illiterate_coder

joined 2 years ago
[–] illiterate_coder 11 points 9 months ago

So it's not a "brain disease", it's a disease of the immune system... In the brain. And it's not that the beta amyloid plaques are bad! They are good actually, except that in this case they are attacking brain cells and that is bad. So the prevailing wisdom that we should focus on the plaques is actually correct, right? The theory is interesting, but this article is very badly written.

[–] illiterate_coder 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Not sure why you're getting down voted. The OP wasn't explicitly about the US but Bernie Sanders got 13M votes in the 2016 primary and he is very clearly in support of taxing the wealthy. That sure is a lot of "insane" people isn't it?

What is unreasonable is assuming that taxing wealthy individuals is, on its own, enough to solve all these other social problems. There just aren't enough billionaires for that to work.

[–] illiterate_coder 50 points 10 months ago (18 children)

Commerce is just the exchange of goods and services. If we all stop exchanging goods, in what sense would we have a civilization? What would you or anyone accomplish if you had to grow your own food, make your own clothes, build your own house...?

[–] illiterate_coder 13 points 1 year ago

What is it you think they're doing now? You buy term life insurance when you're young and healthy, you get a low rate. You buy when you're older and have higher risks, you pay more. They have statisticians calculating your expected lifespan, and modern "AI" models are really just statistical models with larger datasets. It's not really that unreasonable or new a concept.

[–] illiterate_coder 23 points 1 year ago

I doubt anyone you are talking to is opposed to all human rights, that sounds very much like a straw man statement. Reasonable people can disagree about whether any particular right should be protected by law.

The reason is simple: any legally-protected right you have stands in direct opposition to some other right that I could have:

  • Your right to free speech is necessarily limited by my right to, among other things, freedom from slander/libel, right to a fair trial, right to free and fair elections, right to not be defrauded, etc.
  • Your right to bodily autonomy can conflict with my right to health and safety when there is a global pandemic spreading and you refuse vaccination.
  • Your property rights are curtailed by rules against environmental harm, discrimination, insider trading, etc.

No right is ever meant to be or can be absolute, and not all good government policy is based on rights. Turning a policy argument into one about human rights is not generally going to win the other person over, it's akin to calling someone a racist because of their position on affirmative action. There's no rational discussion that can be had after that point.

[–] illiterate_coder 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I believe the answer is, unfortunately, no.

Long answer: In the past, an ML researcher trying to do this would have used either manual labels (for example a dictionary of parts of speech for each word) or multiple sub-models trained to solve each sub-problem before combining into a full prediction model, and even then performance is not great.

However, once the models grew to billions of parameters it turned out that none of this external linguistic knowledge is necessary and the model can learn it all on its own. But it takes billions to trillions of examples to learn all these weights, which means a double hit to the training time: each step is slower due to more parameters, and more steps are needed to train on the full dataset.

None of these models are trainable without a cluster of GPUs, which massively parallelizes the training process.

That doesn't mean you can't try, but my results training a small toy model from scratch for 20-30 hours on a consumer GPU have been underwhelming. You get some nearly-grammatical sentences but also a lot of garbage, repetition, and incoherence.

[–] illiterate_coder 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I don't know if it helps, but this is not really a lie, and you shouldn't feel bad about saying it. You have your own reason for not being able to do something you committed to. Someone else might have a different reason that is equally personal that they don't want to share. "I forgot and I'm sorry" is a socially acceptable way to take responsibility without sharing specifics and potentially making someone else feel confusion or pity.

You can still work on the "why wasn't I able to do the thing I felt I needed to do" without worrying about "why wasn't I honest about my reason".

Just my two cents though.

[–] illiterate_coder 5 points 1 year ago

There is no reason you have to be doing the same thing for 40 years.

[–] illiterate_coder 2 points 1 year ago

Incomes don't follow a bell curve, so the choice of mean income is a red flag to me. Imagine you had 9 citizens making 100k and one billionaire, the mean is now 100,090k.

Relatedly, being in the bottom 10% doesn't necessarily mean the same thing in these different countries, in some of them that might not be below the poverty line so it's comparing apples and oranges.

[–] illiterate_coder 47 points 1 year ago

I suspect it's worse than that: most people have multiple natural talents they never discover. That is why I encourage my kids to try all kinds of experiences, and not label themselves as "not a science person" or "not outdoorsy". You don't need to be good at just one thing.

[–] illiterate_coder 8 points 1 year ago

I relate to this, though I am not autistic myself. My wife and I certainly worry about whether our own personal challenges are going to impact our children. For example, we are both introverts and having to take a kid to a birthday party, mingle and make small talk with other parents is awful, it ruins the whole weekend. Of course, we still go, but our kids don't have as many play dates as other kids do. You know what, though? They will be fine. We play board games and video games and read.

All kids have advantages in some areas and gaps in others that they will have to work on as they grow. You can't teach them everything, and yet they will become fully functional adults anyway. You're doing a great job taking your kid to therapy and getting him help he can't get from you, that ~~shows that you love him and can take care of him. Focus on passing on your strengths and not trying to avoid passing on your failings.

[–] illiterate_coder 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm sure there is a point being made here about the Mormon church, but I just have to say if this is the argument being made, it flies in the face of common sense and probably undermines the message it's trying to send.

First of all, "code switching" is a totally normal linguistic thing that people do when they're in more than one social circle. Do you greet your kid, your best friend, your lover, and your father the same way? There is no reason why your speech patterns have to be consistent no matter who you're talking to; we all do this naturally without even thinking about it.

More broadly though, I find the idea of "authenticity" to be more often than not an excuse for people to not bother learning the norms of the group they are in. If you come to work and spend all your time "hanging out" like your coworkers are your buddies, you're going to have a bad time. Be a good worker at work, be a good friend to your friends, etc. If you don't like what's expected of you or it doesn't align with your principles, then by all means reevaluate whether you want to be part of that group.

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