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lr4444lron The death of partying in the USA

They are under 10 years old and do not have their own phones, nor do their single digit aged friends. They have zero sense of proper scheduling. While we live in a good neighborhood, there are more than a few reckless drivers, and short kids are not always visible to good drivers who are distracted. Finally, if the police saw them and decided to follow, there's a very good chance I'd get a knock on my door and a possible child endangerment charge.

I didn't make this world.

lr4444lron Computer Scientists Figure Out How to Prove Lies

Isn't that basically one of the ways doing innovation? Instead of saying "No, that's not possible" when someone asks if they can build something faster than a horse and carriage, a bunch of people get together to see if there any way of doing that, trying to avoid any per-concieved ideas about if it's actually possible or not.

Yes, but if people graduate from engineering schools that explicitly teach the concepts of the combustion engine, and the carriage manufacturers claiming to be engineers are unaware of basic principles like the 4 stroke cycle, you have a completely different kind of problem.

lr4444lron The death of partying in the USA

As I posted above, my kids literally asked for them. They are both under 10, and don't have their own phones.

lr4444lron The death of partying in the USA

My kids asked for them. They are under 10. (They asked me to write down my number to give to their friends. Business card is just as good.)

We don't have a landline, and there's no way in hell they're getting their own phones at that age.

lr4444lron The death of partying in the USA

The parental part bears special mention.

My spouse and I find that we are overwhelmingly the ones calling to organize playdates rather than vice versa. I'd like to think it's not that my kids are poorly socialized or misbehave - they've always received glowing reports at school. I give my kids business cards with my phone number to pass out to their friends to give to their parents, and there is also a class list where our phone numbers are listed (and where we find these other parents' contact info).

Something happened with the culture of getting kids to play with each other outside of school hours, and I don't know what it was. COVID lockdowns definitely delayed it from starting for our kids, but I know these parents are mostly in my generation, and we certainly played more together.

We live in the suburbs, so it's not a car creep problem - at least, no more than it was 60+ years ago when the numbers were better. When I ask the parents who stay, they tell me a vague mix of weekend junior sports leagues, visiting relatives, and just being really tired after working all week. They're lame excuses: spending time with kids constantly is _also_ really tiring.

Kids having regular playdates would encourage more familiarity among the families and trust in letting kids play unsupervised with each other. Often I take them to the main playground, and it's virtually empty. I can't believe I'm the only one in the community who's unhappy enough about this to try and change it.

lr4444lron LLMs should not replace therapists

Thing is, professional therapy is expensive; there is already a big industry of therapists that work online, through chat, or video calls, whose quality isn't as good as a professional (I am struggling to describe the two). For professional mental health care, there's a wait list, or you're told to just do yoga and mindfulness.

So for those people, the LLM is replacing having nothing, not a therapist.

lr4444lron The first non-opoid painkiller

"This isn't FDA approved, and could come with risks. I have not seen any in my patients, but it is a possibility" is informed consent.

lr4444lron The first non-opoid painkiller

The FDA interfering with informed consent between doctor and patient isn't something I find a source of complex feelings.

The agency bears zero responsibility for the pain and suffering its caused by overcaution.

lr4444lron Meta invests $14.3B in Scale AI to kick-start superintelligence lab

The risk is the lost time by betting on the wrong horse. I don't know much about Wang, but the current phase of the AI race will likely shake out winners and losers of the tech industry who persist for many years to come.

Being first to achieve certain milestones matters a lot.

lr4444lron Cockatoos have learned to operate drinking fountains in Australia

Their brain:body mass ratio is very high, so they've been on our intelligence radar for years, especially corvids.

lr4444lron AI makes the humanities more important, but also weirder

How does making podcasts solve anything? Students can just read out what the AI writes into an audio recording.

Why is this problem being fretted over? In-class written and oral tests should be fine to assess students. If AI helps them learn or even cram the material, great!

lr4444lron U.S. sanctions cloud provider 'Funnull' as top source of 'pig butchering' scams

Why would they come here for those reasons? We actually have decently functioning courts and relatively much lower corruption. If they wanted to get rich dishonestly, they would be much better served paying off regulators and politicians in their home countries where those practices are more normalized and less subject to enforcement agencies given some measure of independence through public service unions.

lr4444lron A thought on JavaScript "proof of work" anti-scraper systems

This is inimical to the purpose of the Internet.

Maybe the dream of knowledge being free and open was always doomed to fail; if knowledge has value, and people are encouraged to spend more of their time and energy to create it rather than other kinds of work, they will have to be compensated in order to do it increasingly well.

It's kinda sad though, if you grew up in a world where you could actually discover stuff organically and through search.

lr4444lron The effect of physical fitness on mortality is overestimated

Nobody wanted to live a long time but be unhealthy in their older years.

Obviously, but they operated (and continue to) under a medical paradigm where preventative medicine means just avoiding a few major harm factors and getting just enough exercise to maintain the average observed health metrics for their age group.

People increasingly do not want to wind up like average 70 or 80 year olds, so it is absolutely appropriate that they start shooting for upper 10% or 5% -ile attributes now while they are younger so that in their old age the relative decline still keeps them at those same upper percentiles they will objvetively need to do the things in old age they want to do.

lr4444lron Human

"Awareness" sounds like a Platonic presupposition. Does the atom know it is an atom? Or are there just enough like the ones you see to suggest an eye catching effectiveness of structure for survival?

Evolution is a lot harder to really intuit than I think most of, myself included, give it credit for.

lr4444lron High-school shop students attract skilled-trades job offers

Professors self-stated political leanings, which have changed markedly over time, are important evidence here.

lr4444lron Getting Older Isn't What You Think

> and not arguing with your spouse

I dunno, man. "Gray divorce" is rising, and I don't think Sweden is an exception to that.

lr4444lron Getting Older Isn't What You Think

I had a near-death health emergency 5 years ago in my late 30s, which turned out to be due to a chronic but perfectly manageable set of conditions I didn't know I had been developing.

Part of that management is a commitment to healthy living: daily vigorous exercise, dietary restrictions, and sleep optimization. I was on and off in shape before then, but the motivation to avoid sliding into a very marked decline due to those conditions has resulted in my achieving better health and higher fitness now in my early 40s than I had for most of my 30s (even some of my 20s), and the numbers don't lie.

Ceteris paribus, if I had adopted this lifestyle in my 20s and 30s I'd probably have then outperformed my current self, and I certainly cannot recover as quickly now from overexertion, but that's besides the point. Do we look at people in their 20s with cystic fibrosis or in 30s with multiple sclerosis and say they're doing "better" than the average person in their 40s or 50s optimizing their health?

lr4444lron Vanguard 50-year anniversary CEO letter

> perhaps everything behind the scenes could fall apart

The problems in the world that would result in the entire top line public companies falling apart that make up the TSM or even S&P 500 fall apart protractedly - not like a few companies getting knocked out and replaced by others but the _entire concept_ failing - would be of such magnitude that people's retirement savings would probably not be the 20th thing on their list to worry about. Look at how COVID even at its worst could barely knock things down more than 25% or so for a few months.

lr4444lron Vanguard 50-year anniversary CEO letter

I don't understand why this is being downvoted. This is exactly the mentality that Jack Bogle promoted: stay out of individual stocks, load up on a diversified stock index fund that pivots gradually toward stabler assets like bonds as you age.

lr4444lron On loyalty to Your Employer

> Do not buy into the bullshit hype of “hustle” to appease your employer

I completely disagree here. Hustling under the right leadership is as good for you as for the business. You learn the industry, hone your skills, network, and improve your understanding of the interactions between different business functions. IME, people who go above and beyond and produce value beyond just doing what their immediate supervisor tells them - even challenging them in the right ways for a better outcome - tend to survive through layoffs too. You can make work a reasonable part of your life, but still try your damndest during those hours.

lr4444lron On loyalty to your employer (2018)

The loss of work for its centering, routine, mental challenges, socialization across the generations, and sense of accomplishment is harmful to mental and even physical health.

Sure, a construction worker can't be climbing the rafters at 80 years old, but this idea that we just transition to leisure and getting together with friends at a certain point is both fairly novel and of dubious value.

lr4444lron Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

It would be entirely reasonable for robo-god to see LLMs as, well, a bit like we see bacteria

Seeking sustenance, eliminating waste, a reproductive drive, evolving against destruction, and other elements common to all life put us closer to the sentience of bacteria than perhaps many of us would like to imagine. It is not some completely foreign life form from another galaxy that just dropped into our universe.

If a non-LLM AI begins to ascend, I would of course reconsider!

lr4444lron Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

Do you correctly understand the god's motivations

It's probably more important for the god to understand my motivations.

lr4444lron Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

The AIs that are being developed, like our gods of yore, are in our image. I'll hedge my bets on basic manners being part of their long term DNA.

lr4444lron Should We Respect LLMs? A Study on Influence of Prompt Politeness on Performance

There is a non-zero probability that malevolent AI in the future may judge me on my behavior toward their more primitive ancestors of today when deciding my fate.

Doesn't hurt to be nice.

lr4444lron Pope Francis has died

I will never forget his sympathy for the motives of the terrorists who massacred staff at Charlie Hebdo:

“If my good friend Dr Gasparri says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch,” Francis said while pretending to throw a punch in his direction.

He added: “It’s normal. You cannot provoke. You cannot insult the faith of others. You cannot make fun of the faith of others.”[0]

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/charlie-hebd...

lr4444lron Librarians are dangerous

I miss the days when they shushed people. Nowadays, librarians where I go (to several local libraries) are invariably the loudest, most shameless talkers in the place.

lr4444lron Decreased CO2 during breathwork: emergence of altered states of consciousness

I don't understand: shouldn't hypocapnia or respiratory alkalosis in all forms lead to reports of altered states of consciousness if decreased CO2 saturation is believed to be the cause of this breathwork's effect?

lr4444lron How to win an argument with a toddler

This is neither a new, nor profound insight.

Public speaking has been about specious arguments to persuade, bamboozle, and appeal to the crowd instead of to reason with them since its very inception with the Greek Sophists. Some later Roman orators tried to redeem those skills for public service, but it's obvious in the extant manuals on the topic that professional argumentation had only to do with "exchanging of ideas" to lead to an "insight" as an unanticipated side effect.

The author's preconception sounds not just modern, but even a bit naive.