tpoacher

Why "trampoline" though? Is there an obvious allusion to multiple jumping that I'm missing?

Reminds me of a quote by my old prof at Oxford:

"We used to just call this stuff chemistry; but citations and funding didn't really take off until we started calling it nanotechnology."

What's a "trampoline"?

"Oreo cookies are the tastiest cookies currently in the market!"

~ Oreo cookie company.

That quote reminds me a bit of the Non-violent Communication book.

There is a puzzle piece missing from this article and others like it, which I think is crucial but often overlooked.

It's not enough to "vote with your wallet", you also need to make it very public and very clear "why" you're casting that vote at all.

Otherwise execs are typically more than happy to infer a completely wrong "why", and are very happy to not understand the real reasons, because a) either the real reasons are not actually necessarily that obvious in the first place, and b) even when they are, unless they are made too obvious and public to ignore, then people will happily fail to understand the things that they stand to benefit from not understanding to begin with (Upton Sinclair's law). All while collecting fat paychecks and bonuses.

This confirms to me it was indeed originally intended as a buzzword then. :D

Nothing like establishing a new buzzword in a field to get them citations rolling.

"Choreographic programming"?

Are we just straight up inventing buzzwords now?

Hey guess what, I'm more into symphonic opus programming, none of that backyard dance-club programming for me thanks.

/s [no hate, just laffs]

They're not saying your manual copy/pasting from a browser window onto your clipboard shouldn't be possible; they're saying the browser itself shouldn't allow this functionality to be scriptable internally.

The former is a system event, not a browser one.

This is similar to how on google docs if you try to copy via the edit menu, it pops up to say use Ctrl-C instead.

Honestly, I too am surprised a JavaScript plugin was able to access and alter the system clipboard in the first place too.

I take it SoC does not stand for summer of code in this context?

I'm not disagreeing with what you say here, but I think we're arguing about subtly different things.

E.g. you'll note my zebra example was not about whether one should additionally request a photo of the animal just to make sure it is indeed a rare animal. It was arguing that given existing differentiating information that points to an uncommon condition in the first place, one should not dismiss this on the basis that horses are still more common than zebras in the general case regardless. Under this uncommon information, the prior of thinking about horses should go out the window, and one should absolutely focus on zebras (at least as an additional differential). I assume you would also agree with this conclusion.

But of course, in real medicine things are not as simple as this contrived example. So the point I'm making is that, from what I have observed, there seems to be a bias towards decisions based on "prior" rather than "posterior" probabilities, even in the presence of additional differentiating information which should have prompted additional differentials to be considered. But this is different to saying one should constantly seek additional evidence to include or exclude additional differentials that are unlikely in the first place. That, I agree, would be a waste of time and resources (and potentially harmful for the patient).

Having said that, I somewhat disagree with the phrasing that we should not be ordering tests if we aren't ready to follow their results to the logical conclusion. This is a bit like saying, "I don't want to check for X because if I do and it checks out it will derail my current management plan"; but then this is putting the cart before the horse, since it's the findings that need to dictate management, not the other way round. I do think it is reasonable to say that one shouldn't be ordering a test if the expectation that it will change management is sufficiently low to justify the time/cost expended for it -- and where this expectation is a function of both the likelihood of the finding (given current information!), as well as its potential to change management. But this doesn't mean that if you do find an unrelated inconsequential incidental finding you are now required to divert all resources to it.

Conversely, if an incidental findings does prove worthy of treatment, then I don't see the problem with committing to treat it, as long as you don't lose sight of the original complaint either. Obviously that doesn't mean one should go looking for incidental findings willy-nilly though.

While this is true as a platitude, I do find that medical colleagues seem to treat this platitude rather overzealously at times, often completely disregarding the posterior probabilities involved. I like to call this the prior-over-posterior fallacy/bias (though one could argue this is simply a variant of the normalcy bias)

E.g., I get the whole "if you hear galloping think horses not zebras" adage, but I guarantee you, if someone comes and says "hey when I was in Africa I saw a black and white striped animal galloping really loud", I bet you an uncomfortably large percentage of the "horses not zebras" crowd would still favour a horse over a zebra diagnosis, despite the overwhelming posterior.

Combine this with our (otherwise reasonable) tendency of avoiding the information bias of seemingly unnecesary tests, and it becomes a big problem, whereby uncommon conditions are treated as common, thereby often escaping detection altogether, and driving down their apparent prior probability even lower, causing a diagnostic vicious cycle.

Indeed, I didn't mean to imply that all doctors possess that skill in great amounts (or that, in any case, circumstances allow for full utilisation of the skill even if they do) or that medical history taking is therefore always of the highest standard. Obviously some doctors will be better at it than others, or more at liberty to use this skill than others (as you say, I could imagine a GP who only has 10 minutes per patient won't be as keen to start with fully open questions as a junior doctor in a ward who can clerk patients somewhat more freely).

Note that this isn't too different from, say, how software engineers are expected to be good at, and make good use of unit tests. But most probably don't (either because they never really cared to fully develop that skill, or their organisations applied contrary pressures leading to tech debt). But it is a recognised skill.

My main point was that, it is, in theory, a skill that doctors are expected to train (or at least pick up on during their practice), and therefore the same prompting principles that seem to apply here in the context of LLMs also interestingly seem to apply to medicine and history taking when "prompting" and interacting with humans.

Both the article and some of the discussions here share a lot of commonalities with doctors taking a medical history. There is a certain skill in guiding the conversation towards useful outputs, while not dictating the exact outputs to a patient who is eager to please with their responses.

E.g., medical history taking protocol always says to start with open ended (albeit structured) questions, and converge towards more closed/specific ones when you're sure you've extracted the broader surface and you now want to close in on a differential diagnosis.

If you start open and go with the flow but then just let the patient talk without any structure or subsequent attempt to converge, there's a risk that the patient might spend 60 minutes taking about their fluffy dog at home, which wastes time, and doesn't get you anywhere nearer the diagnosis. But, if you skip the open questions and go straight to yes/no diagnostic questions, you will definitely miss the fact that they have a dog at home that they're worried about, and that they'll be self-discharging against medical advice in the next hour to go tend to their dog.

So while to an outsider, the conversation might look effortless, in reality the doctor requires considerable skill to be able to strike a balance between open vs closed prompts, as well as the ability to critically sift through the outputs, and decide which outputs are relevant to pursue further and lead to a fruitful direction, versus those that can be safely discarded to remove potentially distracting noise from the conversation (and all while attempting to keep this interaction within a limited number of prompts due to operational time constraints).

I see. That's good to know, though you could have led with that! I was mostly calling you out because it seemed you were misrepresenting the article's argument, whereas you now seem to have no problem with their reasoning of bulk destruction, but simply question the premise of whether the books are indeed rare in the first place.

I have to say though, while I'm relieved we're not destroying in bulk books from the 1900s, nevertheless, just because a book is from the 2020s doesn't necessarily make it a plentiful resource (I've often been in a situation where fairly recent textbooks I wanted are out of print and are only sold in old bookshops, or for exorbitant prices on ebay, for instance). So ragebait quality article or not, I still acknowledge the issue.

As I said to another person above, I would still feel more comfortable after this discussion, if the company had made a statement that non-destructive scanning methods will be pursued in books with less than X books in circulation.

> You are not being prevented from accessing another copy of the book to get that knowledge.

Except in the (potentually rare) situation that a book is rare, which brings us back into full circle in the discussion.

So, ragebait article or not, we have identified an issue if reasonable importance.

E.g. if there was an official statement that non-destructive scanning were to be used in titles with less than X copies in circulation,I would feel more comfortable.

Read it again. These aren't books that were bought in bulk bt bookstores.

They're rare books that are bought in bulk for scanning.

The analogy is imagine someone buying near-extinct animals from any source in bulk, not kittens from average pet shops.

I often ask it to aim for a Flesch-Kincaid Readibility Ease Score of around 50, with good results. ELI5 is good too where appropriate.

I'll add ASD-STE100 to my list of decorposlopification strategies.

Shouldn't it be the reverse? The vote of people who earn less (and are therefore more disadvantaged in society and rely on fair laws the most) should count more.

Tax and "money paid to the system" is a red herring only an entitled super rich person would think is relevant.

I think what the author is trying to say is that the turboencabulator's vertex manifold buckler dimensional engine leverages bifrontal synergies spanning several plasmic thresholds.

This enables an Agentic Solution Plexus to surplant inter-connectomic data access completely locally over the internet, securely, in a federated sandboxed reinforcement learning evolutionary cow-milk optimisation harness, complete with Lorentz-Newton manifold compatible titanium bearings.

Sounds exciting!

ahem, TempleOS generally tends to be considered a marvel of one-man engineering, not a cooky project. Despite Terry Davies' illness.

separating em dashes (or preferably en dashes) with spaces is british style; no space is US style.

> Open Source is a global effort, but current political situation makes collaboration hard and trust difficult to earn. Especially when development is not transparent and open.

I find this an odd statement. I would understand an explanation that forking was chosen on ideological grounds, but, how is development "not transparent and open" in an open source project? Sounds a bit contradictory. Plus doesn't the fact that a fully functioning fork was performed effortlessly show that the project was indeed truly transparent and open?

Thank you for the correction!

I'm not necessarily arguing it was a form of suicide (or blaming the victim, as it were).

I'm arguing that the impetus to prolong life is generally a very strong and biologically ingrained urge rather than the result of cold rational thought, and therefore in general such rational thought is often predicated on having lost the biological imperative to some extent (e.g. through a mental health process).

And secondly, the "danger" I'm cautioning against is that this narrative that glorifies rejecting treatment is usually painted as "horrible chemo" vs the implicit scenario of dying peacefully in your bed. But this is not the case, cancer can have horrible symptoms, typically excruciating pain. Chemo is often performed exactly in order to control those symptoms by shrinking the cancer, even if prognosis of survival is poor. There's a reason hospices exist, and it's not because people are ignorant or cowardly and afraid to die in a dignified manner and choose horrible chemo instead of quietly dying in their homes.

In fact, one thing one might want to consider here is that, as a doctor, he may have had easier access to morphine, and this may well have influenced the decision.

It was widely known that doctors are at a considerably increased risk when I was studying medicine, enough to warn us and have professional wellbeing modules in the curriculum. Plus, it's a special population in having significantly different access to relatively covert means, making it more likely to go through with said ideation.

I have seen academic references in the past confirm it. I'm not about to waste time on a scholar deep-dive just to defend my comment but I'm sure you'll find such references easily if you look. Having said that, if "you" have time and you do decide to look and find conflicting evidence that you care to share, I'd be interested to hear more.

> You are suggesting that majority of doctors are depressed with suicidal ideation?

No. I'm suggesting they rank among the highest in occupational risk. In Bayesian terms, the difference between the two is the distinction between a prior and a posterior statement.

> Why do you consider it more likely?

Because, subjectively, the likelihood (low drive for survival given mental disease) should be overwhelmingly higher than the prior (low drive for survival given average person) in this case. Hence more likely.

Just ask it to aim for a Flesh-Kincaid ease-of-readability score of around 70. Or use ELI5 style. Or both.

you're thinking of vim

> This is now considered a bad move.

... for now.

This article is making a LOT of "convenient" assumptions.

For all we know, the more likely scenario is that Charlie, like a sizeable percentage of his doctor peers, was burnt out, tired, and depressed, did not really have an overwhelming (some might say "healthy") desire to survive (in fact, perhaps quite the opposite), and saw the cancer as a non-undignified quick "way out".

Doctors (and medical professionals more generally) rank among the highest in occupational risk of mental health disease, especially for things like addiction, alcoholism, generalised anxiety, ptsd, depression and suicide.

I have no objection regarding the choice he made, but let's not glorify it as the "natural" thing to do either. This narrative is harmful to people who "do" desire to survive but are scared, which may then prevent them from making a dispassionate decision regarding their care.