I think it's both true that most LLM writing ("writing") sucks and that it's better than what a lot of people can produce unassisted. Which to me doesn't mean that we should roll over and accept LLM output as a lesser evil... it just means that the bar is so low it might as well be in hell, and rapidly getting lower :')
It's nowhere close to good writing, but it's better than the dreck many self-published writers produce and sell - successfully.
But that's the real problem with LLMs. Culture is aspirational. It has a consistent goal - find the best, highlight it and distribute it so others can build on it.
LLMs are the opposite - produce as much of everything as possible at the lowest possible barely-acceptable-if-you're-lucky quality.
This was already a problem before LLMs. Mass market content farms - Kindle Unlimited, Wattpad, Spotify, social media in general - give everyone an equal voice, with mass popularity and "likes" as the only metric.
Now LLMs are automating the creation process, so everyone gets more of everything.
Except inspiration. Not so much of the "That's astounding, I wonder if I can learn from that and reach for something in that league."
The SAT/ACT prep school industry is a thing. I grew up with many, many kids whose (wealthy) parents sent them to SAT prep summer school every year from age 12 to 17.
Oh for sure. But there's also a huge industry for private tutors, homework help, writing help, etc- which more directly translates dollars to GPA points. My thinking is that the translation between dollars to SAT/ACT points is much less than that.
Note that it doesn’t dry out; it polymerizes, and the reaction is catalyzed by water, which is why cyanoacrylate glues will stick your fingertips together instantly but will not as rapidly stick plastics or metals together.
Water but it's a bit of hit and miss that can turn soggy, better is bicarbonate that triggers are more or less instant reaction (often in baking powder in a pinch, but that's mostly a waste compared to just bicarb).
Often if one wants to make something "larger", dropping superglue, adding bicarb with a silt, blowing away and dropping another layer works fairly well (it's a bit of a brittle but still quite hard mass that is created quickly).
I think Polyolefin Primer (Permabond POP) is magical in what it can superglue. Beautiful chemistry allowing something like Teflon or steel to be glued. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9yz8OqThJk
They're made out of extremely cheap materials, so you're paying several times more for packaging and distribution than for the product. Then again, people pay to have water packaged and distributed, often when they have it on tap.
I expect something with a lot of small bubbles and cracks, also it also overheated and got weird decomposition and reactions, something like a overcooked/toasted meal. Reusing a comment that I made in a previous thread:
For comparison, there is a nice video by NileRed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phNLecfyWS8 He is making Bakelite that is a type of plastic. It's a tiny amount, in a lab, on purpose and he may make a few attempts. Anyway it overheat and instead of a nice piece of plastic he got a nasty block of foam with burned plastic. No imagine a huge tank of a similar chemistry reaction.
A contractor showed me how to fix dents in granite with superglue. It’s totally clear. The trick is to scrape it with a razor blade at a 90 degree angle (strait horizontal). The imperfections become nearly invisible.
I've been told this is a cheap way to fix small windshield cracks. Never tried it but sounds like it would work for the small spider sized and shaped cracks from small rock impacts.
This is basically what the glass repair kits sold at auto parts stores are. (They also include a suction cup with syringe, to vacuum any air bubbles out.)
My wife and I both have Fully desks, which are now part of the Herman Miller family (but weren't at the time we bought them). Not the cutest designs ever, but they've both held up well, and I think the bamboo/wood-ish desktop finish is nicer looking than similar models from other brands.
I've also seen a few places (including IKEA?) sell bring-your-own-top adjustable desks, where they provide the legs and motor and skeleton and then you add some kind of slab of your choosing as the desktop. Haven't tried one myself, though.
- the way the wood looks and feels.
- it has been fairly tough. I managed to stain it with an overnight pen leak, but it's mostly easy to clean, and stands up to minor impacts from computers and cups. Also, no water marks so far.
I dislike:
- the curved front, which looked cute in the pictures but makes it a PITA to fit a keyboard tray. That was a mistake. I wish I'd gone for the straight edged desk.
IgE antibodies, which play a huge role in allergic responses, are "supposed" to target parasites and other non-germ invaders. There are treatments that directly deactivate these antibodies... or you can give yourself a parasite on purpose to give those IgE antibodies something constructive to do: https://radiolab.org/podcast/91951-an-update-on-hookworms
I skate/surf goofy (or used to... haven't done much of either lately :P) and prefer to hold a baseball bat or a golf club lefty, despite being right-handed. And I have an immediate family member who's left-handed but bats righty!
I’m the opposite… write lefty bit bat/swing (rackets and gol) righty. Not sure about surfing - I only paddle board and the stance is more straight-on (because you paddle both sides to avoid turning in a circle).
Of course, I’m terrible at baseball and my handwringing is atrocious, so maybe I’m just broken.
Appreciate the suggestion but I'm terrible at editing so I just stick with PS because the cost for a month or two when I need it isn't much and it's really easy to find videos walking through exactly what I need to do. Even a single hour spent trying to translate a tutorial would more than wipe out the savings.
I think another under-discussed factor in the opioid crisis is that opioids are cheap, but (American) healthcare to treat underlying pain is not. You might not be able to afford six weeks of physical therapy, surgery, etc., but you can probably afford $11.23 a month for a generic prescription.
My view of a lot of the opioid crisis stuff aside from physical pain is psychological trauma - people self medicating as an alternative to doing the work.
That’s why I think the psychoactive legislation that’s introduced recently about psychedelics is so important because those things can rapidly accelerate processing and healing psychological trauma.
My view, is if this was done 20 - 30 years ago there wouldn’t be such a large demand for opiates. I take it further and say that probably some in the drug companies understand this already and were lobbying against the introduction of more curative psychedelic treatments so that they could sell subscriptions to painkillers.
(This is a serious article by a serious researcher. There exists good work on Frontiers in….)
The 5-HT2A receptor is profoundly immunomodulatory. (Acid is arguably a more potent immunomodulator – an antiinflammatory one – than it is psychoactive.) Local inflammation is a thing in injury, "global" inflammation as well – there is strong interplay between cytokines and metabolic/anabolic/catabolic process; Interleukin-6 stimulates osteoclasts which actively break down joint tissue – and neuroinflammation also affects physiology. Muscle tone, blood flow, pulmonary function, and so on.
Ego death happens to be a phenomenon or qualia when you boop that receptor hard. I'm not sure ego death necessary for anything. It might be. Ego death is very intimately related to the individual neuronal state and memory, and inflammation is quite enmeshed with that. (Cf. cortisol.)
I was quite surprised to find that paper! Thank you for… the audience?, for your consideration? It's quietly somewhat maddening that this is on the books and there's so little mention of it.
Like, psychedelics? I'm not a hippie. I'm not into psychedelics. I'm into neuroinflammation, haha
Chronic Back pain is correlated with emotional trauma. The physical body is a mere projection of the energetic and spiritual being. This is wahy meditative spiritual practices such as yoga and taiji are good for chronic pain, as the physical pain is a mere projection of a deeper trauma that needs released.
Ignoring the spiritual part, emotional state does have a well-known feedback loop with physical state. There’s a (largely incorrect) idea in pop psychology that just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness. It’s not nearly that simple, but there are some more straightforward examples: lots of tense emotional states (anger, anxiety) lead to tense muscles (jaw being the classic example). Relaxing your jaw can lead to a (temporary) relaxation of your emotional tenseness. I’ve never heard of a similar result for the lower back, but it’s not hard to imagine. If nothing else, they must be correlated through sedentary lifestyle.
> (largely incorrect) ... just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness.
I don't have a citation to hand and it's really old but there was academic research supporting that at some point. IIRC they used some clever request to get people to move their facial muscles in various ways without tipping them off about what was really going on and then asked them lots of questions that touch on emotional state.
By directing your attention towards, or away from, physical phenomena that mechanically affect your lower back: overexertion, underexertion, posture, nutrient intake, crowd...
Setting the woo aside, there is a lot of data on disorders like central sensitization syndrome that show our psychological state has a very strong modulating effect on our perception of pain.
I mean tons of back pain is medically unexplained. It's not like physiology has a perfect record here that can be used to dismiss alternative theories.
There's a really neat book called Gift of the Raven about an athlete with chronic knee pain that doctors couldn't figure out any plan to stop. He rowed from Alaska to Siberia and the book goes on about a shaman that performs a healing ritual (psychedelic mushrooms were involved) and he finds himself cured. So, there are times I suppose when the pain is all in your head, and maybe has a feedback loop since pain will also cause muscle contraction which can pull bones out of alignment. Relax enough and the pain stops.
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