AnarchistArtificer @ AnarchistArtificer @slrpnk.net

Posts

4

Comments

1,199

Joined

2 yr. ago

I love and hate in equal measure the hubris with which one regards a "simple" problem that turns out to be very difficult. I love it because it usually ends up being productive eventually. I hate it because it's hard to emerge from the rabbit hole once you've committed to it.

"Ask a person and they'll remember the exact reason why, both in the context of the requested change and the coding project limitations."

Or if it's something that they don't directly know, they'll know who will know. There's a knowledge accountability chain that evolves out of pragmatic necessity and AI simply can't replace that

That's really neat, thanks for sharing that example.

In my field (biochemistry), there are also quite a few truly awesome use cases for LLMs and other machine learning stuff, but I have been dismayed by how the hype train on AI stuff has been working. Mainly, I just worry that the overhyped nonsense will drown out the legitimately useful stuff, and that the useful stuff may struggle to get coverage/funding once the hype has burnt everyone out.

I feel like I've seen a few things recently that would be suitable, but I can't recall them right now (my mind always goes blank when I try to summon memories like this). Your comment has caused me to make a mental note to try posting there if I stumble across anything suitable.

I agree with your characterisation of the UK, but I also think that any country denouncing another's actions has power — it may affect how other countries actions towards Russia if nothing else.

Especially because I can type quite quickly. Though upon reflection, I only do this when I know it won't do loads of different pings (One friend has their Facebook messages on silent, for example, so I use that for low priority, stream of thought messages )

(Apologies for replying to you via multiple messages. I hope you find it more humourous than annoying)

But I find spacing out messages can help make online messages have a flow more like a regular conversation

I hate when people send lots of tiny messages instead of one long one.

I agree that lots of smaller messages can be distracting, especially if it pings for each

Yeah, I fear that these calls for investigations may be a grief-ridden family grasping for some meaning. If there were some deeper nefarious goings on behind this death, then that might allow them to make sense of their pain. I've been fortunate to have not lost anyone to suicide, but I understand it's especially difficult to come to terms with.

I feel angry because as you allude to, retribution upon a whistleblower need not directly kill them in order to ruin their lives. Morally, I'd say that OpenAI may still be responsible for this death even if this wasn't an assassination. Unfortunately, the legal system isn't well suited to respond to diffuse responsibility, so the family is unlikely to find justice regardless (even considering that one version of "justice" would be OpenAI being held accountable for the original things that were highlighted by the whistleblower)

When I imagine how much pressure Balaji must've been under, and how I have felt under much milder circumstances, I can understand how that might've made a person feel suicidal. Blowing the whistle sucks because although it's rarely a case of just bringing the truth to light and letting the world do with that information what it will; becoming a whistleblower doesn't mean participating in a singular act of revelation, but adopting a new identity for the foreseeable future, as you continue to be defined by the one act, whether that's in terms of professional reputation, harassment of one's family, or being required to be a witness in court.

My greatest sympathies go to Balaji's loved ones.

I like yours better.

I don't know if this is at all related, but I have found that I have to think of rest as being two different sorts: passive rest (i.e. sleeping, sunbathing, etc. typically "body" rest), and active rest (stuff that tends to use the mind, or are stimulating in some way). When I have been burnt out, I find it hard because I lack active rest, and it makes me super antsy. Sometimes I desperately need some passive rest (especially as I have some physical disabilities too), but my need for active rest can be so great that it feels torturous to engage in passive rest.

The worst is when I am too mentally burnt out for active rest, such as if I am ill, or if I hadn't been having to spend all my mental energy on work tasks. I think, for me, brain fog is related but distinct. To use an analogy, brain fog is like the drain of a bath being blocked; lots of people can experience brain fog, it isn't specifically an ADHD thing. The ADHD component here is like being unable to close the taps that are filling up the blocked bath. This means that ADHD + brain fog = the bath will inevitably overflow. This is what the agony feeling is to me. It's not the brain fog per se, but the inevitable consequences of the brain fog.

You should do a version with a smiley face

I'm guessing that this question arose because you noticed that feeling full after eating is linked to needing to poop. This is because in an simplified model of your digestive system, there's your stomach, your small intestines and your large intestines (which includes the rectum, where poop is stored).

Often, when we eat a meal, the last meal is still being digested in our small intestines. When we eat a new meal, it is likely to spend around 2 hours in our stomach, after which point the partially digested new food will move into our small intestines. So that this can happen, it's necessary for there to be space in your small intestines, so eating a new meal sends messages to your digestive system to ensure the old meal moves along into the large intestines, where the final stages of digestion can happen and the mostly digested food is processed into poop, which gets stored in the rectum. Basically, you can think of it like a conveyor belt, that starts moving when something enters the stomach.

If you put poop up your butt and into your rectum, it would probably just make you feel like you needed to poop, especially if there was an old meal slowly making its way through your intestines. The short answer is that the systems that produce poop are connected to but distinct from the parts of your digestive system that processes food. Your stomach is the place where food goes, so parts of your body that are listening out for a message "we have recently eaten" are expecting that message to come from your stomach (or possibly your blood, because of nutrients being absorbed from early digestion).

That's the simple answer, but the complicated answer is that feeling hungry is actually, weirdly separate from whether we are full or not. For example, there are receptors (special messengers that watch out for certain signals) in your stomach called stretch receptors, and they can detect when your stomach is full. They are one part of the system that helps you tell when you're full, but it's not a super quick system. This is why it's possible to eat too much and notice until a while after, when you feel sick. It's also why drinking a lot of water can make you feel bloated, but it doesn't necessarily make you feel not hungry.

But feeling hungry isn't just determined by your stomach. Have you ever eaten meals on a particular routine, and then switched to a drastically different routine? I started a job where lunch time was relatively early, and I didn't have time for breakfast in the morning, so I decided to have my lunch be the first meal of the day. For the first few weeks, I was hungry all morning, but then gradually, I started to only become hungry when lunch time was approaching. Our bodies are incredibly adaptable, but they really like routine. This is especially significant when we look at hormonal control of hunger. I'm a scientist who studied some of this stuff at university, and the honest answer is that what makes us feel hungry is really complicated and we don't actually understand all of the little systems that work together to coordinate hunger.

The short answer to your question is no, because the rectum being full isn't what tells us we're not hungry.

It's not fine if the code needs to be used by other scientists though, which it often will be, even within the same research group. I have a friend who worked in a lab where one of their PhD students wrote a bunch of helpful code that was an unmaintainable mess that ended up breaking a lot of work flows at some point a year or so after the creator of it had left. It was kludge upon kludge upon kludge, and the thing that finally broke seemed to be dependency related, but I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on with it (I was asked to take a look).

There's a lot of duplicated effort in science. Scientists tend not to think about stuff like software ecosystems unless they're in a subfield that has been doing computational stuff for a long while, like bioinformatics. When it comes to code, there's a lot of inventing the wheel from scratch and that leads to weird square wheels that work good enough to then have more code built on top of them. Software might not be scientists' product in the same way as it is for IT people, but it often ends up being a part of the wider product of methodological reproducibility

(disclaimer: I haven't read the article, I'm just replying to you because your comment was interesting)

I think your theoretical vs practical framing is useful, but as a (non-computer-)scientist, I find it fascinating to consider how a biomedical scientist uses programming compared to someone whose background is much more grounded on the compsci/IT/programming side.^[1]

[1]: I sometimes joke that, compared to many of my scientist colleagues, I am an exceptional programmer, and this says a lot about the average quality of the code that scientists tend to write when they don't have much dedicated training or experience in programming

I'm reminded of Plato's argument against writing, in which his position was roughly that relying on writing will make us become less practiced at remembering. I especially love the line, which goes hard.

"What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder."

Though the entire passage where the quote is from is great; It's thought provoking even if I don't necessarily agree with it.

Man, I need to read Schopenhauer. I'm not especially well read in Philosophy, but I heard somewhere that Schopenhauer is one of the ones to read if you want to understand polemical writing, and that intrigues me.

From a pure nerd point of view, I will say I got a hell of a lot smarter when I got better at being dumb. By that, I mean that I allowed myself to feel less anxious about appearing smart and I found it easier to enjoy learning from the cool people I knew when I could say "no, I don't know much about that, but I'd love to learn more". I also got to spend more time with my own thoughts, reflecting on my ideas, rather than focussing on acting a certain way.

You're quite right that there are no winners to internet arguments, but this didn't need to be an argument.

I think things often escalate in online discussions because tone and intent don't come across well. Sometimes we start writing a comment and find ourselves struggling to put words to our point, possibly due to other tasks demanding our attention. Often we don't realise a clarification is needed until after people have already read our message.

Given those factors, if we want to avoid turning discussions into arguments, we need to assume good faith from the people we're talking to. That can seem like an absurd prospect given how many people online are arguing in bad faith, but if you can't reasonably assume a particular person in a conversation is arguing in good faith, are they really worth your time?

For example, I didn't read the person you're replying to as being particularly snarky, and I'm surprised that you read them as such. You've written a decent amount here that seems determined to be having an argument, but I'm not sure what the actual argument at hand is. It seems like you might be feeling the need to defend yourself based on the miscommunication that happened up-thread? Which I can understand, but I don't understand why you feel the need to break things down to the nitty gritty wordy bits. If I were being uncharitable, I would probably consider you to be trying to stir shit up and start arguments where there are none. However, if I am assuming good faith of you (which feels reasonable, to an extent, because you clearly spent time writing this comment, and I also appreciate that you partly apologised), then I still read you as being defensive, but in a way that I'm far more sympathetic to, because I do it sometimes myself.

I think you captured the grim nihilism of most internet arguments well when you said that no-one really wins in an internet argument. Certainly though, there are losers, and sometimes when I find myself arguing for longer than I should be, it's because I feel like I'm trying to "save face" in a way, and avoid being the loser. Sometimes it's when I have fucked up and communicated my original point unclearly, and sometimes it's because I feel like people are unjustly accusing me of something (by implication, usually). However, that mode of discussion sucks for everyone involved, and ultimately, wanting to avoid that shit is a large part of why I'm here on Lemmy, where I find I have more discussions than arguments.

I fear that my comment here will seem overly accusatory or judgemental, but I hope that you'll recognise that I have no stakes in this discussion and wouldn't have spent this time writing this if I was just trying to throw shit. Your parsing of condescension in the above comments is not invalid any more than my reading of those same comments as being patient and reasonable is. Words can be slippery, even for the most skillful of writers. But I think you'll find that assuming good faith of the people you're communicating with can lead to far more productive discussions because people become more inclined to show you more slack in turn, which is nice.

I had to avoid alcohol for a while because of a medication I was on and it drove me mad when people would press me after I said "I'm not drinking". I think it makes people feel weird about their own alcohol use? But if they're that self conscious, maybe they need to do some self reflection about whether their alcohol use is a problem.

A phrase I've been seeing more in recent years that's a small thing that feels impactful is stuff that says "alcohol and other drugs". It is a drug and needs to be treated with respect, and ideally caution

I'm seconding Bitwarden. I'll also say that whilst self-hosting (if one can do it securely) may be more secure than using a service, security is always going to be a sliding scale trade off of convenience and security.

I recommend Bitwarden to everyone, but I'm sure there are options that are probably equally good. But most people could probably benefit from a password manager because we have so many different services demanding we make accounts that I reckon it's next to impossible for any reasonable person to avoid reusing passwords across services (that's one of the biggest security risks that hit regular people).

Start up tips: make sure your master password is strong and memorable. I found Bitwarden's password generator for this. A passphrase tends to be more memorable than an equally long password — a good master pass phrase would have at least four words (four is sufficient for most people). Write this down in a physical place, as a backup, ideally not your wallet. it doesn't necessarily need to be locked away, just make sure you'll know where to find it if you forget it (I forgot mine a bunch at first and had to reference my backup a few times).

Password managers and security in general can feel overwhelming because of the instinct to do things properly, which might include things like self hosting a password manager, or only avoiding biometric sign-in on the phone app version rtc. However, the best password manager is one that you use, and if bits of convenience like this help, then it's a good trade off.

It reminds me of the joke about two people who see an angry Grizzly bear in the forest, which starts charging at them. One of the people starts running away, and the other shouts "Where are you going, you'll never outrun the bear". The running person replies "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you". That's a bad paraphrase, but the sentiment is that using a password manager at all puts you way ahead of many people, in terms of security. Obviously, you'd feel more secure if you knew you could outrun the bear, but if we spent too long being anxious about our ability to do that, we definitely will get eaten. (Apologies for such a long comment. I always do this when I'm procrastinating going to bed. I hope you have a nice Christmas, if you're celebrating that wherever you are.)