I have a home in Seattle, so I get to see intersections and signs that are so confusing that I can't understand what I'm supposed to do when I encounter them. On residential streets around my house, people put up all these "20 is plenty" signs, close off streets, etc., have speedbumps put in, place their cars in driveways that block off the sidewalk, put in traffic cameras in school zones, etc.
My wife's car has FSD (it's a Model X Plaid with HW4) and it does a great job at navigating all of this madness. The magical milestone for autonomy is here already, and it's a part of my daily life. I drive my girlfriend to her job and back four round trips a week, from Ballard to Green Lake.
Three thoughts come to mind:
1) At some point a federal limitation will be legally imposed on the kinds of special cases residents can force on the roads and/or we'll just shrug and let the tunnel-boring machines go under our homes.
2) I think the Boring Company tunnels would be a lot better if they had a grid topology and a story that's more than just lip service about public use.
3) It would be really cool if people got together to take over some of the surface streets and made old-timey functioning streetcars from 120+ years ago. The city and state governments could support this by simply ceding control to worker-owned cooperatives that build and maintain their own streetcars. Ballard was going to get a train that connected it to the rest of the city by 2039, and now that plan is dead because it can't be sustained for financial reasons (public planning is rife with linear assumptions and other forms of myopia).
The claim is that compilers were f(x) -> y, and LLMs are f(x) -> P(y | z1 | z2 | ... z3).
But how were various combinations of popular programming languages, operating systems and hardware platforms not effectively f(x) -> P(y | z1 | z2 | ... z3)? Suppose you were quick on the take and were writing in Unix and C in the early 80s and found yourself porting your program from a PDP-something to an 8088 PC, or to a 68k Mac, dealing with DOS extenders, printer drivers, different versions of C (remember K&R style?) or C++? Remember MFC? The evolution of the STL?
LLMs are similar to that maelstrom, just on a faster timescale.
When you're an adult and you can't afford surgery with skilled surgeons, you get shunned by the less accepting parts of society, which leads directly to increased morbidity.
When you suppress treatment before adulthood -> higher surgical costs.
When you don't treat it at all -> quiet suicide, causes get buried in the statistics.
I lived through all of these things. It was an impossible childhood. I lived with this in total secrecy and agony until my early 40s. I'm 45 now, and I've had all my surgeries. I know what hundreds of thousands of dollars buying the best care can bring. None of that is available in Finland, where this study was done.
(I had the luxury of making my peace with my father before he passed.)
The study involves a large number of people over approximately a quarter century, and its methodology is very robust. I don’t believe it’s an argument against recognition and kindness towards gender minorities, either intended or de facto.
It also focuses specifically on young cohorts so there are no people who loved in the closet for half of their lives. The range of medical transitioning described is by no means limited to surgery, and I don’t believe that therapy and hormones work differently in Finland compared to the rest of the world.
The primary takeaway here is that our understanding of gender and how to alter it is very poor and so treatment outcomes are often poor. That’s a call to more research and more efficacy, not calling trans people names and shunning them.
I understand why you’re defensive, it isn’t an unreasonable stance, but please do read the study at least.
It's telling that there isn't a single mention of surgery in the study or the interview.
Facial feminization surgery (FFS) exists but is extremely rare in Finland. After puberty, hormones alone can't change bone and cartilage structure, nor can they make vocalization congruent. Only surgery can do that.
Comparing what life was like before I had FFS+VFS, and I remember the way people treated me. After puberty locked in my bones, expecting life to be easy with hormone therapy alone simply wasn't realistic socially. Most people were incredibly judgemental. Life is a lot easier when people can't instantly spot you as something they see as abnormal.
I think you have a point, and of course no one study is going to be perfect. At the same time though one of the major strengths of this study is that it looked at large numbers of both MtF and FtM patients, and the results seem consistent, with both MtF and FtM sharing similar outcomes. If FFS was the key variable that was being ignored then you'd expect to see a stark difference between those populations.
The mean ages of participants also trended young, mostly still in their teens, which means that quite a few of the participants were receiving treatment before or during early puberty.
The point is to protect Apple's control over its APIs and business model. I'd be shocked if they're not busy figuring out how to use LLMs to shore up app review right now.
The war on general-purpose computing isn't good for human well-being. All of this stuff concentrates power in ways that are genuinely terrifying. Maybe the point is that we notice it, and understand the suffering it causes?
As long as it's not coupled with calls to tax and regulate those who do get in early and reap benefits from doing so, this is good and healthy.
(I'm not the earliest adopter of crypto and AI by any means. I only rode up crypto a couple of times for 2X and 3X kinda gains on my investment, and I only started using Claude last year.)
This is so draconian it's worth leaving the United States to avoid this. The video is entirely correct: the true target is to help corporations maintain their monopolies on production. I'm disgusted with the Democrats that are pushing this trash, even as Republicans are wiping out our rights on a federal level. Our rights really are under attack from all sides.
This is so incredibly bad that we citizens need to organize to oppose these laws. I really don't like sticking my neck out given the horrific political environment, but this is so scary that I don't know what else to do. realtaraharris.bsky.social
A few weeks ago I got into our car. Without touching any controls other than the screen, it backed out of our garage and driveway, drove me to the grocery store, found a parking spot and parked. On the way back, it did the same thing without issue.
Last night my spouse was "driving," and she got frustrated by the slowing traffic ahead, so she grabbed the wheel away from the car, and in a microsecond we were nearly sideswiped. We were both so terrified! But it only reinforces the takeaway: this car drives better than we do. No human can see as far and as well as the car's cameras can.
I'm not trying to undermine his wider point, which is fair. It's just hard to reconcile the words in the title ("driverless car hype") with my daily driverless reality.
My first encounter with MBTI was at work, eight years ago. I resisted categorization because I dismissed it as being too geometric (like the four elements, or the four humors), and I tried to skew my results so that I'd be the type (ENTJ) that I thought would be promoted. (I've always scored ENTP on tests, no matter how I tried to skew my answers.)
Over the years, I learned more about Jung, what cognitive functions are and how to identify them, the research of Dr. Dario Nardi, etc. When I think about MBTI types these days, I have a lot of experiences to draw on that make them more real to me.
It took me a long time to understand that the MBTI tests out there are of limited value. I only treat them as a starting point when establishing someone else's type in my mind. To really figure someone out, you have to be able to take into account a ton of other things, including childhood traumas, neurodivergence, etc.
For sure. I was super skeptical at first and the more I dug in the more compelled I became. I actually made my own conversational version of the test and ask people if they want to be typed - its fascinating, I have helped type 50+ people.
My wife's car has FSD (it's a Model X Plaid with HW4) and it does a great job at navigating all of this madness. The magical milestone for autonomy is here already, and it's a part of my daily life. I drive my girlfriend to her job and back four round trips a week, from Ballard to Green Lake.
Three thoughts come to mind:
1) At some point a federal limitation will be legally imposed on the kinds of special cases residents can force on the roads and/or we'll just shrug and let the tunnel-boring machines go under our homes.
2) I think the Boring Company tunnels would be a lot better if they had a grid topology and a story that's more than just lip service about public use.
3) It would be really cool if people got together to take over some of the surface streets and made old-timey functioning streetcars from 120+ years ago. The city and state governments could support this by simply ceding control to worker-owned cooperatives that build and maintain their own streetcars. Ballard was going to get a train that connected it to the rest of the city by 2039, and now that plan is dead because it can't be sustained for financial reasons (public planning is rife with linear assumptions and other forms of myopia).
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