very against any form of this screening. The risks of the disease are very bad, but they feel on a population level that the risks of abuse by insurances or governments are much higher, per what they have told me.

Sure, DNA seems like something that is 'real' and 'grounded', but once you get into the specifics of even sample collection and handling, those little errors in the Gaussian distributions start adding up (in quadrature!) and it is surprising how fast the error bars end up swamping any kind of knowledge.

Personal anecdata: My folks bought their house for ~70k, it is now worth ~1.5M. The taxes are about 600/year for them, they have no mortgage, paid off decades ago. If they were to try to buy their house again, it would be ~8k/mo just in taxes and mortgage. Moving out of the metro isn't an option as no medical services really exist outside of metros in CA anymore. Same for many other services.

Many older homeowners in CA cannot afford to live there anymore, essentially. They are in a gap/trap.

Yes, you could revoke Prop 13 and let things adjust, but even incremental steps would cause wild swings in property values as the market readjusted, likely causing knock on economic effects in the whole US economy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Any discussion of the cost of housing in CA has to include this. Want to know why the property market there is so distorted?

It's Prop 13.

TLDR: Property taxes only increase 2%/yr (sorta, its complicated) and reset upon sale of the property. So current owners are highly incentivized to stay in place and not move. Supply is held down, so prices rise.

And med schools are quite focused on grades.

Same goes for Law Schools, which, again, Brown is an outlier for JDs.

Look, the professor here is right. But he's living in a different time. The students are under the gun here and are responding to their incentives. The prof's gripe should not be with the students but with the AMA or the Bar associations, ultimately.

Essentially, the system is sick, the kids and prof are caught in the middle of it. Don't fight each other, fight the power.

Seeing as the article was about Brown and their PLME program is famous for med school acceptance, then I think we should expect that the culture there is more about grades than a generic undergrad university's culture. Which, yeah, is also very grade focused.

The obvious problem with that is it is terribly expensive. You need Masters or Doctoral level people for long periods alone with students and you need to trust that these proctors won't be some form of -ist towards the students and also that their grades will be fair.

It is by design not something that scales.

But it seems that is where the path lies at this point.

Essentially, the aristocracy gets education again and the plebs get to fight/cheat it out amongst each other and paying to do nothing in the end.

Damn it

It's a cost problem. If you want to try for a SOTA model, you're going to need to spend big time.

Germany spent ~$115B last year on it's defense, roughly 2% of it's GDP.

In contrast, ~$145B was spent last year just on AI infrastructure by Meta, and, well no one talks about Meta winning any AI races.

If it does correlate to some 'strong' degree [0], then i think we could use it as a bit of a prediction going forward.

[0] It's population stuff so really anything above r>0.35 is good enough

Democracy works exactly because of this?

We just poll all the people, including the dumb ones, and then average out the answers. The dumbs all cancel out in the end. (Yes, of course, I know it is a lot more complex than this)

The whole point of democracy is that we don't know what is the dumb or smart answer so we have these complex functions and dances to squeeze out the best one we can think of at the time. (Yes, I know that the reasons for states to turn democratic are complex)

It's really high for psych stuff. If you even get r=0.5, you've got a great result there.

But it is important to note, I feel, that SAT maps to only about 2/3 parts of the IQ score, and IQ score is also a quite fuzzy measure here for things like knowledge work job performance.

I do agree though, you get quite a bang for your buck just reporting these numbers.

But, if you explicitly tie money and compensation to the SAT score, man, that is setting up some very perverse incentives around it. If it adopts widely to do so, then you're gonna get some really strange interaction effects there.