mjlangiii

Maybe it is, but if it is, it is one that includes more parts in our system.

The way LLMs lack broader context, have a narrow focus, and hallucinate, strike me as similar to people that have had traumatic brain injuries to their right hemisphere. Those people may hallucinate that the left side (the right hemisphere senses the left side of the body) of their body is made of wood and hinges and can talk to you about it like it is the most natural thing in the world. When the information gets to the left hemisphere to construct language about what they sense, there is a failure of the right to deliver the broader context to the left hemisphere that that's not possible, but they won't bat an eye discussing what they believe.

So, we have a left hemisphere where we do most of our focused thinking, logic, constructing language, etc. and LLMs seem pretty similar to a lot of that. But, we also think without language, thinking does not require language. A lot of thinking is also happening in the right hemisphere and it isn't using formal logic, isn't using narrow focus but rather intuition based on broad contextual and experiential embodied knowledge. And this type of thinking isn't binary, it accommodates paradoxes without issue. LLMs don't currently have anything analogous to this type of knowledge and this type of processing AFAICT.

In addition, that intuition might be tied to a feedback system with the body, for example, our second brain, the gut, provides a lot of control over how our body performs and provides a lot of feedback to the brain about how we feel. In fact, all feelings are sensed in the body (gut feelings, cold feet, weak in the knees, lump in your throat, burning ears, tight fists, etc.). Part of our intuition is based on considering an idea, sensing how we feel about that idea, sensed in various parts of the body, and then bouncing that back and forth across hemispheres to decide.

I wonder, what sort of pattern matching can we build that models embodied feelings. How would you model boredom, hunger, lust, fear, humor, etc? I think that's possible, but I don't know that we'll be able to do that with a normal computer, I think the way the brain works is more analogous to a symphony of simultaneous signals being processed with an emergent thought and less like a single-threaded process assembling words.

Maybe we can enumerate and model the human drivers of behavior and get something closer to what we're calling comprehension here, but token predictors for language are not getting us any closer to human comprehension. The human brain might just be an anticipation machine, but LLMs only deal with one dimension of human behavior, language, and there's little reason to think you can skip modeling everything that leads to human comprehension and still get anything more than just word babel with compounding error rates in predicting words that represent human comprehension.

I agree, a stark difference between AI and me is knowing when to say, "no", and/or to dig deeper for the unspoken story/need/value.

you might enjoy reading, "Manufacturing Consent"

Nice theory, but it is overfitted to a broad category of all software and a product that is thriving shouldn't be conflated with a product that is improving.

Some products with software continue to "live on" successfully and thrive, without updates. Think of a digital alarm clock who's goal was to help typical users to wake up on time most of the time. If you ship a product that does that and it isn't being updated, is the product really dying or doomed to failure?

No alarm clock will ever wake everyone up on time, but we can always strive to get closer to that goal if we chose to set that goal. An unreasonable goal could cause unnecessary bike shedding, etc.

But a simple pacemaker for the heart, the goal is closer to the idea of helping as many people as possible, rather than most. Hopefully we write good software and we go 15 years without needing an update. I think that is better than bad software that has to receive more updates. Which software is more "alive" and "thriving". Is the good software with no updates for 15 years really "dying" since it isn't "improving"? Again, thriving and improving shouldn't be conflated.

So, a product setting appropriate goals helps determine how much maintenance is actually necessary and some goals can be met without requiring any future maintenance. Other goals may benefit from frequent maintenance. Some products can thrive without improving. A product's goals determine's the importance of improvements.

Celebrating maximum exploitation of workers by those with all the leverage & power and calling the decent consideration of another man's well-being silly, that's, well, I'll just say that I believe we can do better, sir.

When I read this I just assumed it was a checklist for people that know these things - a good reminder. But now that I think about it, it probably was also meant to get people to look out for these things as they learn. I doubt this is enough to really help anyone learn these things.

+1, and anecdotally I've seen most good developers are bad teachers and that I have always gotten much more from my peers just one or two levels ahead of me (regardless of my peer's ability to teach).

In this series functional concepts are very gently introduced. I feel like it really appreciates the beginners starting point and assumes very little. Is this close to what you want?

https://egghead.io/lessons/javascript-linear-data-flow-with-...

I don't think there is one smoking gun for a chemical in food.

To me, I see a clear pattern. Reducing nutrition to consuming more of a specific chemical/molecule or consuming less of a specific chemical/molecule is always way more complicated than that. The best way to get the complicated combination/form of chemicals is to just eat as low on the food chain as possible in a minimally altered form.

Naturally occurring sugar in plants, say an orange, or rice, is good for you. Extracting sugar doesn't ever seem necessary for the American diet. The oil in a nut is good for you, extracting oil and using it to cook doesn't ever seem necessary for the American diet.

So I don't think it is controversial to say eating plans is good for you, especially say broccoli for your inflammation. The more broccoli you eat, the healthier you are; its really simple.

The second part of what I said, to try to eat low on the food chain is more controversial. But as soon as you combine that rice with meat, that sugar starts interacting in new more complicated ways and the it is no longer as simple as, the more rice you eat the healthier you are. It becomes, if you combine it with meat you have to limit the amount of rice you eat because together they spike your blood sugar level [0] study, image of that spike [1]. And I rarely hear, "the more meat you eat, the healthier you are".

So to me it seems like you can try to walk a tight-rope of eating the right amounts of the right processed and meat foods, or you can just eat things that generally make you healthier when you eat more of it.

That is a simple baseline that you adjust based on atypical differences you have, celiac disease, etc.

Regarding cholesterol specifically, and how you mentioned it conflicting with current theories that are being questioned (fairly enough) in this thread - here's some summary thoughts from the editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Cardiology on it. [2] They might be helpful providing some color to the conversation.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2679037 [1] https://imgur.com/ZqHpEzv [2] http://www.webedcafe.com/extern/program_media/ajconline.org/...

I agree with many of the critical points they make in this Japanese review. There should be higher standards for nutritional research.

The main idea seems to be that in Japan because there are some positive patterns observed regarding all causes of death and high cholesterol levels and because other studies showing high cholesterol is bad were all flawed, therefore it is warranted to recommend eating more cholesterol.

Well, the notion that eating cholesterol effects your cholesterol level goes against your first comment.

Then the sentiment that you can throw the baby out with the bath water seems extreme, if you can find a flaw in studies that disagree with you then your studies that agree with you prove the point. I mean, I agree that when there is no un-flawed data it is hard to draw conclusions, but are their studies all really as so unblemished. A main criticism of theirs is studies citing rates of death for certain diseases without mentioning the rate for all causes of death, but a lot of their cited studies do the exact same, only some of them reported rates for all causes of death.

Finally, and I know you're surprised, I am not persuaded by them that eating cholesterol or having high/"normal" cholesterol levels is neutral or positive in affecting your health. I agree with them that we need much better data. I understand that in Japan they observed lower rates of date from all causes. But the only question I really have is what should I eat to avoid dying as an American, and this article just doesn't really cover that one way or another. I'm very grateful for sharing it, there are a lot of good insights in there.

I read it a few years ago. Thanks for the link, I'll take a look.

And I think, I've seen a lot of studies that compare eating "normal" amounts of cholesterol to eating more than normal. But "normal" cholesterol levels in your blood still leave you with a "normal" American rate of heart disease, read, still very high. Those studies might not show much of a difference in disease rates. But studies on eating cholesterol versus no cholesterol are much clearer in showing a significant difference. On a plant based diet people can get their cholesterol below 60 and the disease rates for people with that low of cholesterol are much lower.

Heart disease is America's biggest killer. There is a lot of data that eating cholesterol effects disease rates including heart disease, cancer, etc.

If you study disease rates for those eating cholesterol and those replacing it with a plant based diet, eating cholesterol is higher.

While you have a particular point about eating cholesterol, measuring cholesterol, and related disease rates - are you suggesting people's health is not negatively affected by eating cholesterol?

Here's a simple study eating an egg versus not, it compares stopping eating cholesterol to stopping smoking. [0]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21076725

The user story is a promise to have a conversation. I think that is usually well understood. From there I think you can fall into two camps: that conversation should result in a Jira/whatever ticket with all the requisite documentation for an agile team versus that conversation IS the essential information required to properly build the expected valuable working software.

Back to the question - what do you do about poor knowledge transfer in a project? I think a moderate de-emphasis on thinking of the user story text and the additional info like acceptance criteria etc. as self-sufficient documentation and adding more emphasis on that close relationship between developer, user, and maybe a tester, can help fill in big knowledge gaps.

It is, agreed. For tomatoes, buy fresh ones as you need them.

I'm sure you've worked plenty of time thinking about this already so I feel dumb trying to supplement that at all, but I'd assume you're probably repressing some level of emotion just because the physical expression of anxiety isn't so much a learned behavior coming from your prefrontal cortex but more like a low level hind brain thing you have just by being human. Between survival instincts and social instincts we have very physically based "emotions" and playing the odds here, I'd wager you and others that comment, having similar experiences, that you developed this coping mechanism at a young age. Apologies if I'm reading too much into a simple comment saying you're misunderstood at times.

I agree that people think you need meat alternatives because they lack the knowledge of how to make a plant based meal.

I agree with GP that most people don't care what a meatless meal could look like, culturally they just want meat each meal and will only consider an "impossible" substitute.

If we must change our impact on the environment, maybe it doesn't matter that people have a cultural desire to wait on impossible standards for substitutes and to continue harming the environment in the process. I don't know how important it is to change now, but if it critical then I'd be fine with something like rationing meat or some creative ideas towards forcing drastic change.

Also, maybe your grandparents can't imagine meat only once a week, but my grandparents certainly can, not because of current habits but from the great depression. They grew up on farms and had animals but they had more plants and usually ate the plants, only rarely they would slaughter animals for meat. Most meals were plants and that was the most normal thing in the world.

I assume meat at every meal is an extremely recent phenomenon and I think culturally we can easily move on from it, if we take the necessary measures.

When you say you want to completely understand the problem before starting, your personality sounds like an enneagram type 5, check it out to see if that describes you. If so, that might shine a lot of light on where your anxiety comes from.

Laravel is moving away from magic methods to using facades, FWIW.

It is a bit of catch-22 IMHO, for some. If you're very experienced it is just as easy to roll your own (although others may not onboard as quickly compared to well known libraries). If you're not very experienced then if you try to roll your own it may wind up being a mess. I'm in the middle and once I understand a library well I know its limitations and use its components as they were intended where I won't have to customize them too much, and roll my own components for the rest. This largely sidesteps the issues I used to have of wrestling with UI frameworks. I hope that helps.

The common sentiment that marriage takes hard work on the daily or else it turns sour, ideas like that point to a fundamental difficulty with the human heart, no?

For me, his writing helped me understand human nature better such that I see people less as slowly clawing their way up a mountain towards being a better person and instead to view people more like a Jekyll and Hyde struggling between two extremes of good and evil.

I'm off to celebrate Christmas with family but I don't think you can be honest with yourself about who you are unless you appreciate the depths of human depravity, with that understanding you can build a truer foundation for your personal convictions about life.

What about cultures that didn't have centralized government like native Americans?

nutritionfacts.org was created for this reason, to consolidate the evidence from nutritional studies so that you don't have to.

spoiler alert - the comprehensive review lead them to the conclusion to eat plants, unprocessed.

But anyway, it is a nice resource to get a round up of studies on a similar topic.

Just my two cents; I'm a father of 4 and I'm okay with not capturing those moments on film. And I mean that in two senses. One, I'm fine using my very imperfect memory to recall special moments and two, because of the logistical problems with grabbing the camera I'm not willing to risk missing out being fully in the moment. The occasionally photograph from an event or time period seems sufficient to conjure up the feelings from that time.

Regarding an always on camera - I'll second other comments in warning there are just so many concerns with abuse, I don't see how to get around those.

100% correct. It is a lifestyle disease and the reason your doctor won't tell you is because the health industry is built around treatment, not prevention, and so your doctor was never taught this. It's through no ill intent, it just never made good business since to teach doctors much about nutrition or to fund much of the research doctors may prefer to have before adopting new advice. Drug companies on the other hand do bury study results that don't help them, and the food industry does the same and intentionally misleads the public about making healthy diet choices.

Eating whole food plant based diet with moderate exercise usually reverses T2 diabetes and definitely prevents it.

I just assumed cubic feet

I disagree that it is a greater point when you consider how important rituals are to many people and gp post has a very valid point.

can we put the date in the title?

I'm sorry, can you explain how to use this?