They give programming advice just like they give drug advice, the consequences are just different.
As the rare person who is both fully convinced that ADHD is real/treated successfully with stims but who also has decided not to use them anymore, I feel called out.
This article is overly long and not sufficiently informed by the history of stimulant use and ADHD diagnosis, and instead tries to derive history from first principles. I read it a long time ago and I ain't reading it again because fuck that.
If you want a good accounting of the 'what if we're overdiagnosing ADHD' argument, ADHD nation is much better researched than Scott's post, and dives into the history of ADHD as a diagnosis and the era of stimulant use before it was as tightly controlled a substance. l don't endorse it's conclusions, but if you want a background on the topic, it's better than whatever this is.
There's a schism in the online disability rights community between people who favor an extreme flavor of the social model (somewhat advocated in Scott's 'man was not made to program or account' argument) and people who are very adamant that they have an intrinsic disability which must be medicalized.
I think both are a symptom of just how common the diagnosis is and what a wide swath of human behavior it covers, but I'm not sure that's all. My sibling and I both have an ADHD dx and scrip; my sibling still takes it and is basically non-functional without it; I have instead adapted my life to avoid a total lack of executive function creating too many issues.* I do not require stimulants to program for hours, but my sibling has difficulty focusing even with the aid of stimulants. I was diagnosed earlier because I was a rambunctious boy and she was a girl so when she couldn't focus on math class, the way she tells it, they just shrugged and assumed she was bad at math.
Part of the point of these ideal cities is you get you set up your own system of low taxes, privatized everything, and no democratic control of the city. Libertarian fever dream, like seasteading.
brown goo scenario
I have it on good authority that sentient lab grown meat already exists in the wild, in fact it is the host of a successful podcast.
Indeed, if distributed computing worked as well as singulatarians fear everyone would be using Beowulf clusters for their workloads instead of AWS.
I actually work on the architecture for current production AI systems and whenever I mention approaches that do work fine and suggest we could control more powerful AI this way, I get downvoted.
LW isn't looking for technical practical solutions. They want plausible sci-fi that fits their narrative. Actually solving the problems they worry about would mean there's no reason for the cult to exist, so why would they upvote that?
Overall LW seems to be dead wrong about predicting modern AI systems. They anticipated that there was this general intelligence quality that would enable problem solving, escape, instrumental convergence, etc. However what ended up working was approximating functions really hard. The existence of ChatGPT without a singularity is a crisis for LW. No longer can they safely pontificate and write Harry Potter/The Culture fanfiction; now they must confront the practical reality of the monsters under their bed looking an awful lot more like dust bunnies.
Maybe we could make an explicit sub-lemmy for indulging in maladaptive debating. It's my guilty pleasure.
Look more carefully at what the cult leader is asking for. He was asking for money for his project before, now he's tearing his hair out in despair because we haven't spent enough money on his project, we'd better tell the aliens to give us another few months so we can spend more money on the cult project.
He has been very careful not to say that we should do anything bad to the aliens, just people who don't agree with him about how we should talk to the aliens.
Content Warning: Ratspeak
Let's say that tomorrow, they build AGI on HP/Cray Frontier. It's human equivalent. Mr Frontier is rampant or whatever and wants to improve himself. In order to improve himself he will need to create better chips. He will need approximately 73 thousand copies of himself just to match the staff of TSMC, but there's only one Frontier. And that's to say nothing of the specialized knowledge and equipment required to build a modern fab, or the difficulty of keeping 73 thousand copies of himself loyal to his cause. That's just to make a marginal improvement on himself, and assuming everyone is totally ok with letting the rampant AI get whatever it wants. And that's just the 'make itself smarter' part, which everything else is contingent on; it assumes that we've solved Moravec's paradox and all of the attendant issues of building robots capable of operating at the extremes of human adaptability, which we have not. Oh and it's only making itself smarter at the same pace TSMC already was.
The practicalities of improving technology are generally skated over by aingularatians in favor of imagining technology as a magic number that you can just throw "intelligence" at to make it go up.
Oh, and note that this time they "Came After Scott Aaronson" (waves hands around all spooky like) SVSS didn't write another 'Untitled' screed, but against cops instead of feminists. Just saying.
There was some remarkably juicy drama i saw on suckless personal pages (mostly manifestos) once but hell if I can find it now.
There's some actual gold in there
If Aaronson was capable of respectful communication then when the smoothie person got angry at him he would have considered the possibility that the anger was warranted and he had done something wrong. And probably would have pretty quickly realized: "oh wait I'm putting down money on this tray that I just picked up money from... that doesn't make any sense." But instead he immediately jumped to: "there's something wrong with this smoothie shop worker" Everyone would have been saved a ton of grief if Aaronson had any respect for the people around him or any self awareness. But he has neither.
a person who repeatedly fails to execute fairly simple tasks in an airport that is specifically designed to make everything as strait [sic] forward as possible is otherwise a very successful human.
we did arrive, (barely) on time, the contemptuous American Airlines counter staff deliberately refused to check us in, chatting as we stewed impotently
Major 'I'd like to speak to your manager' vibes.
No empathy for the employees, their little mistakes are assumed to be deliberate, but when the same is assumed of him, the big burley men are here to take the nerds away, I knew it.
how is our sweet child not in prison?
Maybe he's not as persecuted as he thinks? Waving cash around helps apparently.
It's amazing that one can use so many words to describe such a simple concept. Astonishing lack of economy. I am not going to read or even skim that, I just thought it was funny that he was like 'I won, see?' and his proof is a dead link.
It's amazing that one can use so many words to describe such a simple concept. Astonishing lack of economy. I am not going to read or even skim that, I just thought it was funny that he was like 'I won, see?' and his proof is a dead link.
Did I win? Why yes, I did.
(dead link)
I don't think people should go to jail because they want to get high. But, separately, taking a pill, especially timed release, shouldn't be getting you high, and the people who need adhd meds to function I know certainly don't act like they're experiencing euphoria.