lumb63

Almost any diet that contains mostly real food rather than artificial food-like substances will produce substantial improvements in health. Contents are hugely secondary to actually consuming real food.

They might be able to beat “ad blockers” referring to the software that blocks ads; I don’t think they’ll ever beat “ad blockers”, the humans that are looking to block ads. There is a certain breaking point where people will simply not watch the content anymore. I am astounded that this hasn’t happened already and a migration to some other alternative site hasn’t ensued.

One of my fears with the growing use of LLMs for writing software is that people are using them as a catch-all that prevents them from feeling the pain that indicates to us that there is a better way to do something.

For example, nobody would ever have developed RAII if manual memory management didn’t peeve them. Nobody would have come up with C if they didn’t feel the pain of assembly, or Rust without C, or Typescript without JavaScript, etc. Nobody would have come up with dozens of the genius tools that allow us to understand and reason about our software and enable us to debug it or write it better, had they not personally and acutely felt the pain.

At my job, the people most enthusiastic about LLMs for coding are the mobile and web devs. They say it saves them a lot of time spent writing silly boilerplate code. Shouldn’t the presence of that boilerplate code be the impetus that drives someone to create a better system? The entire firmware team has no interest in the technology, because there isn’t much boilerplate in C. Every line means something.

I worry LLMs will lead to terrible or nonexistent abstractions in code, making it opaque, or inefficient, or incorrect, or all of the above.

+1 for minimalist footwear. I keep telling anyone who will listen, “isn’t it crazy that we don’t have foot shaped shoes?” And then we wonder why we have bunions, knee pain, and tight hips when we sit sedentary at a desk all day in our not-foot-shaped shoes.

I highly recommend reading The Technological Society by Jacques Ellul. It was written in the ‘60s about how technology influences the direction of humanity and all the unintended consequences that come from that, and how we turn to more technology to solve those problems. It was a very prescient book.

I have come to like this approach reasonably well. My current company uses a similarly simple problem to evaluate candidates. For me, it was a breeze, and I thought we’d be hiring slouches left and right. Once I started administering the interview, I realized that the majority of candidates absolutely bomb this simple question for one reason or another.

It seems that “able to code a simple problem well” is a far less ridiculous proxy for good software engineer than “able to code a hard problem at all”. Much to my surprise.

It seems to me that most people will not be willing to lower their standard of traveling to the extent required by public transit in most places in the US, even if travel by car becomes very difficult. The gap is simply too wide.

I live in the Boston area and commute by car. My commute by car (despite the recent closure of a lane on the most heavily trafficked road on my commute, for no reason other than to not have it) is between 25 and 45 minutes. The fastest I can pull it off by public transit is an hour, with a long tail up to 1h20m or more in case of shutdowns, etc. I’d gladly take public transit if I could even meet my worst-case commute time consistently, but the worsening of my life by doubling my average commute time far outweighs the benefit of being a little greener and not having to pay attention to driving during my commute.

In other areas of the economy we wouldn’t consider inducing demand for alternative remedies by making the way average person operates worse. It becomes quite dystopian in my opinion. For instance, one could argue that too many people are seeking healthcare rather than pursuing lifestyle changes to improve their health, due to the availability of healthcare, so we should shut down hospitals. Or one could argue that the presence of housing induces demand for housing and so we should stop building new houses while providing no additional place for people to live. That will just create homelessness and/or very expensive housing. Both of these solutions will lower demand, but in a quite painful way for many people.

To me the solution which makes far more sense is to build improved public transit and people will naturally gravitate toward it, reducing demand for roads/cars, AND their quality of life will improve. For instance, if Boston expanded the MBTA with the long-sought-after urban ring project [1], my commute would reduce to perhaps 30-35 minutes by train. At that point it would be an absolute no brainer for me to switch all my commutes to public transit.

This is a rare situation where almost everyone really can win. Easier, cheaper, faster, greener travel. I don’t see why people argue for an approach where the majority of people lose.

> It took over a decade of research, elaborate numerical models, and 13 Greek marines fighting in it from dawn till dusk to prove it was surprisingly good at its job

A decade of research and mathematical models to determine that an ancient civilization wasn’t just making useless armor for fun?

The first step is accepting that you don’t have enough time to do it all simultaneously. From there, I’d suggest you to prioritize the most salient interests. I’d also give preference to interests which require a long-term time commitment. For instance, one of my hobbies is strength training; I always prioritize it over sometimes-more-salient interests because strength is use-it-or-lose it, and other interests are often fleeting, for me.

You talk about demand for home ownership as if it is entirely induced via economics rather than inherently valuable. I don’t understand why? There are reasons why home ownership is desirable neglecting economics entirely. Owning a home gives you more control over the space you live in, in terms of the ability to customize the space.

Almost as if people are skeptical of/apathetic to guidance from an organization that recently got done eroding decades of public trust.

But how do you know another human is “conscious”? Certainly there is an intuitive sense to it that would be very difficult to put into words, but that is the crux of the matter. Every other human, whose brain you have no ability to peer into, could be an unconscious yet sufficiently advanced computer, or a machine built to make the exact motions, words, decisions, etc., that you perceive, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

Something that has bothered me for a while is the cost structure of college. At least at my school, everyone paid the same amount, plus or minus three or four thousand dollars. Meanwhile, a computer science major will earn on the order of double what a psychology major might earn, both as a starting salary, and that will compound over their careers.

This is also true of loans. There is one flat interest rate for (federal) student loans. That rate does not reflect the creditworthiness of the borrower at all. It doesn’t consider their major at all. Any intelligent lender would never operate this way; who would give both a computer science major and basket weaving major the same amount of money and claim (via interest rate) that both loans are equally risky?

We have the concept of prices to serve as tools to encourage or discourage people from pursuing ventures society needs (or, really, is willing to pay for) more or less. It seems to me that in the context of higher education the economics are fundamentally broken. This causes a lot of grief for a lot of people, who then claim socialized higher education is the answer. It might be better than what we have; I’m not sure. That said, I’m inclined to think the free market would solve a lot of the problems seen in the current student loan situation in the US. There would be no kids with low-value degrees in $250k of debt graduating with a job paying $30k/yr. That simply shouldn’t happen.

This is terrible reporting. I don’t support the warrantless monitoring of citizens via Section 702, but the email displayed shows zero nefariousness as far as I can tell. It is just the FBI deputy director encouraging FBI agents to lawfully (at least according to FISA) use the tools at their disposal to demonstrate their use to the FBI.

Would anyone more familiar with the field be able to provide some cursory resources on the protein folding problem? I have a background in computer science and a half a background in biology (took two semesters of OChem, biology, anatomy; didn’t go much further).

The most humbling part is, there’s always another level down. I thought programming code for the Linux kernel was low-level, until I worked on a team where there was an entire separate MCU on the same package underneath the primary cores running Linux that booted and controlled the whole system. I thought that was low-level until I worked for a team building a similar chip and had to participate in the design and validation efforts for it. There is almost always a whole world beneath the level of abstraction any of us operate on. Beneath the software world are IP blocks, which are composed of digital logic circuits, which are composed of transistors, which are governed (if you get small enough) by quantum effects… reaching the bottom is nearly impossible; it’s very humbling.

This is especially true from a security standpoint. Many analysts are worried about XSS attacks and other such high-level techniques. C has an entire different class of vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. And beneath that, there are countless vulnerabilities by exploiting properties of the physical hardware. Most industries choose to ignore these problems, because they’re very expensive to mitigate.

+1 for embedded software. I work for an IoT company and the web and app devs think LLMs are the saving grace of the universe. The firmware team just keeps chugging along, ignoring the noise, debugging hard problems, and writing unsexy low level code.

From what I understand (having heard an EE at work talking about this), at bleeding-edge nodes, electromigration is no longer the biggest concern; the reliability of the individual transistors is. They apparently stop transisting eventually. I’ve heard redundancy is being built into chips to accommodate this.

I can’t understand why publications would strike deals for their content to be used for training LLMs. It seems incredibly short-sighted to me. They gain a windfall in exchange for what is basically nailing their own coffin shut.

Another factor which may come into play is inaccuracy. In a distributed system where there is a known algorithm for making local and global decisions that are as-close-to-optimal as the algorithm can determine, then everyone gets to benefit from the increased knowledge present at a global level rather than at a local level. In the human world, some people simply make bad decisions, since there isn’t an algorithm for a lot of leadership decisions. If that person is the global decision maker, then rather than everyone benefitting, everyone suffers; whereas with a local decision-maker, only a small group suffers if the leader makes a bad decision (and hopefully other leaders pick up the slack).

It’s also partly because a distributed system can factor into its decision-making a vast amount of information, as where humans may not have sufficient understanding of all areas (and again, decisions are not algorithmically optimizable) to make the proper decision. As where more knowledge can help an algorithmic decision-making process, it can overwhelm a human one.

It also looks like it only applies to foreign peoples? That said, I don’t know how you select for only foreigners without collecting identity.

There is a body of actually elected officials whose job is to create legislation to enact public policies. The FTC is neither elected nor capable of creating legislation. This is an overreach of their power and will likely be ruled as such in court.

The same thing happened with Roe; it is not the job of the Supreme Court to enact public policy. That is for the legislature to do. If you talk to anyone in law, they will tell you that, regardless of their personal opinion on abortion, Roe is perceived as one of the worst court rulings ever because it was specifically designed to “legislate through the court”. Here we are in the same position again, with a non-legislative body enacting public policy; we don’t learn.

Another interpretation is that the ruling party is bribing people now that election season is ramping up by passing rules it knows has no standing in court, but won’t get shot down until post-election. Imagine all the people who voted for Biden thinking he would absolve them of the contract they willfully entered to pay their student loans. This is not much different. It is another group of people who have contracts they wish they didn’t have relying on government overreach to save them rather than not having put themselves in the position to begin with.

I didn’t realize this was satire until the second paragraph. Well done.

As a firmware engineer who is trying to build a website in his spare time, I find CSS absurd. I’ve found SCSS and Sass make it much more bearable. The ability to represent a hierarchy concisely is awesome.

It is asymmetrically difficult to lose weight compared to gaining weight. The body wants to maintain homeostasis, but tries way harder when it perceives the threat to be starvation. This makes a lot of sense considering historically that conserving energy rather than expending it would probably have been a massive survival advantage.

As an example, say we are discussing someone whose average energy expenditure is 3000 kcal a day and they eat that much currently. Let’s say they start to exercise and their average expenditure rises to 3200 a day, and they start to diet, so their intake falls to 2500. The body wants to minimize that 700 kcal caloric deficit to maintain homeostasis. The person will lose weight, but by the time they’re down, say, 10 lbs, a normal person 10 lbs lighter than they started would expend maybe 2900 kcal, but they’ll be expending 2800, since their body will start to downregulate processes that expend energy to minimize the deficit. This is why when people are losing weight they might feel cold (thermogenesis has decreased), tired (mental processing has decreased), or any other number of negative effects. It’s the body going into self-defense mode.

Another factor is fat. Sadly, as weight is gained, fat cells grow, and split when they get too big. When weight is lost, they shrink, but they never re-combine. Fat is an endocrine tissue that releases numerous hormones that regulate energy balance, appetite, etc. This means that people who previously had more fat will never (without medical interventions) be “the same” as someone who is the same weight, but never carried extra fat to begin with.

This might sound like “why bother trying when there are so many things stacked against you?” but I couldn’t disagree more. Despite the propaganda masquerading as science that says “diet and exercise don’t work”, they do. Nobody is immune to the laws of thermodynamics - if more energy is consumed than is expended, weight gain results, and if more is expended than is consumed, weight loss results. The main reason all these studies are able to say “diet and exercise are a bust” is because people don’t maintain the lifestyle that reduced their weight to begin with, and usually return to familiar habits.

Luckily, our habits are mutable, and just like our body can play tricks like making us more hungry when losing weight, we can fight back if we know what we are up against. For example, caffeine is a commonly consumed substance that suppresses appetite. Staying busy rather than being idle also suppresses appetite. Not having junk food in your house/office/etc. reduces temptations to help aid healthy decisions. Having healthy food available and prepared makes making healthy decisions easier. Scheduling diet breaks or planning free meals (and calling them free meals, not cheat meals) improve diet adherence.

In my opinion, the way to sustainable weight loss is slight modifications to the environment and behaviors to nudge the system in the desired direction. Our culture is too focused on motivation and discipline and toughing out situations no matter what to achieve our ends. Meanwhile tiny differences compound and do not feel like an immense burden. It’s also worth mentioning the power of a self-fulfilling prophecy: have you ever known anyone who lost weight via diet and exercise, and said it is impossible to lose weight via diet and exercise? On the flip side of the same coin, there are a lot of people who think diet and exercise will not cause weight loss, and they’re disproportionately overweight. Believing something is possible is nearly always a precondition for achieving it. Thoughts become things.

Best of luck on your weight loss journey. You can do it.

What’s most interesting is this is incredibly unpopular amongst voters of both parties.

Milton Friedman discusses this in depth in his book Free to Choose (from the 1980s), for anyone who’s interested. Here we are 40 years later, problem still unsolved.

I think it’s a way of farming status/clout. People who make fun of people who pose fringe ideas are rewarded with likes. People who shut down people on “the other side” are rewarded with likes. People can get likes by pushing the prominent ideology and kowtowing to that majority. It’s for their personal benefit, and being online removes the real-life downside of bullying or disagreeing with someone where you have to actually defend your ideas or deal with someone who is visibly upset by your actions. In conclusion, the upside of nitpicking is amplified by our tribal instincts, and the downside is muted by the nature of being online.

Fantastic. An additional way by which someone looking for help or support from a human can be denied that help and have their needs offloaded to a technology that probably can’t help them.

Here’s how I see this playing out: practices start to use LLMs to answer patient queries to save money. People realize their queries aren’t actually being answered fully (or at all?) and stop contacting their doctors at all. Practices save money and patients get worse outcomes. Exactly as we’ve seen in customer service over the years - talking to a human is nearly impossible.

An alternate possibility is the LLM gives such bad advice that it causes irreparable harm to a patient and nobody can be held liable because the doctor didn’t issue the advice and neither did the company which produced the LLM.

The universe where an LLM used in this situation does anything positive for the patient is vanishingly small. But I’m sure providers and practices will love it, since it effectively will allow them to not do part of their job and increase margins respectively.

I’ve thought about this a fair bit. The idea of companies being a firewall for liability to protect individuals seems…off? Companies don’t make decisions, individuals do. Certainly there is some utility to the idea of limiting liability, but our current system seems to me to afford too much benefit to those running corporations.

I see what you’re saying, but I think there’s a moral argument to be made for wanting code to be open source, but for humans only. Contrary to what law says, corporations are not people.

The contributors likely feel like their altruism is being exploited by mega corporations who are looking to harvest free labor. I sure wouldn’t want to work on a project if that’s how I perceived my users. But that doesn’t diminish their desire to provide a code base that anyone can use, learn from, modify, etc.