Curious Canid

My medical care provider is awesome. UW Health (University of Wisconsin) is a non-profit organization that was built on top of a student healthcare system. They focus on treating the patient, not the condition, and have managed to build a staff who really believe in that. The system is associated with the UW Medical School, so it has access to the latest equipment and specialists in almost every area. In ten years, I have met one person there who did not impress me. She turned out to be from a temporary agency.

UW Health is perpetually understaffed, like all medical providers, because the business model for insurance companies is to prevent sick people from getting the care they need. They still manage to provide excellent care, but there are often long waits to see people.

I have a deep and abiding fear of paper targets.

Sorry, I find humor helps me deal with bad situations. And as a progressive in the US, that is where I currently find myself. Large numbers of people profess that they would be happy to murder me, my family, and my friends, because we aren’t misogynist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic sociopaths. I put a high value on human life, and I would not kill someone over property, but I am willing to kill to prevent others from being killed.

I believe in using as little force as necessary. I believe in de-escalation. I believe that deadly force should always be a last resort. But having a firearm leaves that option on the table, in case nothing else works.

I hope that we can eventually all get back to treating each other like human beings. Right now I don’t think I can count on that from everyone.

With respect (or disrespect) to LLMs: Nearly all AI gets its training data in unethical ways. It’s results are unreliable and require careful validation.

There are other types of specialized AI that can do other kinds of tasks well. It is good at certain kinds of medical diagnosis (in combination with human doctors). It can solve some problems that involve lots of complex iteration, like how to fold proteins, create new molecules, or assemble structures. There are a lot of potential uses.

Sam Altman is a huckster, not a technologist. As such, I don’t really care what he says about technology. His purpose has always been to transfer as much money as possible from investors into his own pocket before the bubble bursts. Anything else is incidental.

I am not entirely writing off LLMs, but very little of the discussion about them has been rational. They do some things fairly well and a lot of things quite poorly. It would be nice if we could just focus on the former.

One of the very few times I’ve gotten goosebumps was from the last bit of dialog in the first Terminator movie. Sarah Connor is sitting in her jeep at a gas station with her German Shepherd. Sarah: What did he just say? Gas Station Attendant: He said there’s a storm coming. Sarah (looking off into the distance): I know.

In modern America this is not a hypothetical situation.

I think it helps to clarify that we are talking about the current US Progressive movement and not just the abstract definitions of the terms. US Progressives have non-economic goals (restoring and expanding civil rights), but they generally agree that society should take care of everyone, not just the rich. That means providing at least food, housing, and health care without regard to income. There are a lot of different ideas about how that could be done. Everything from a Basic Living Stipend within a largely capitalist economy to a adopting a fully socialist, or even communist, economic system.

Vitamix blenders truly are in a class by themselves. As far as I know, they’re the only blenders that include cooling fans to keep the motor from overheating. And if you do somehow manage to overload it, the thing automatically shuts off until it has cooled down to the point where it’s safe to run again. They’re virtually impossible to damage, short of active vandalism.

Their motto really should be “Fuck the worst case scenario.”

CVS will synchronize your prescriptions if you ask. I suspect other large pharmacies will also.

I’m in my mid-60’s, although I haven’t entirely accepted that yet. My recovery rate hasn’t changed much, if any, but I do get more minor injuries than I used to. My joints are not as forgiving as they were 40 years ago.

Honestly, my answer is zero. It’s a rare day when I click on one.

I particularly dislike talking videos. I would always prefer to read instead of hearing someone talk.

These are all valid questions and I think a lot of good ways to think about them have been presented.

I suspect that the reason a lot of people are grappling with this right now has to do with the bizarre social and political environment of the moment. When large portions of the population have chosen to ignore objective reality, and make up their own, you can’t help but wonder if it’s all just arbitrary. However, there is an answer to that, and the answer is no, it is not. Within our perceptual reality, however it exists, things do behave in consistent ways and can be observed independently of belief. Those who attempt to ignore that do ultimately fail.

Our lack of knowledge about the underlying nature of our reality does not change the way it behaves for all of us.

This triggered me. :-}

This is the perfect time for LLM-based AI. We are already dealing with a significant population that accepts provable lies as facts, doesn’t believe in science. and has no concept of what hypocrisy means. The gross factual errors and invented facts of current AI couldn’t possibly fit in better.

That’s the beauty of modern corporate capitalism. The upper tiers of management are shielded from any responsibility by their subordinates. Their subordinates then have a strong incentive to shift the responsibility elsewhere so it doesn’t fall on them. Paying someone else to take the responsibility does not actually benefit the company, except may be in the short-term, but it does benefit the people who get to make the decisions about it.

And if the service provider really screws up, and loses too many contracts, they either sell out to another company just like themselves, make further profit, and go back to doing what they were doing, or they shut down, form a new company, and go back to what they were doing.

The only people who can be hurt by all of this are the regular employees, who lose their jobs as part of the cycle, and, occasionally, the shareholders, who are never adequately represented by the board. It’s a prefect system where bad decisions only affect those who have no part in them.

“The Cloud” just means “someone else’s sever”. A lot of people who should know better just don’t get that.

It’s entertaining to take almost any internal memo or external press release and substitute “someone else’s server” every time “the cloud” appears. They all suddenly look insane.

The company of friends, which includes my dogs and cats. Other people, of any species, are comforting and provide something else to focus on.

I also do a lot of reading these days.

Pro-Trek 3500 in titanium. It has multiple sensors, radio-based time correction, a great display, a separate button for the backlight, and solar power. It you want a watch that blends in with the business-ware this is not it, but I like the way it looks.

I will always treasure the episode where the someone is explaining how their life was ruined by finding their prom date having sex with someone else during the party, and Wynonna realizing the someone else was with her.

Financially ruining the AI industry would be an awesome side-benefit.