octokatt

For the sake of mythological accuracy, I hope that Unicorns sunk by debt and managing to pull into negative ARR (due to overhead costs) will get called Nightmares.

But Zombie Unicorns being an accurate term is enough to make me happy today.

So, this is using a behavioral trick common to magicians. It's skewing words towards ones similar to those used in a burger commercial.

"Most famous", "truly satisfying", "robust" are all words you're going to find in a burger commercial. "Rapid communication" primes for ordering fast food or similar. But I get how these are little things, and to be fair, they are. They're little priming cues to get to the big one.

Let's head to the ending, which is impressive. I'm going to remove some words, then ask you what comes to mind:

"A rich tapestry, a melding of different [..] into one cohesive and awe-inspring [...] that leaves every visitor with a deep sense of satisfaction."

Now. Let's be clear. On its own, this probably won't do much. A small echo, easily forgotten. But if this is used, say, to change multiple articles _then_ have follow-up ads? Targeting customers who have impulse control issues struggling with pre-diabetes?

It's easy to see how "write a customised version of this article to sell a hamburger to someone with X profile" can become an automated part of the internet in a fairly short timeline. That's a problem.

Interesting. What do you think he was doing?

Dear ye gods, this was the first time I clicked on something in the internet and then had fun in freaking _years_.

Your maxxed-out HSA will not save you if cancer comes.

You're still gambling.

A nice distro of Linux that autolooads Kodi or something similar would solve this, and be utterly lovely.

While that means the smart TV wouldn't be able to phone home with usage data, which is what this fight is really about, EU legislation could carve a path forwards. And that would be neat.

Differing perspective but wanted to share:

I find trying to socialize and make friends in an office situation to be incredibly stressful. Everyone in an office is there to primarily make money, and the politics implied make it hard for me to let my guard down and meaningfully connect with anyone.

I greatly prefer socializing with people over hobbies -- everyone is at the gathering willingly to enjoy a hobby, which means I have something in common with everyone participating.

Far superior, but then... I like having a groove and knowing when my next social gathering will be. I like routines. It sounds like you don't, which I can sympathize with, and I'm glad you have friends to spontaneously hang out with and hope you get to expand your circle and enjoy your life.

?

If you miss Chuck Norris jokes and want to know the Ancient Grecian equivalent, I highly suggest reading more quotes about Milo of Croton.

The dude won six Olympic wrestling events in a row. The seventh Olympics, he came in second. A twenty-eight year rein in one of the most practiced sports in the ancient world.

Eat your heart out, Tom Brady.

Ran comment through Google Translate: The photos in the article are superb, as expected from Japanese camera people.

これらのフォーラムでさまざまな言語を見て、返信できるのは素晴らしいことです。私はいつも言語が苦手でした。またすぐに戻ってきてください。あなたの視点に感謝します。

false the chance of getting cured and not needing any more visits is big enough that the risk factor doesn't get a chance to grow

In general, most mental health issues are chronic, and need multiple visits. In this case, that's part of the problem, as C.AI becomes more trusted over time, but the chance of a hallucination occurring grows with the number of visits, both increasing the eventual likelihood of an incident and compounding the harm.

the first instinct should be work on reducing the chance and magnitude of damage, instead of giving up entirely

The first instinct should be to prove this attempt at therapeutic C.AI _actually works_. Then we can work on improvement, but right now, that hasn't happened. We don't let people practice medicine without a license for some very good reasons.

My fears for AI therapy becoming a more accepted practice is that we know, from research, the act of _having a person care_ is part of what makes therapy work. Humans are social creatures, for better and for worse, and loneliness is almost as good a predictor for bad health outcomes as smoking. [1] We have no meaningful evidence that an AI is going to cure loneliness, nor lead to better health outcomes, but we do know that protracted social media usage does worsen mental health outcomes. [2]

As well, having a cheap substitute means the focus will be on getting the cheap substitute to work, instead of addressing the larger ongoing mental health epidemic and health care cost crisis. Getting the AI to work will become the new focus, rather than getting to the root cause and creating meaningful policies to create a better society where health care isn't out of reach and strong, healthy friendships with people are supported by infrastructure.

C.AI replacing therapists is huge step towards a future where people are unable to afford to talk to another person. This attempt to substitute therapists, who are professional people who care, is a huge step towards that future. Do you want a future where Medicare only gives access to a chatbot, rather than a human professional? I don't want that, and I hope you don't either.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/loneliness-poses-health-... [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9915628/

Hard agree. Have gotten to play this dance with getting migraines treated. To get the treatment I know works, I had to try taking a medication both me and my doctor were reasonably certain would make me sick.

Sure enough, the medication made me so nauseous I missed two days of work. Then I got to stop taking the medication, and go through withdrawal. Thanks, insurance companies.

This is horrible, and I wish it was more surprising.

I stopped playing Pokemon Go when it wanted forever access to my location, because that's creepy, and sure enough that was the right call.

"Above all else, do no harm" - Hippocratic Oath (translated)

The reason why a big concept in medical ethics is Do No Harm is because it is very easy to justify some bad outcomes for the sake of many good ones, similar to what is happening now with this application of character.ai -- it's easy to justify Mostly Good.

However, Mostly Good doesn't scale, because often patients need to seek medical attention more than once. Each visit then becomes an increasing risk factor of being hurt by treatment, eventually making malpractice inevitable.

_That's not good._ Move fast and break things cannot apply to the ethical practice of medicine, which is what is currently being attempted.

Adding the ProPublica article which talks about United Healthcare specifically denying claims for terminal diseases for greater profits.

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...

edit: We do not know the shooters motivations, nor do I presume to know. But wanted to add a link for context to the above comment to show context for the statement.

If you're seeing that your efforts are being wasted, then that means you're in a good spot to half-ass the solution. Use the other half for things you find meaningful to prevent burn-out.

Not sure if it applies to your situation, but I know the perspective helped me, that if you're neurodiverse (especially autistic) then "just let it go and accept you're being paid" was advice that _never_ helped me. I'm autistic. That's just not how my brain is wired to work. I needed different strategies to get to a better place.

Scaling how likely a given direction was to actually be implemented, then giving an appropriate amount of effort, helped a lot. Then I could spend my time on what I _should_ be doing. Like refactoring, learning new libraries, or just reading a book.

I hope it gets better for you.

Wait, is any of this Parasite SEO stuff a good idea?

I don’t think so.

If I thought it was a good idea, I wouldn’t be sharing any of this stuff.

Google clearly has a long way to go before the parasite SEO era of Google ends. So in the meantime, I want to create as much competition in the parasite SEO industry as I can. The more people fighting for the spoils, the more ridiculous the whole situation gets.

But if a friend asked me if they should start a company to do this, my advice would be fuck no.

Making sure people see the end of the article, which ends with "fuck no" in the context of "should I do this?"

This is the financial market equivalent of flagging a security exploit, which I genuinely appreciate.

Metallurgy may be a key part of how the city could sustain itself at such a high altitude. The mountains are rich in iron ore and have dense juniper forests, which could be burned to fuel the smelting process. The researchers have also uncovered coins from across modern-day Uzbekistan, Maksudov says, suggesting the city may have been a hub for trade. It doesn’t appear to have been strictly a mining settlement, either—at Tashbulak, a cemetery contains the remains of women, elderly people and infants.

“We have realized that this was a large urban center, which was integrated into the Silk Road network and dragged the Silk Road caravans toward mountains ... because they had their own products to offer,” Maksudov says.

Checking, did anyone else get to this part of the article and think "Yes, this shall be my anthropological model for dwarves in my D&D game"?

Most of these suggestions are detached from reality, I don't move away from my family because I feel some arbitrary social expectation, I do it because I want space and freedom.

I'm going against the grain a little here, and say that's reasonable. Not all families are great to live with. Heck, I had some cousins I tried living with and nearly permanently damaged my relationship with them.

I will say deciding to live with an extended _found_ family can be awesome. There's usually someone around to help pick up slack, and there's nothing quite like the relationships you can form based on that extended time together.

Even the extended found family thing, though? Not always great. I'd say what communal living does is make for higher lows, and sometimes lower highs. If you're in abundant circumstances where you have multiple close relationships and survival/logistics aren't an issue, it's largely unnecessary -- but if you aren't, it's really worth trying.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but this sounds like the wave of economic prosperity that happens whenever agriculture turns to manufacturing, it just happened later in this county because of the large Amish community.

The fact that other local businesses are viable because larger chains aren't available also seems to be a factor, but again, is a wave of prosperity already seen in other communities. It turns out, enabling entrepreneurism is really good for building a middle class!

The trick will be if this wave can continue, or if the prosperity will be overtaken by the capitalistic cannibalism (gentrification) that happens to economically-viable areas. In the meantime, this feels to me like an attempt at a feel-good story that millennials can and should be able to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, just look at the Amish.

This book won't go into field surgery, but will go into emergency care for field-setting a broken limb, how to clean wounds, and when to use/not use medications.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/540113.Where_There_Is_No... https://www.amazon.com/When-There-Doctor-Challenging-Self-re...

Not a professional, n=1, but I've successfully NaNoWriMo'd a few times and do regular amounts of creative writing for both D&D campaigns and for fun.

Absolutely freaking yes. Lots of mental drift. Swapping over to a new window on my MacBook happens enough that I have an app for shutting down that ability while working on writing. Ditto having a specialized app (Ulysses, then Obsidian) for writing with minimal buttons.

I can do without, but having the ability to close and lock those doors increases my writing speed by a decent chunk. As an engineer, if I can make myself more productive and writing more enjoyable with better tools, I'd rather do that.

That said, I absolutely have a friend who does his writing in Microsoft Word. He's already a bit of an odd duck, though, and is not an engineer.

So, if you scroll through LinkedIn, you can see an influx of leadership migrating into WotC from Amazon.

These are folk who have never even played Dungeons & Dragons, looking to monetize and assuming they know how an internet marketplace works because they're from Amazon, not understanding that fan goodwill is what keeps your cash cow alive.

Truly, Phoenix is a monument to man's hubris.

Quoting the article, because from your comment I'm not sure you got to the end, which is a shame as it addresses your point.

TL;DR: If we're not going to aim for better, what's the point at all?

If it weren't for the piano soloist (the conductor probably didn't notice, he just knew to defer to the piano soloist's concerns), we would have played the concert on a very slightly out-of-tune piano, and then... > What? > Nobody in the audience would probably notice. Certainly not in the specific. Nobody is standing up and saying, "there, see how G above middle C has one string that is 0.2hz out of tune with the others?!" Nobody is standing up and saying "that piano is out of tune, what a travesty." Perhaps some of the more sensitive listeners would have felt some vague sense that the piano could have sounded nicer, that maybe the hall needs a better piano, or something. Did the piano sound better, after all that work? Yeah... it did, I think. Hard to say. I'd like to pretend it was some colossal difference, but that's really the point. My big stupid ears are not the best judge here. Just trust the people who have the best discernment.

Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and precisely how it is bad.

If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this.

I lost my mom to ALS six years ago, and those final months still haunt me.

When the time comes, make sure your remembrance service has pictures of when he was all of himself, the way you want to remember him. One of the worst things these illnesses do is leave you with final memories of a pale shadow of the person you loved, instead of the fantastically colorful person they should be remembered as.

One internet stranger to another, I hope things go as well as they may.

Perhaps an overwhelmingly obvious finding, that doomscrolling and existential anxiety are related, but important so we know it with scientific proof and can move on to doing something about it.

That's entirely fair, and precisely why I posted the framework. Thank you!

I guess what I'm solving for is trying to tag a specific person or group with why a decision got made, which... if there was an easy way to do that, politics would be a lot cleaner. Removing that, and just adding many-to-one tags for authors in-document, seems like it'll get to most of the desired requirement.

I know folk are ripping down this straw-man, which is reasonable, but what are better best practices?

I'll start, I'd rather have YYMMDD_xx_title-words.md, where xx are the principal engineer's initials. It'll handle the merge/pull issue, and also show at a glance who was making architectural decisions (and if they were making too many at once), though I would love to hear how something like this has blown up in the past.

Wow. I was going to start kicking an old gaming Meetup back to life, but looks like I'm going to invest my sanity elsewhere.

Likewise, I've only used Meetup for non-profits/community organizing, and frankly I can get most of the same features from a Wordpress/Jekyll website, a couple of plug-ins, and maybe Mastodon.