busyant

> when the only affect is appetite suppression

You don't know this.

> These things are useful for a few months

You don't know this.

> For anyone else (most people), it's much healthier to learn how to do difficult things.

You don't know this.

> Willpower is a muscle.

I know you mean this in a figurative sense, but what exactly is "willpower"? There has to be a physical (and physiological) mechanism for "willpower", no?

Do you believe that can be aberrant physiological conditions?

I do. I also believe over-eating is a manifestation of some type of "aberrant" physiology.

> People only come out of the woodwork because it suddenly happened to be worth a lot.

I used to work in pharma with a chemist whose medicinal chem team had invented 3 different multi-billion-$ prescription drugs.

He told me ... no one gives a shit about your patents unless you start to make money. when that happens, your competitors suddenly remember that they invented your drug before you did.

He spent a considerable amount of time being deposed by lawyers from rival big-pharma companies.

> The medical field as a whole isn’t generally interested in understanding how medication, only in empirical measuring and qualify the effects.

I don't think this is quite correct. I mean many practitioners of medicine will have the attitude of ... "if it works, it works". And that's perfectly reasonable.

But if you understand the mechanism of action of a drug (or other treatment), it (often) makes it easier to improve a drug.

So ... some sectors of the "medical field" understandably care only about empirical results. But other sectors would prefer to understand what's going on.

Yep. My father gets a med from there.

1 year supply from Northwest? $477 (includes shipping).

1 year supply from CVS? $1395

I have. Was that the hard part?

And what would that be?

> Terence Tao (2026) lists many goals of mathematics beyond problem solving. These include developing new theories and techniques, understanding the world, sustaining a community, training the next generation of mathematicians, contributing to cumulative knowledge, and creating works of aesthetic value. Of course, these have been positively correlated with genuine solutions.

> If, instead, mathematicians treat AI as a technology for advancing its long-standing and centrally human purposes, the technology may come to contribute to an accelerated flourishing and enrichment of the discipline.

For the longest time, people who conducted research (not just math) ranked and measured their peers (albeit quasi-subjectively) by 1.) their ability to solve difficult problems, 2.) the cleverness of their solutions, and 3.) the clarity of their explanations.

With the advent of these models, we're understandably worried because #1 and maybe #2 may be gone (maybe even #3).

Are researchers going to shift the ranking/measuring of their peers over to ... "so-and-so is a world-class explainer of AI proofs"?

If you go around telling people, "no no no. You don't understand. The important part of our intellectual work is now going to be <something that was never weighted highly>", well, then it feels like you're handing me a participation trophy and telling me I came in 1st place.

I have no idea how the next 5 years will shake out, but I think that's why there's a lot of anxiety at the moment.

If we (as a species) can genetically modify embryos to make our offspring more athletic, more intelligent, more <whatever>, is that human-RSI?

That's not a gotcha question.

I'm just genuinely curious if that would meet the definition of RSI.

> We already knew we had to do that. But the people in charge of the economy don't wanna.

I've often heard it said that <big corporations> often use consulting firms to recommend unpopular decisions they were already planning to make, thereby offloading the culpability to the consulting firm.

Maybe the LLMs are going to be the ultimate "consulting firm" for our societal issues.

I say this mostly tongue-in-cheek, but we're already offloading a lot of lower-level responsibilities (e.g., "write my email") onto these AIs.

> All of this stuff is gated by experimental effort, not AI!

My post said you still needed to run the experiments, but if you think AI can't help to improve bioweapons compared to humans alone, I disagree.

As a biologist whose PhD research was on the genetics of microbial pathogens, I am far more concerned than the author.

I think he trots out a lot of straw-man arguments (e.g., teenager making the weapon, "super"virus, etc.).

Those scenarios are purposely far-fetched so that he can ridicule them and thereby leave the impression that all the AI/bioweapon concerns are similarly far-fetched.

He spends a lot of "tokens" discussing AI-generated viruses. But bioweapons can be much simpler than a virus--they can be small molecules that inactivate essential molecular targets in humans. This is something that was discussed at length when I was in grad school and it wasn't dismissed as hyperbolic hokum.

So, is AI going to develop a supervirus? Probably not. But it doesn't need to.

Instead, I speculate that AI can "help" in making bioweapons ...

a. more potent

b. less detectable

c. easier to disseminate

You still need humans in the lab to run the experiments, but I think it's foolish to dismiss the worries about AI in such a condescending way.

> no LLM in the world can make them go faster

You mean the microbes have to double n-times (to get sufficient numbers of microbes) before tests can be run on them.

But maybe the LLMs figure out a way to run those tests on microbes that have only doubled 0.1(n-times).

You could then think of the LLMs as being a more honest version of Elizabeth Holmes.

bioweapons are probably easier.

Killing each other is relatively straightforward. Keeping people alive (e.g., curing cancers) is considerably more difficult.

I imagine that AI augments both our destructive and constructive powers.

> But why would they ask the right questions without prompting?

What if the models are good enough (maybe even now?) so that all you have to say is "come up with a list of interesting problems overlooked by humans in <insert math discipline>. Then work on those proofs."

I don't think that's so far fetched. Especially given the news today about NS.

> The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.

I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.

"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."

The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.

"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."

> And without mathematicians to ask the right questions

Here, I disagree. What makes you think the AI won't be able to ask the right questions without prompting?

> and able to appreciate the results, why would AI driven research continue?

Here, I think I agree. At some level, there has to be a human in the process that must understand / interpret the results.

I gotta say, however, that I'm not certain about my agreement. I'm worried that I'm missing something where the human can be excised from the process entirely.

> we should be putting this in the water supply...

Talked to a physician last year who said the entire planet should be on GLP-1s.

I worked at a pharmaceutical start-up years ago.

* one of our medicinal chemists had studied nights to become a patent agent (this isn't the bad part).

* he landed a pretty nice job at an IP firm with a considerable raise in his salary.

* we were _in the middle of his farewell party_ when the IT guy told the CEO that during the previous few days the chemist had printed our company's entire library of novel chemical structures and their associated biological activity data.

* in the moment, i had no idea what was happening, but i've never seen someone go from looking happy to absolutely miserable at their own farewell party.

* i do remember that my boss later said she wanted him frog-marched out of the building in handcuffs.

I'm waiting for the press release where both organizations merge.

For my amusement, I recently asked ChatGPT whether OpenAI and Anthropic were worth their proposed valuations or whether they'd be "kneecapped" by the Chinese models etc.

It gave me a long, detailed explanation which boiled down to, "Maybe Anthropic will be worth the 1T market cap if xyz happen, but unless something fundamentally changes w/ OpenAI, they are NOT worth anywhere near 1T"

Here's a quote from ChatGPT:

"And if I had $1 million that had to be invested today in either OpenAI at $852B or Anthropic at $965B, with a 5–7 year lockup: I'd put the entire $1 million into Anthropic. Not 60/40. 100/0 Anthropic."

Identifying bird species from photos that I upload.

To be clear, it depends on what your definition of "insanely bad" is.

I'd say ChatGPT/Gemini make egregious mistakes on ~10% of my photo uploads.

I recently uploaded a photo of a short-billed dowitcher and ChatGPT told me that it was a Wilson's snipe, explaining all sorts of details about the legs and tail feathers (neither of which were visible in my pic!).

I then followed up explaining that a Wilson's snipe hadn't been seen at my location since last November (and that Wilson's snipe was out of season at my location) and Chat revised its estimate downward to 85% Wilson's snipe.

Again, I followed up and I revealed the precise location of the bird and ChatGPT said something like "oh yeah, 99% short-billed dowitcher"!

I've had similar experiences w/ Gemini (haven't tested Claude).

Again, 90% success rate is pretty good, but the other 10% of the time, the 2 LLMs that I use fail on species ID and often hallucinate features on bird photos.

edits for typos, plus another example from the same "birding outing" the other day.

I uploaded a very clear photo of a sparrow.

* ChatGPT says "song sparrow"

* I explain, "no way. this sparrow has yellow over its eye and the breast is wrong for song sparrow."

* ChatGPT: Oh yeah, savannah sparrow

* I explain, beak is too big for savannah sparrow.

* ChatGPT: Oh yeah, saltmarsh sparrow.

* I expalin, "no orange on the bird's face."

* ChatGPT: oh yeah, seaside sparrow (finally correct!)

I've mentioned that episode as an analogy to current affairs to anyone who will listen.

> Whoever it is, that's always the case in government. It's not their money and any accountability like this is so rare

The guy who sold me my last car at my Toyota dealership was in his late 50s.

What's weird is that he told me that I would be his 1st sale!

I asked him what he did before and he said he was "in construction" but that it was a young man's game.

Something didn't add up and I googled his name.

Turns out that he was a former state police officer, ensnared in a fake overtime scandal. He served a prison sentence and lost his pension. I think the scandal nailed a few more cops, too.

> if you’re rich you don’t need to own a boat, you can spend more per day to rent if you want to use one.

There's a bit by Bill Burr where he says something like "you don't want to be the guy that 'owns the boat' (too much upkeep). You want to be the friend of the guy that owns the boat (you supply a case of beer every time you go out and your friend supplies the boat)."

I can't tell if you're being serious or sarcastic.

In case it's the former, nobody in the corporate world is using Linux desktops.

And let me know when your parents start using the Chinese LLMs on their own.

> the average worker can do most of their tasks with 5% of the api costs using an open source model from China and achieve the same results.

Are you also going to tell me that everyone will be switching to their favorite Linux desktop distribution over Mac & Win because it's "free"?

> I'm a researcher in the field and I definitely take AGI seriously

> I just think LLMs are a dead end for AGI.

I have no background in CS, so apologies if this is a naive question, but what makes you take AGI seriously, but also say that LLMs are a dead end?

i.e., is there something else that you think is not a dead end?

I don't have any shocking story, but I also was once made to participate in a day long group bonding exercise.

one activity was for each member of our department to grade the overall "personality" of our department using several personality dimensions (e. g., kindness, competitiveness, etc.)

what I think i learned was that each of us projected our dominant personality traits onto the whole group.

eg, the hyper competitive climber said our department was cutthroat.

the guy who avoided conflict said it was a happy department with few disagreements.

etc.

beyond that insight, I didn't learn much.

The substance of what you wrote is interesting on its own, but I wanted to compliment you on your writing style. It was an enjoyable read.

Reminds me of the decimal point scene in Office Space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fGHaVn5rGo