lithocarpus

Eye Spherical Cylindrical Axis Prism Base O.D. (Right) Pl -1.00 075 1.5 OUT O.S. (Left) -1.00 -0.50 076 1.5 OUT

Mildly nearsighted in left eye, with astigmatism in both eyes.

I am not sure to what extent it was a reversal of myopia or reversal of astigmatism. It must have been one or both as far as I can understand. Neither are considered to be at all reversible "officially" but I've seen other people claim that their myopia has reversed naturally.

What I do know for sure is that I can see crispness at long distance in both eyes that I could not before. I imagine I was mildly nearsighted in my right eye as well and that the eye test was not granular enough and rounded down to it being considered perfect. My right eye is still a little better than the left. But even with both eyes open things are crisp now.

I don't have health insurance that covers eyes now so I haven't bothered to get another test. Someday I will.

I believe myopia is primarily caused by less use of the eyes to focus on a variety of distances and scenes. We mostly are indoors looking at books and now screens -> myopia goes way up. I also believe it can be reversed by using the eyes differently and this happened for me.

I had myopia from when I was a teenager. I didn't realize it till I was 21 and tried glasses and could suddenly see what I didn't know was possible to see. I then wore glasses from 21 to 27. Quit wearing glasses at 27 and left the office and computer to be mostly full time in the woods. Two years later my myopia had mostly reversed and I could see crisp detail at long distances without glasses for the first time. Six years now since I noticed the reversal and I still can see clearly at long distances. I love it.

I don't get the importance of the distinction really. Don't LLMs and Large non-language Models fundamentally work kind of similarly underneath? And use similar kinds of hardware?

But I know very little about this.

True, it is more complicated.

For one, there could be some financial incentives mixed in in that health insurance companies would want their people to be healthier so they don't pay out as much, but it's not that simple for them either - the health industry as a whole profits more if there is more treatment ergo more health problems. If health care was cheap or less needed the insurers themselves would make less.

More importantly, there can be other than financial incentives mixed in for doctors and public health organizations to encourage health. Doctors for example take an oath and I think often genuinely want their people to be healthy. Public health organizations may be more murky but there's definitely a financial and otherwise incentive for the government itself minus those corrupted by the health industry, to want people to have less health problems.

My guess is something like, because there aren't patents on food.

There's no financial incentive for the healthcare industry to promote a healthy lifestyle.

It seems as if some researchers think that reducing this single metric without considering any other factors is inherently always a good thing and is very important.

I'm for subsidizing agriculture that improves long term soil quality and abundance. i.e. kind of the opposite of what most big ag row crops do now.

It's tricky to implement any subsidy in a way that's not exploited by big companies. But a place to start would be not subsidizing synthetic fertilizer and pesticides or anything that degrades soil long term, to encourage farms of every scale to focus on natural long term soil improvement.

I assume that's simply a calculation they do of how much their revenue will change if they adjust the prices up or down. Until it makes financial sense to lower prices, they can wait on trying to capture the market. I would guess they're working on making the cars and equipment cheaper before massively scaling up.

This is true to a degree, but, if big ag subsidies were phased out, small local farms would have a better chance of being viable.

I guess you could say this raises prices, but on the flip side, small farm prices could start to come down if they were more viable.

Genuinely curious as I don't know - could zoom not still record what is said and use that for their own purposes?

I just assume anything said near a computer could be and likely is recorded and stored by somebody, nowadays.

If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.

This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.

There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.

The idea that California is now "free of drought" is funny, it may be technically correct by the way the word drought is used, but it doesn't mean the underlying factors that contributed to the likelihood and severity of recent decades of drought have improved - it just means we got a lot of precipitation now, but another dry year and we'll be back in drought again.

If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.

This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.

There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.

The OP and the farmer are people who coded in the past. There can be a big difference between someone who understands how computers and code work generally, and someone who doesn't.

I was a software engineer up till about 8 years ago. I still dabbled in scripts here and there for things I needed since then. LLMs have proved hugely useful for me to do a wide variety of things that wouldn't have been worth bothering with before. The biggest barrier that LLMs overcome for me is being able to quickly find and adapt to different tools, libraries, languages, etc. But it does help immensely to understand how software works to some degree for being able to approach the problem in the first place. I think the two factors multiply together.

I imagine if I want to I could get back into real software engineering much easier and faster than I could have a few years ago, because I still understand how things work fundamentally, I'm just out of date on what's changed in libraries and systems and languages in the last 8 years.

It's also useful for working with spreadsheets and databases.

Anyway I don't mean to shill for LLMs, I hate where this all is taking civilization in general but I'll still use it where it helps me accomplish things I do value.

One way I'd describe it is LLMs say lots of things that technically make sense but aren't quite like anyone would normally say it.

And secondly they like to use more nouns for things, in my experience.

Of course all this is just what I observe currently and could well become different for better and worse in future versions.

I'm dubious about the idea that the cellulose additive is no different than eating plants. The forms that are used in food are refined / modified, i.e. not the same thing that I eat when I eat plants. I know a few people who react very badly to this added cellulose but don't have issues eating plants.

Sure, and, more processed is almost always less healthy than less processed. Doesn't mean "bad for me" just "not quite as good for me"

Partisan spite does cut both ways and should be seen as such and ignored on either side.

Regarding fat I think "eat real whole unprocessed food" is a simple way to cover it. These guideliness recommend using less added fat including avoiding deep frying, and if one must use fat to use a minimally processed (i.e. pressed or rendered) form like olive oil or coconut oil or butter or animal fat. Though they failed to mention the distinction between refined and unrefined olive oil - today much of it is refined i.e. highly processed.

Some of us do want to live near where our food comes from and eat it fresh. I haven't seen anyone advocating that pasteurization should be banned, just that raw milk should be un-banned.

I mean I've seen "low calorie bread" that was basically industrial bread cut with cellulose which is analogous to very fine sawdust.

I think avoiding industrially processed food is wise, but it eliminates 99% of restaurant food and 90% of prepared food in almost any setting, only exception being about half the stuff at a salad bar.

Almost everything that isn't a single ingredient whole plant or animal food contains industrially processed oil or sweetener/starch.

Still worth doing imho but I understand why it's not easy for most people.

Not disagreeing but also I wonder how it compares to inequality in Britain before the US was a thing.

I would guess fear of losing market share and valuable data, as well as pressure to appear to be winning the AI race for the companies' own stock price.

i.e competition. If there were only one AI company, they would probably not release anything close to their most capable version to the public. ala Google pre-chatgpt.

Some people are dropping things in response to how things are being ruined. Many people are not.

I hope you're right but I imagine with more computing power used more efficiently, the big companies will hoard more and more of the total available human attention.

Palantir is more directly involved in the surveillance state and military industrial complex.

Not saying Google isn't, but it's at least not as public or blatant, and is much less of what Google does overall.

Don't worry sufficiently advanced LLMs will learn how to put in the right amount of typoes to be convincing.

I mean, it does for people like me who decide to work less as they don't need to earn as much.

I've been envisioning a market for agendas, where the players bid for the AI companies to nudge their LLM toward whatever given agenda. It would be subtle and not visible to users. Probably illegal, but I imagine it will happen to some degree. Or at the very least the government will want the "levers" to adjust various agendas the same way they did with covid.

I despise all of this. For the moment though, before all this is implemented, it's perhaps a brief golden age of LLMs usefulness. (And I'm sure LLMs will remain useful for many things, but there will be entire categories where they're ruined by pay to play the same as happened with Google search.)

More fundamentally, the trend of the world economy is toward turning everything anywhere in the world into either a resource to be exploited or a playground for the rich.

This is a big generalization but I think it's broadly true.

If you are in a "resource" area you'll get pollution and often instability and war.

If you are in a "playground" area you get massive cost increases and are eventually forced out.

As the trend is toward concentrating more and more wealth at the top, the slice of rich who can afford to enjoy the playgrounds becomes smaller and the number of refugees, homeless, and poor becomes larger and poorer.

Not quite - because the person with the 300k house still owns the house. They have a 300k asset and <300k in debt. (assuming house value didn't crash after they bought it.

This has been happening for a very long time. The current administration is just worse and/or more blatant about it than previous ones.

So I agree with your sarcasm and I also agree with the parent comment that the current admin is doing a better job "clearly showing" how this works to everyone.