kunai

The fact that whether or not doing something like this (which is bizarre, incredibly unhealthy, and just not how humans are wired socially) is considered at all in the AI space and met with a "oh well, we'll wait and see long-term" is sort of a microcosm of how out of touch the push behind LLMs is. Anthropic, OpenAI, etc have thrust a poorly functioning product with unhealthy obsequiousness and a clever obfuscative instinct to hide its numerous limitations upon a legion of unsuspecting normal people who mistake its cleverness for true wit and insight. And now these people are blowing up their relationships, their passions, and their hobbies, and for what? What, actually, would routing your texts through Gemini or ChatGPT possibly do for your relationship? Is the onus not on us when we individuate and socialize to take it upon ourselves to learn how to communicate our feelings and emotions with each other? What sort of Kafkaesque absurdity are we living in?

I suppose Zizek predicted all of this years ago with his little anecdote about how in the future, I paraphrase, but he suggested even sex will be outsourced to technology; perhaps on a date one will purchase an artificial phallus and the other a male pleasure item, and the two will sit on the floor and watch their pleasure objects mating with one another. That's about how absurd this reality is that the genAI pushers seek to impose upon the world.

I mean that's certainly part of it, but Altman's grotesque comments today about the idea of raising a child being "more inefficient" than training an AI model there's something deeper, darker, psychologically I think; that the VC people are fundamentally misanthropic and antisocial and despite AI not really fulfilling their desire for a world where humans are entirely fungible they want to sell it that way as a sort of bizarre wishcasting. It's just incredibly odd.

I never quite understood why AI and LLMs are marketed the way they are, or why the powers that be behind its massive push seem so keen on selling it as a wholesale replacement for human careers (which given the current curve of improvements despite what the naysayers of human intellect might suggest, is unfeasible).

Accountants didn't die off when calculators came on the scene. In no scenario is an LLM a drop-in replacement for any career field the same way CAD was a drop-in replacement for draftsmen -- and even then, draftsmen are still around today, in slightly smaller numbers, doing CAD drafting and design rather than using raw pen-and-paper skills.

Claude and Codex are exceptionally useful for reducing workload and improving productivity. But that's all they are. They're calculators replacing the slide-rule, drafting-esque drudgery of typing out all your code by hand. So why not market them like that? As helpers, assistants, tools to enable you to do things better and more efficiently? Which, in my usage of them, is what they're really only good at. Instead, there's been a mad rush to shoehorn agents and LLMs and genai into everything, outlandish claims like GPT writing better than Hemingway and Ginsberg, and creating absurd tools like Grok or Sora that are fundamentally broken, don't work well, and have flooded the internet with noise and disgusting slop.

And in all of this, they've created a cancerous gold rush that threatens to wipe out the entire economy when the jig is up and people realize how useless these claims are, and that at the end of the day, it's a fancy search engine, a calculator, that can think a little better and reason more than the ones of old.

It really feels like all of these CEOs are just borderline running a cult at this point.

These solutions are often proposed as easy fixes but I'm skeptical that they actually will do much to reduce healthcare costs. Healthcare is fundamentally expensive. Not-for-profit hospitals and for-profit hospitals don't really substantively differ in terms of out-of-pocket expenditures for patients; I find it difficult to imagine that forcing insurance companies to be nonprofit would do much to reduce costs.

> large insurance pools that must span age groups and risk groups.

What you describe (community rating) has been tried and it works. But it requires that a lot of young, healthy people enroll, and seniors receive most of the care. In an inverted demographic pyramid like most Western economies have, this is a ticking time bomb, so costs will continue to rise.

> Mandate at least decent minimal coverage standards

I think a better solution is to allow the government to threaten in negotiating prices with companies as Canada does; it greatly reduces rent-seeking behavior by pharmaceutical companies while allowing them to continue earning profits and innovating. (I understand a lot of the complaints against big pharma but they are actually one of the few sectors of the economy that doesn't park their wealth and actually uses it for substantive R&D, despite what the media will tell you, and countless lives have been saved because of pharma company profits)

Essentially the gist of what I'm saying, as someone who has been involved with and studied this industry for the better part of five years, is that it's much more complex than what meets the eye.

Agreed. I'd also argue that there will always be the issue of adverse selection, which in any system that doesn't mandate that all individuals be covered for healthcare regardless of risk profile, will continue to raise costs regardless of whether or not margins are good or bad. That dream died with the individual mandate, and if the nation moves even further away from universal healthcare, we will only see costs rise and not fall as companies shoulder more and more of the relative risk.

Disruption, yes, in the sense that the current system needs to be overhauled. But this is a space that's frequented by the SV and VC space and "disruption" has very different connotations, usually in the realm of thought that suggests some SV-brained solution to an existing problem. In some edge cases like Uber/Lyft, this upending of an existing market can yield substantial positive externalities for users. Other "heavy industry" adjacent sectors, not so much. Healthcare and aviation, not so much.

Even SpaceX's vaunted "disruption" is just clever resource allocation; despite their iterative approach to building rockets being truly novel they're not market disruptors in the same way SV usually talks about them. And their approach has some very obvious flaws relative to more traditional companies like BO, which as of now has a lower failure-to-success ratio.

I don't think you'll find many providers clamoring for an AI-assisted app that hallucinates nonexistent diseases, there are plenty of those already out there that draw the ire of many physicians. Where the industry needs to innovate is in the insurance space, which is responsible for the majority of costs, and the captive market and cartel behavior thereof means that this is a policy and government issue, not something that can be solved with rote Silicon Valley style startup-initiated disruption; that I would predict would quickly turn into dysfunction and eventual failure.

Enshittification has done a lot of damage to the concept of "disrupting" markets. It's DOA in risk-averse fields.

Interests are not inherently gender-specific. I know many women who gravitate towards wargames, sports, and the like, typically male-dominated hobbies. We need to stop pursuing this notion that an activity is inherently male or inherently female.

Most trans women I know are the exact opposite, they gravitate towards extremely feminine interests, like makeup, fashion, design, etc. Inherent attraction towards a particular interest only dictates your personality type, I don't think it's meaningful insofar as it relates to gender dysphoria -- I think that stems from a much deeper, much more subconscious phenomenon which is adjacent to body dysmorphia. But I digress.

I proffer a question to those skeptical about gender transition: with the rise of GLP-1 blockers, many have found holes in the body positivity movement, in that a lot of formerly obese people who found solace in Ozempic and lost a lot of weight -- this accounts for a body transformation. Many report their symptoms of body dysmorphia disappeared entirely. Is this not the same for HRT and trans people? The other issue is that many are quick to compare the plight of a trans person to that of an anorexic -- but it's already established that anorexia nervosa is a special class of eating disorder that is multifactorial in origin and etiology.

If you're content with GLP-1 blockers and Ozempic being used to combat obesity, then you should have no issue with HRT. It's essentially the same thing, being used to treat a very similar condition. A lot of obese people don't necessarily want to be skinny, they just want to feel comfy in their own skin, and that's a trait they share with trans people.

The bell curve is much wider for humans than LLMs, I don't think this needs to be said.

There's one particular variable in all of these examples and videos that is conveniently elided by the authors, which is that most of these seem like inner-city schools. Children born into poverty with lackluster parenting are more likely to act out, the presence of social media notwithstanding.

What? How exactly are military aircraft "held in low esteem?" If anything, it's the exact opposite.

Doesn't seem like that far of a stretch given that Accutane (another acne medication) has been linked to IBD as well. There are a lot of drugs that interfere with the gut microbiota, of which its dysbiosis is often linked to the development of IBD. We're still in the infancy of understanding the pharmacokinetics of drugs as far as they relate to the gut and the ability of drugs to modulate the microbiome.

This is irresponsible advice. Some people find that meat alleviates their symptoms while other people find more relief from going vegetarian. Recommending a single type of diet (especially a "fad" diet like the carnivore diet, rather than one with some type of scientific basis like low-fodmap or specific carbohydrate diets) as a panacea is not going to work for most people. People can and should try elimination diets instead, where you eliminate all but the most basic of foods and slowly reintroduce foods over time to see which ones are triggers.

It's entirely possible you or someone you know saw great success with a carnivore diet, but others trying it might not see the same results and need one tailored to their specific gut microbiome.

It's better to attempt elimination diets rather than a single type (low-fodmap, specific carb, carnivore, etc.) What works for one person may not work for everybody.

My point seems to have flown over your head. Obviously it's a given that I know that, I'm a histologist. My point was that IBD is marked by histological changes within gut epithelial tissue that suggest chronic inflammation and elevated TNF-a and cytokine activity. However, it doesn't mean that the causative agent of IBD is the same for everyone.

If this was the case, and IBD was a purely genetic illness with no environmental component, then it would be literally impossible to study it. In labs we force mice to ingest dextran sodium sulfate (DSS) which produces persistent colitis by degrading the gut mucosa. It's impossible to really tell without sequencing someone's entire genome whether their IBD comes from genetic factors or environmental factors.

Both IBD and IBS respond to changes in diet, as both diseases involve degradation of the gut mucosa. Obviously IBD is marked with inflammation as well, while IBS is marked only by dysbiosis and abdominal discomfort.

Exercise is also a big one. It can be difficult to exercise when you lack energy, but it's critical for your long-term health, both physical and mental. The bidirectional gut-brain axis is poorly studied but seems incredibly powerful compared to the importance that medicine has traditionally given it.

The idea behind there being no link between diet and IBD is nonsensical and patently unscientific.

From a layman's point of view, IBD is a single disease. However, in reality, it's an umbrella term for a disease with a common set of symptoms and histological changes that can have a variety of underlying etiologies. Some people are more genetically susceptible, with family histories; others with no family history can undergo changes in gut microbiota composition, genome methylation, among other environmental factors that influence development and progression of the disease.

There are a bevy of peer-reviewed studies that show links between better diets/exercise and an increase in SCFA-producing microbiome components, which are known to suppress inflammatory cytokines and improve innate immune mucosal defense systems and free radical scavenging, promoting gut healing. On the flip side, plenty of people with poor diets and a lack of fiber are at a far higher risk of developing IBD or some other autoimmune disease (like SLE or RA), even certain cancers. It's why one of the most common strategies to address mild IBD and IBS cases is to begin an elimination diet and see which foods are triggers for inflammation.

You are correct that for many, diet isn't the reason why people have IBD. But it does play a huge role in symptom burden and the overall severity and prognosis of the condition. This isn't even considering the effect of environmental contaminants (such as PFOA and BPA) on IBD development, which has been well-known for over a decade now.

Ignoring science for a bit, just from the perspective of common sense, the idea of what you put in your body not affecting you is absurd and ridiculous. It's an idea pushed by gastroenterologists who don't want to risk upset patients who would rather not change their entire diet and lifestyle to mitigate their disease, for a small portion of whom the changes will not work anyways due to an underlying genetic component to the disease. Still, there's nothing to lose and everything to gain from adopting a healthier lifestyle.

That's incorrect -- the reason NASA chose Starship is because it was the most capable lander for the lowest possible projected upfront cost. Government contracts always attempt to maximize economic utility while meeting objectives -- any other advantages are ancillary to this.

> Symmetrically, almost all problems can be solved by increasing the mass budget: more fuel to loiter longer, redundant systems, etc...Starship is so hilariously large that there's enough mass budget to solve almost any problem.

Also incorrect. Mass budget does not change fundamental Newtonian physics, nor does it alter the issue of instability caused by a high center of mass. The engineers at SpaceX are very smart and I'm sure they're hard at work trying to engineer out this solution, but it's a bit like saying that you can prevent a car from rolling over if you make it heavy and powerful enough. Sure, but that causes problems and challenges of its own. It would have been easier to engineer the car to have a lower center of mass, i.e. it would be easier to land on the moon with a lander that had its mass spread out over a larger surface area and didn't have an angular moment of inertia significant enough to where topple was a concern -- like the Dynetics or BO proposals.

I'm absolutely certain at this point that this video, the video of the kid on the subway, and the guy in the Tesla are all some sort of inorganic viral marketing campaign on Apple's part because they are also aware of how narrow and niche the market for this device is and are terrified it'll have low uptake.

It isn't open and interoperable with a bunch of other software like the Quest or Reverb, you can't game on it because there's no SteamVR support, and the projected use cases are ridiculous gimmicks. It's also got a much narrower FoV than initially advertised and is limited to Apple's walled garden. For productivity, why would you pay $3500 for this when you could buy two huge 4K monitors and an impressively powerful PC/Mac instead and still have about 500 bucks left over?

It's all so weird. It's like they're trying to make it seem normal to just use this thing out and about when the best applications of VR are interactive simulations and games that are best used indoors in controlled environments. Not a single mixed reality device (Google Glass, HoloLens) by Apple's competitors has ever made this type of use case work, and I have little faith that Apple has somehow overcome all of the obstacles that Google and Microsoft faced.

"Gear selector" is an anachronism. Most modern gear selectors are entirely electronic on newer cars. What I'm talking about is a physical, permanent fixture that is used to change the car's transmission state into/from park, reverse, neutral, and forward (drive). You still will occasionally need to do this in an EV, for instance, in the case of an electrical failure and you need to push the vehicle out of the way of traffic. Or literally just backing out of your driveway.

Seems sort of pedantic to say "what do you need a gear selector for," obviously I'm not talking about an H-pattern and a clutch.

I like how efficient Teslas are and their class-leading range but the idiotic proliferation of touchscreens in mission-critical applications (like dashboards and control panels) is largely their fault, and they show no signs of stopping it. The new Model 3 has touch turn signals and none of the cars have had physical gear selectors for a long time because Musk thinks that they're unnecessary (lol). Why? Just why? Keeps me from buying one. Swipe to go into reverse? Really?

What's worse than that is that their fans ooh and ahh at this sort of cost-cutting nonsense because it "looks cool and futuristic" when it's far less functional (and frankly, more dangerous) than what it replaced. Apple already took their heel-turn with killing off the Touch Bar. Honda and VW both have scaled back touchscreen controls on their latest model vehicles. The F-35's touchscreen avionics have had problems and newer aircraft fielded (like the new F-15) tend to have more mechanical button backups while also retaining the advantages and flexibility of large flat-panel displays.

Musk's companies are the odd ones out here in terms of going the opposite direction. It's long overdue for them to correct this.

Productivity has increased by nearly an order of magnitude since the 1960s but real wage growth hasn't kept up. The vast majority of wealth created in our current economic system flows to corporations and asset management, which has had its good effects -- creation of new capital enterprises, VC, etc -- but also created a massive network of rentier capitalists like Ken Griffin whose motives for said wealth generation are unclear. The latter group would like nothing more than to sit on their unrealized gains and watch their porfolios increase in value with little to no concern for the net benefit of free enterprise, entrepreneurship, or society at large.

Given that, it's hard to imagine a technocratic future where ML and LLMs enable increased productivity with a lower workload. The prevailing trends just run diametrically counter to the idea that this type of technological progress will yield any significant relief for the working and middle classes. The more likely scenario is that you use AI to increase your productivity and end up working the same hours every week with minimal wage growth, all in sacrifice to the great god of GDP.

If I'm not misremembering I'm fairly certain Excel still has hard limits on rows and columns.

Hell no. The limitations of this sensor/optics size (regardless of fancy periscope tech) is apparent given how overreliant Apple has gotten on their DSP/image processing to produce 'better' images.

I've actually been more and more dissatisfied with the results from iPhones over the years; their sensors have had the same limitations with dynamic range and low-light ability for years but try to make up for it with fancy signal processing. It (mostly) works well when you look at these images on a small 6 inch screen, but blow them up to even a moderate sized computer monitor and they look pretty abysmal compared to even a basic entry-level mirrorless camera or DSLR.

The latter two have much less intrusive noise reduction and produce a far better looking honest, unprocessed image than any phone camera could. Shooting in RAW on an iPhone is proof of this; the raw sensor output is much, much noisier than a low-end DSLR in anything but peak noon outdoor lighting conditions.

That's not getting into many of the other benefits of dedicated cameras, like much more granular control over colors, WB, exposure, aperture, shutter speed, filters, true control over depth of field, more lens choices, etc, that are aided by the superior ergonomics. Cell phones have completely replaced point-and-shoots but large-sensor cameras and film cameras still blow the pants off of even the most sophisticated mobile cameras in terms of detail and versatility. The question is whether you have a use-case which calls for the greater expense and size of a camera like that.

Isn't this exactly one of the problems that GPT4 has been aiming to solve? It'll be interesting to see if this is the tyranny of AI -- whether degradation of NLMs is an increasingly insurmountable barrier to good performance or whether it's something that can be massaged out with better verification.

Seems like you could get the same thing with ham radio for far less cost (albeit far less cachet by virtue of not being ex officio)

Tesla and SpaceX come to mind. Or Apple.

At the very least, Artemis is a functional space launch system with exceptional reliability and predictability despite its insane costs. The wasted billions are an embarrassment, but far less so now that we know a) the thing works, and works pretty darned well and b) it is, for now, the only game in town in its class.

Starship is an interesting project with a lot of ambitious goals, but it is far behind schedule in terms of development and the Raptors are suffering from a lot of issues that Merlins didn't have due to SpaceX's inexperience with cryogenic fuels.

So the question to be asked is: do we want an pricey but reliable and proven solution now, or do we hold out for years in the promise of some intangible futurist idea that will likely take far longer than anticipated to become a viable solution for crewed travel? If your answer is B, then it's fairly obvious you're less interested in the rapid progression of space travel writ large and more interested in ensuring a project you favor wins out.

In a perfect world, SLS would be a rapidly reusable rocket with 5 RS-25s, an inflatable heatshield, F-1 derived liquid boosters, and landing legs. But that's not the world we live in, and something > nothing, in my opinion. And I also find it important to put the price of SLS/Artemis in context to other far more wasteful government projects that produce no surplus economic value for people, like the F-35 program or the B-21 (questionable benefit over existing defense systems). In that context, SLS is almost utilitarian, providing valuable scientific jobs to engineers and scientists, while propelling the way to the Moon for this generation's astronauts and explorers.

There needs to be a Godwin's law for how long we can have a thread about space exploration without somebody mentioning SpaceX

> or the benefit of humanity it is unfortunate that the SLS did not blow up on the launchpad

This is genuinely one of the most vile and disgusting things I've read on this thread so far. Cheering on the hypothetical destruction of people's hard work to create a significant engineering and technological milestone is so fundamentally antithetical to the hacker ethos that I can't believe you found it acceptable to put that into writing in such a crass manner.

> Imagine what SpaceX could have produced for $21b

Considering the vast majority of SpaceX's technical achievements are built on the back of the American taxpayer (through use of public-domain NASA documentation and blueprints as well as government contracts), likely not much. As I've said elsewhere in this thread, SpaceX's strengths lie in their crack team of software engineers for which you can credit their advances in reusability, not necessarily their hardware.

It's extremely tiresome to see individuals so cynical that their bias against government-funded research and technology manifests in such an ugly way, especially against the backdrop of such a magnificent success story despite overwhelming odds. Good night.

I'm not sure if we were watching the same livestream, but the official launch livestream was incredibly high-budget and high production values. Felt like you were watching a trailer for Top Gun or Interstellar. It's really funny to me that SpaceX fanboys can't set aside their polemics against SLS for five seconds despite a pitch-perfect launch while Starship fumbles about with inordinate delays and cost overruns -- the exact same thing SLS is most criticized for.