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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 5th, 2023

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  • Started on Friday… still coming in waves. I had a breakdown a few weeks ago… just pushed myself too hard for too long…it was probably building up for at least a year. Went to the VA (veterans affairs, for those not in the US, the VA is the sole source of health care for many veterans in the US), and they started making adjustments to my anxiety and depression medications which eventually precipitated into a ER visit. A few days later, they got me hooked up with the mental health clinic where I talked to a provider about going on short-term disability while we’re messing with my medication doses until I feel normal again. He says something along the lines “sounds like a good plan, sned me the paperwork.”

    Queue up to Friday, I get a call from the insurance company saying they got the paperwork from the provider, and it recommends I go back to work. Now I’m out of PTO, disability is denied, and I’m trying to decide whether I lose my job or go back to work on while tettering between “extreme anxiety” and “drug-induced haze” from all the new prescriptions.


  • Nobody wants to think of the guy in the latest drone video as the father of a 6 month old who’ll never know their father because he was drafted by an authoritarian government to fight in an unjust war. I’m sure a lot of those Russians are full on board with the war, but I’m certain a lot of them aren’t, too. Same reason people have such a hard time empathizing with both the Oct 7 victims of Hamas and the Palestinian people. It’s horror enough thinking of these things as good vs. evil…it’s so much worse when you see all the grey. As an American, I can’t help but see Israel making the same mistakes we did after Sept 11. I’m sure they feel the same rage and fear I felt then, and I imagine it’s making them blindly lust for revenge just like I did. It’s all just so fucking bleak how easy it is to convince ourselves that our enemies aren’t people.






  • I kinda get where you’re coming from… but just as an easy example…

    well-informedly isn’t a word.

    I have now told you what is and isn’t a word, dispote you explicitly not consenting to me doing so. What happens now?

    In this case? It isn’t a big deal. You can tell me to pound sand or ignore me or try to get into a flame war with me over it, but your lack of given consent doesn’t inherently prevent me from doing anything to you so I wouldn’t agree that its just the way things are naturally.

    There are cases where it is much more important. If what you stated were true, there would be no concept of rape because nobody could do that to you without your consent, and if you have consent, it’s not rape. Same with murder… the closest thing would be assisted suicide. I’d also argue that the Palestinians haven’t consented to what is happening there. In each of these scenarios, one entity refused to consent, but it didn’t impact the other perpetrator from continuing because the victim didn’t have enough strength or weaponry or whatever (a bigger stick).

    I honestly don’t see how you can have a society without both a mechanism to determine what the shared rules are, someone with a big enough stick to enforce those shared rules. Obviously, the tricky part then becomes ensuring that the enforcers only use their stick when its appropriate. Otherwise, you just end up with authoritarianism.






  • LLMs are not self-aware. They are language prediction models. They say things real people might say because they were fed millions of permutations of real people saying things, so they’re very good at mimicing that. The issue with them not staying on the rails isn’t because they are developing a consciousness, its because trained models are extremely complex and difficult to debug…that’s why you need to be careful with the training data you use. So when a company scrapes its training data off the internet, you end up with LLMs that will say the same stupid shit as you find on the internet now (racism for one…or appeals to empathy like you mentioned)