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plastic_enjoyer

49 karma · joined November 30, 2023

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plastic_enjoyer··on Physically healthy 28-year-old woman schedules euthanasia due to depression
> Also, her therapist claiming that "There’s nothing more we can do for you. It’s never gonna get any better" sounds like an enormous red flag for me. Some authority should take a long hard look at a professional therapist speaking like that, especially considering the proximity/possibility of human euthanasia, or just suicide in general.

I don't think this is a red flag. I don't see anything wrong with a therapist speaking like that because this statement is often made after years of working with the patient and not after the first few hours of therapy. In my time I worked in a psychiatric ward we had many patients who were considered "austherapiert", i.e. the treatments they have undergone over the years have not worked. In some cases, we are talking about patients who have been in and out of the psychiatry ward on a regular basis for over 20 years undergoing different treatments without their condition improving. People who have been suffering from their illness for decades, and we're not just talking about depression, but also illnesses such as schizophrenia, BPD, bipolar personality disorder, dementia, etc. Many of these patients take medication to manage the symptoms of their illness, but the side effects are often perceived as worse than the actual illness. And even with medication, a normal life is often no longer possible. People lose their jobs, their family, their friends - their whole life because of their mental illness. It's not only about the internal suffering, but also that their life irretrievably breaks apart and due to the symptoms of the illness building a new life may be not possible.

plastic_enjoyer··on Banning open weight models would be a disaster
> Most of the researchers are specifically in a handful of big labs, most of which in turn are in the USA. As one who has done so, trust me when I say that relocation is harder than it seems on paper.

I think it's a bit short-sighted to assume that the future development of AI models will only come from large corporations or research institutions. At the moment, the training still requires a lot of computing resources and a lot of data - but these are limitations that are not permanent. Since the AI boom that Alex triggered in 2012, the development and optimization of models and training has improved very quickly, to the point that even hackers and enthusiasts can create very good models with a little money. Just because a government heavily regulates AI and possibly bans open weights doesn't mean that people on the fringes of legality will abide by it.

plastic_enjoyer··on Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban UBI Experiments
In other words, it's pure ideology and not rooted in any scientific evidence.
plastic_enjoyer··on Billionaire-Fueled Lobbying Group Behind the State Bills to Ban UBI Experiments
Billionaires want us dead
plastic_enjoyer··on Psychology, a Failed Discipline: Flawed Paradigms, Methodology, and Epistemology
Oh look, it's another article shitting on psychology and declaring the discipline dead, where the author has obviously never looked beyond the scope of social psychology.
plastic_enjoyer··on Ask HN: Should I try to manufacture toasters?
>I wish we could go back to a time when everyone takes their own risks and has to do their own research.

When was this time?

plastic_enjoyer··on The phrase "no evidence" is a red flag for bad science communication (2021)
> Agree this completely. So much scientific evidence I see published is just survey results from participants...

> The standard for that evidence should be very different than the standard for reproducible physics, chemistry and biology experiments.

I don't really see why we should treat evidence coming from surveys differently than evidence coming from physics, chemistry or biology experiments as long as surveys are well constructed, fulfill the criterion of validity and reliability and are reproducible. Yes, they are not 'hard facts' but often the only option to measure latent variables or fuzzy constructs. If they do this in a reproducible way I don't see the issue here.

On the other hand, 'hard sciences' such as neuroscience and medical science have a big problem with non-reproducible studies, even though they use more 'objective' measurement methods.

plastic_enjoyer··on "King of the Cannibals": How Sam Altman Took over Silicon Valley
OpenAI is only one of many companies building AI. While ChatGPT and DALL-E are impressive, there are domains where those models are pretty much useless and other AI solutions are needed.
plastic_enjoyer··on How artists are sabotaging AI to take revenge on image generators
>I can believe serious artists actually take pet in this luddite theatre.

I think more people should participate in the luddite theatre. Luddites weren't against automation and technological advances per se but that the profits of increased productivity weren't shared. The people that are profiting off AI generated art today don't want to participate in distributing their profits more widely, despite generative models being based on the works of other people, some of whose art was used for the training without permission.

plastic_enjoyer··on It's Not Just Ukraine and Gaza: War Is on the Rise Everywhere
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
plastic_enjoyer··on New neurotech eschews electricity for ultrasound
>The fUSI technique estimates changes in neural activity by measuring changes in blood flow. Neurons, like all cells, need blood to function. Increases in neural activity require increases in blood flow, which fUSI techniques measure by projecting ultrasound at a brain region of interest and recording the waves that bounce back. When sound bounces off of a mass of flowing blood, the returning sound waves wiggle at a different frequency than those emitted. fUSI uses this Doppler shift phenomenon to estimate changes in blood flow and, by proxy, the electrochemical chatter of neurons.

So, it seems this works similar to fNIRS which measure changes in the blood oxygen level via near-infrared spectroscopy. The downside of this is, that changes of the blood oxygen level happen significantly slower than the generation of action potentials thus making this technology not really feasible for real-time applications.