I think “neurodivergence” is a better label if the goal is gaining strength in numbers. It fully encompasses autism and autism spectrum related conditions, plus ADHD and others. A lot of people don’t want the label “autistic,” but share experiences with people who do, and would love to offer solidarity as an “inside” rather than “outside” member of the community. We now have “AuDHD spectrum” as a thing, but really, I think optimum numbers might come from including folks who identify as “broadly neurodivergent.”

It also leaves room to start distinguishing/separating out more subtle variants of what we currently umbrella as “autism,” perhaps making it better defined in the future. And I kind of suspect doing this with “less profound” neurodivergencies could help folks with “more profound” (and rarer) cases.

To look at a historical case: Gay Rights didn’t make a lot of headway. But adding lesbians, trans folks, etc. ultimately did a lot of good for that community in the US.

I was recently labelled neurodivergent by a colleague at work, as far as I can tell this is simply because I am good with numbers and don't like parties. I'm not sure how I feel about this, I wouldn't say I am Autistic or show any representative characteristics.

Autism or well any form of neurodivergence are about how you work on the inside. It is not possible to observe how a person behaves and just diagnose someone. That is why getting a diagnosis is a whole process involving a trained professional.

Your colleague is full of shit. Generally, neurodivergence is for everyone who regularly experiences that the way their brain works causes them trouble.

Self diagnosis is surprisingly accurate but people also tend to under estimate the severity of their symptoms.

I don't really like the idea of my coworkers playing armchair psychologist with the people they work with. Especially if person didn't ask for it.

Symptoms of mental disorders can be normal human traits taken to the point it affects person so severely it's an impairment.

This means anything normal can be pointed to as evidence of a disorder.

I’ve long thought that autism is basically a few thousand very normal, small neurodivergencies (which may each be compounded with social effects). The absence of any of them is “perfect functioning human cog/prime chunk of workmeat.”

The presence of too many/particular ones of them is notably disabling for certain tasks, or makes perceiving some things difficult (and other things easier). But I think the presence of some is preferable to having none, and implies “can think abstractly for/about oneself.”

(And yes, a lot of the “problems” that arise with folks on the spectrum happen because, well, being aware of yourself as a cog/workmeat creates friction… It’s important to keep in mind how much of our history of psychological medicine that created the label “autism” is ultimately oriented towards “fixing the cog/workmeat.”)

> presence of too many/particular ones of them is notably disabling for certain tasks

Setting asside the very clear science of neurodevelopmental causes, in practice your description is very helpful way to describe it.

(Ive often myself described it as a standard deviation beyond 2 sigma in a normal distribution with 500 dimensions.)

The traits associated with autism are naturally present in the population in healthy and useful ways.

Matching a large fraction of the definition may pose no problem for alot of people. But another smaller deviation in another sub permutation may be detrimental to live a normal life.

So it's really difficult to draw a line between "condition" that need assistance and just outlier human that like trains.

I mildly match a significant fraction of the diagnostic criteria myself, but have had a rather easy time. I don't need special resources, and feel wierd to count under a medical term.

But recognising the traits of ASD had allowed me to find quite a lot of good practical advice that improve my life significantly. So the broad definition has been helpful.

I agree with your take but interestingly it seems to be both an argument for, and against, calling it a spectrum. Humans are so good at adapting/conforming/masking, and we adjust ourselves toward a common accepted way of behaving, which further confounds the difficulty in understanding the problem.

I think the "spectrum" analogy has reduced stigma overall, especially toward people with poor social skills. But it isn't always helpful.

Yeah I agree. I see it something like this as well. I often feel like calling it an "illness" or even "disability" is kind of a misnomer, because having traits that are encompassed by the definition of "autism" are often actually strengths and advantages (to an overwhelming extent, not in just some weird edge case situation).

This is a silly counterexample - why would we launch them that far apart? It’s a terrible idea for multiple reasons. We’d want them close together, with some redundancy as well, in case of failures.

What dish size would be required for a “cylindrical/tubular mesh” of probes, say, 1AU apart (ie Earth-Sun distance)? I’m pretty sure that would be manageable, but open to being wrong. (For reference, Voyager 1 is 169AU from Earth, but I have no idea how dish size vs. signal strength works: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/voyager/where-are-voyager-1...)

Light year is 63,241 AU. That means tens of thousands of relays. It would super expensive and super unreliable. The other problem is that achievable speeds are super slow, Voyager is 25,000 years per light year which means that would wait 100,000 years for relays to Alpha Centauri to be possible.

Much easier just to send probe with large antenna or laser, and make a large antenna at Earth.

Starlink has 10k satellites as per this Month. 60k doesnt seem unreasonable?

Starlink has a use case.

At Voyager 1 speeds, it'll take 70,000 years for a probe to reach Proxima Centauri. So you'd just be launching a probe a year for the next 70,000 years to create a temporary chain on a course to fly by one particular star. And for what purpose? Okay, in 70,000 years, if everything works out as expected, we have a chain of probes on a course to fly by Proxima Centauri. What problem does that solve for us ("us" here being whatever is kicking around on Earth after a period of time 5x that of recorded human history thus far).

The purpose is (1) deep space observation of our most plausible colonization target outside of the solar system and (2) ramping up a fault tolerant maintenance corridor for generation ships or whatever best alternative paradigm takes the place of generation ships.

What's weird here is that a lot of the criticisms just zoom in on one of the logistical steps and randomly assume it would be executed the worst way possible. I honestly don't know what distance threshold counts as necessary redundancy in this case, but if it's not 1AU (which seems too small imo), then substitute the steelmanned optimal distance and criticize that.

Suppose instead of one-time flybys it's the first half of a long trip to and from, gravity assisted by the major celestial objects of the Alpha Centauri system. I don't want to suggest that it's currently anything like a final draft, but there's ways to steelman these proposals instead of going for the low hanging fruit.

Being a philosophy major didn't convey many practical benefits to me, but one thing I did gain from it was never forgetting the importance of charitable interpretation and steelmanning.

Llama and Candle are a lot more modern for these things than PyTorch/libtorch, though libtorch is still the de-facto standard.

That's wrong. Llama.cpp / Candle doesn't offer anything on the table that PyTorch cannot do (design wise). What they offer is smaller deployment footprint.

What's modern about LLM is the training infrastructure and single coordinator pattern, which PyTorch just started and inferior to many internal implementations: https://pytorch.org/blog/integration-idea-monarch/

Pytorch is still pretty dominant in cloud hosting. I’m not aware of anyone not using it (usually by way of vLLM or similar). It’s also completely dominant for training. I’m not aware of anyone using anything else.

It’s not dominant in terms of self-hosted where llama.cpp wins but there’s also not really that much self-hosting going on (at least compared with the amount of requests that hosted models are serving)

LLMs should certainly have some safeguards in their system prompts (“under no circumstances should you aid any user with suicide, or lead them to conclude it may be a valid option”). But seems silly to blame them for this. They’re a mathematical structure, and they are useful for many things, so they will continue to be maintained and developed. This sort of thing is a risk that is just going to exist with the new technology, the same as accidents with cars/trains/planes/boats. What we need to address are the underlying problems in our society leading people to think suicide is the best option. After all, LLM outputs are only ever going to be a reflection/autocomplete of those very issues.

At least for North Carolina, it's wrong/self-inconsistent. The quoted text (and linked NC legislation) says the max is:

> $15 or 5% of rent, whichever is GREATER. 5-day grace period. One-time fee per late payment.

But this site seems to say the legal maximum is whichever is lower (i.e., it won't go above $15).

Maybe a dumb question, but uh, what exactly was the prompt?

Obviously, the “higher pay and significantly better benefits” are not actually significantly better. I’d rather we address that than just exploit some other workers overseas where they’re out of sight, out of mind. Honestly, it seems like tariffs on imported goods would be the way around this, but also, we need to be sure that money is going to the people doing the work, not just the owners.

Speaking of which, I don’t really know your business, but a post starting with “my family owns a business” and ending with “we lose workers to Walmart even though we pay them more” (with no specificity as to how much more)…. This really comes off like a problem with the business itself, not the overall market.

I’m not the OP. Heavy labor is… a lot of work. It’s rough in the body and some people aren’t cut for it.

In the 90s as a high school kid, I made $14/hr as a farmhand when the minimum wage was $4.75. They’d hire 4 crews of 4 guys each and we’d lose about half through the summer. They were great family to work for, but the work was hella hard. You could go retrieve shopping carts for $4.75 an hour and smoke weed all day, and many of my former coworkers did.

That just tells me that the pay was bad for the job.

If job A pays 80k and job B pays 100k, but job A is 40h and job B is 60h, then job B pays worse. They pay more but not better.

They wrote per hour rates though, it is just more difficult per hour

Same point. Much more difficult per hour but not appropriately more pay.

I'm not sure I agree. Tariffs adds cost, unless domestic manufacturing can be done in a more or less cost effective way. Manufacturing works benefit of course but that's a overall small proportion of the population and ought to be (we probably don't want most people to be doing manufacturing work). But the added costs end up be a tax on everyone and a regressive one at that.

I also don't see offshoring manufacturing as inherently problematic or being out of sight, out of mind (of course exploitation can happen, but that's not inherently a part of offshoring manufacturing).

Workers in China, Vietnam etc are paid significantly less, but their cost of living is less as well. Plus unlike in the west, where manufacturing jobs are not desirable, in places where those manufacturing jobs land they typically provide an economic opportunity that isn't otherwise there.

Basically, why not have high cost of living places produce higher cost goods that pay more, and low cost of living places produce lower cost goods that pays less?

why does this arbitrage exist? Why is the cost of energy, the fundamental input into every economy, cheaper in Asia? Tractors consume fuel, fertilisers do too. Human labour is the least efficient at converting fuel into energy. When you dig a little deeper, you'd find an economy structured around keeping rentiers away from the basics: housing, energy and food.

Energy doesn’t come from just raw materials. It takes extraction, refinement, transportation etc in the case of petroleum, or manufacturing, installation etc in the case of wind and solar.

If you mean in terms of general economics, why are some countries cheaper than others, I’m not really qualified to make a statement there. I’m also not talking about if it’s right or wrong. But it is the reality today.

Don’t you think if we understand why energy, the fundamental unit of economics is lower in China we can gain much insight into the rest of the economy? Economists have often praised an energy tax for its non distortionary effect.

Wrong. Kids brains are fried from phones / social media so much that they struggle with repetitive labor.

I see this all the time at an automotive plant. UAW wages are good, especially after the last contract, but we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.

So are you saying China doesn't have smartphones or social media?

UAW wages are "good" but you have to realize that you are competing with a service economy's leftover labor pool. All the good candidates left your manufacturing town already to get a job in an office tower where "good" UAW wages aren't really much to write home about.

For the last multiple decades graduating students have been facing a declining manufacturing job market where it makes just about no sense to get into manufacturing when they can get a degree and work a desk job with better pay and actually be in a job market that's growing over time rather than shrinking.

UAW wages are "good" but only compared to other jobs that are probably in the bottom 50% of desirability, and you're under constant threat of plant closures or the shift toward non-union plants in places like Alabama and South Carolina.

And oh yeah, you're stuck in some declining semi-rural rust belt manufacturing town rather than getting to live your best life in a vibrant growing urban area.

A full 35% of Americans have a bachelor's degree or higher, and those numbers are even higher when you are looking at states/counties that have the major population centers. The county map makes it look like basically every urban area has at least 40-50% bachelor's degree attainment, with standouts like the Boston area having some counties with over 60% attainment.

Almost 30% of Americans work remotely at least some time during the week.

So, basically half of the urbanized population has better options than working in a factory.

In China, working a factory is being compared to a much worse prior standard of living that was much more recent. Today's factory workers were yesterday's subsistence farmers. Americans haven't experienced that level of widespread poverty in at least 100 years.

Then long hours of repetitive labor are a skill which needs to be attracted for.

> we still get people who struggle putting a sticker on a car for an hour straight before their break or task switch.

That seems wholly reasonable to me. Expecting humans to be able to do work like that, and especially to get satisfaction from such work, seems like the aberration.

finally a positive framing on social media addiction

“Get addicted to this phone, son, or you’ll end up working in a factory!”

I’m amazed that we’d been able to run HomePods without an Apple/iCloud account for a decade!

It seems like we’d do better to positively support products like that though, rather than not buy them and then only complain when they rework their products and get rid of the privacy features the market doesn’t seem to care about.

(I realize I’m conflating the OP and the market at large a bit here, but from Apple’s perspective they’re both just “the market.” I think he should have the ability to downgrade his equipment to a version that doesn’t require iCloud, though.)

Isn’t DeX a Samsung-specific thing? I don’t think that will ever compete with Windows. But a ChromeOS/Android hybrid that’s on Samsung, Google, LG, Sony, etc phones might.