GP posting "Everyone I personally know working in software stopped writing code" on HN is such an obvious tell of blinkered delusion.
Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here.
You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
It is reasonable to presume that balance has been undermined. In general "eat your fruit and veggies" should probably be modified to "eat your veggies", which generally have fiber and better nutrient density, without the unnecessary sugar. Modern fruit really is basically plant candy. And sure, that's better than actual candy or junk food, but I no longer think it is really scientifically tenable to call most fruit "healthy".
by 'most', do you mean by those grown/consumed or by variety? because there's a vast array of fruits incl. savory (cucumber, tomatoes, avocado) as well as less common - soursop, cherimoya, mulberry, jackfruit, durian, so much more beyond the fructose bombs.
" but I no longer think it is really scientifically tenable to call most fruit "healthy"."
This doesn't appear to be even slightly tenable. The amount of sugar one consumes in a normal serving of fruit if not added to the massive amount we actually consume wouldn't be even slightly unhealthy.
Saying fruit isn't "healthy" doesn't mean it is unhealthy, there are plenty of neutral things here. But if you are treating fruits and veggies as the same (e.g. X servings of fruits and veggies), generally, anyone making X be 100% fruit is likely going to be less healthy than anyone making X be 100% veggies. And since all fruits do contain a lot of sugar (EDIT: and thus calories, which generally we already get too much of today), you should indeed moderate your consumption of fruits.
It is very hard, by contrast, to say a person can eat "too much veggies", unless they are doing something crazy like eating extreme amounts of the same greens high in oxalates or something.
Basically, enjoy a fruit or two a day, if you like them. Or don't. But you aren't "eating healthy" just because you eat a lot of fruit, nor are you eating unhealthily if you eat zero fruit.
A healthy diet has always had a range of components. Insofar as you are eating a normal healthy amount fruit is healthy not neutral even with a higher sugar content you won't get an overdose of sugar just from any reasonable amount of fruit.
It is without meaning to compare incoherent dietary ideas like 100% veggies or 100% fruits.
Let me put it this way: I don't think it is an uncommon belief that "adding fruit" to an existing diet will have benefits. But, in fact, if you are meeting your caloric and nutrient needs already, it is unlikely it adds anything (except fiber), and it is plausible it is causing problems (increasing possibility of diabetes, adding extra calories). Veggies are a safer add.
In both cases, you probably need to be rebalancing and not adding things, but, for the same reason, it is sensible to err on the side of much more veggies than fruits. However, because fruit tastes like candy (and perhaps because you don't have to cook them, generally), people reach for adding more fruit to their diets, and this is likely sub-optimal. You should almost certainly be eating much more vegetables than you should be eating fruit. I.e. I'd say healthy is more like 80% veggie, 20% fruit, if you are putting them in the same category.
Maybe 50/50 is perfectly good too, but it seems pretty clear 100% fruit and 0% veggie is the worst possible choice, but 100% veggie and 0% fruit is perfectly fine. This should bring into question the appropriateness of the label "healthy" for fruit.
Pink Lady, Snapdragon, Sweetango are all probably closer to alanced compared to Cosmic Crisp. Cosmic Crisp being more tart than Sugarbee, but still definitely more sweet than tart in flavor profile IMO.
Sweetango and Pink Lady are probably what I would consider balanced sweet and tart.
Interesting. Pink Lady is a favorite for me, and Sweetango is great too, but I'd consider Cosmic Crisp very, very close to Pink Lady in overall balance (I do agree Pink Lady is better though). I'm in Canada and Cosmic Crisp is special / protected and seems to always have to come from the States, whereas I can get the others fresher and grown locally, so perhaps that is a factor.
I'm a honeycrisp fanatic (and it's a good balance of sweet/tart for me). This is the first I've heard of Sweetango, I don't think I've seen them in the grocery stores. Will be keeping my eyes peeled.
Unlike many other apple varieties these days, SweeTango are only available in traditional "apple season" (Autumn months through November in the USA). I've long been a fan of HoneyCrisp, so I tried SweeTango, and while it was quite good, I still prefer HoneyCrisp. I had a similar experience with Cosmic Crisp--not as good as HoneyCrisp, but nice for some variety.
Right, when you take it, it becomes clear it just injects salience / profundity / meaning into whatever you happen to be focused on or have on your mind (EDIT: mostly this is the main effect, but there can be novel perspectives / insights, and other audio-visual changes, but IMO it is the felt meaning that primarily drives the more credulous claims). Without adequate preparation, this is likely to be worthless in most cases, harmful in other cases, and helpful in some again. However, not all causes of depression or addiction are about accepting death, or a salience / meaning problem, and even when that kind of issue is involved, a momentary experience of profound meaning is NOT actually necessarily transformative either (i.e. you can and in fact must still choose how to interpret that experience, once out of it).
So it would actually be very surprising if it was just a clear net positive overall
> However, not all causes of depression or addiction are about accepting death, or a salience / meaning problem, and even when that kind of issue is involved, a momentary experience of profound meaning is NOT actually necessarily transformative either (i.e. you can and in fact must still choose how to interpret that experience, once out of it).
I don't think it's (just) encountering the profound that ends addiction, I think it really just alters or "resets" your brain structure. I know somebody who had bit their nails for their entire life well into their 30's and after a mega dose of mushrooms they just stopped. It wasn't a shift in perspective, they just didn't have that habit anymore, or even the thought of it. They didn't even notice they stopped biting their nails until they had trouble typing.
It also seems to alleviate nerve pain, and apparently enabled one man paralyzed below the waist to walk again. Something really fundamental is getting altered.
Oh, I don't doubt that sometimes something fundamental can be altered. The best sort of broad explanation I've seen that jives with the experience is maybe the one I've found here: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti..., which I think would agree with your notion of a "reset" to fundamental neural structures. And yes, for certain conditions, like cluster headaches, as far as I know, psychedelics are the only things showing much real promise.
It can also just be easy for some proponents to forget that tonnes of people do and have done these things, with no clear significant lasting effects. And it is also common even for enthusiasts to say they they need to do take trips somewhat regularly (e.g. every few weeks or months) to regain the benefits. One-off miracles obviously happen, but I think are statistically likely the exception. And you can reverse or reject your insights, so for sure the trip is only one piece of the puzzle.
I'd love to see more serious research on psychedelics in general, to better engineer for useful and changing experiences. As it stands, just "take the psychedelic, manage your set and setting, and you'll have a significant positive effect" is generally not very plausible nor I think actually supported empirically or even by most anecdotes.
I think its relatively easy to make it beneficial with an adult person taken in most serene settings & with good intentions. The studies they did do seem to reflect that.
I would advice against a too high of a dose first time. The 5 grams they normally give in studies seems to be on the high side for a first time.
Set and setting can help make a positive experience likely, yes, I think what proponents often miss is that for the vast majority of people, the experience will mostly just be "interesting" and "memorable", and not particularly transformative. I.e. transformative / curative effects seem to be rare, IMO for the reasons I already stated.
While I am quite skeptical of the claims linked above, that link does indeed cover the FNR at the FPR of 0.005, and finds it broadly to be on the same order of magnitude, i.e. also below 0.005.
We just perceive it as such, and this should be fairly hard to argue against with all the scientific advances we have made up to this point, at least as long as you assume consciousness involves biology and physics at least somewhat.
Otherwise, you can't explain e.g. smooth perceptions of low FPS stimuli, delayed reaction times, and must ignore obvious limits on various biological and neurological rhythms, or other possible limits on continuity (e.g. quantum stuff) and rates generally.
I've seen papers claim that there are anywhere from 12 to 40 competing definitions (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT), or, more accurately, there are something like 12 to 40 different aspects which all relate to "consciousness", which is very clearly a family resemblance category.
"Is X conscious or not" is an entirely unserious question today, unless this is just a headline followed by actual (and explicit) examination of the various aspects of consciousness being discussed. But, even still, LLMs are probably only conscious in like 2-3 or so ways, most of those meaning broadly "intelligence", i.e. reasoning, problem-solving, etc. When it comes to anything experiential or embodied, AI might eventually get more of these, but LLMs based on recursively applied linear algebra are clearly missing too many core aspects of consciousness to be considered conscious in any broad sense.
I think this is the main point. Most articles conflate consciousness with intelligence or awareness. Without clarifying their definition of it.
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
The major error made by most people in this thread is thinking it is possible to give a single definition of consciousness that is coherent and matches common usage. The folk concept of "consciousness" couldn't be a more clear definition of a family resemblance category, so discussions using the folk concept are an utter waste of time.
Move to the different aspects / parts / things involved when we talk about consciousness (experience / phenomenal consciousness, self-modeling, intelligence, agency, embodiment, wakefulness/alertness, attention, etc) and you can have very clear, meaningful, and unambiguous discussions on almost every point, but there is no coherent unified "consciousness" as normal people use it, and the folk concept can't be salvaged.
This article is bad because it just keeps trying to make the folk concept do work that the concept is simply too messy to handle usefully. But in fact if you avoid trying to find some mysterious essence or all-capturing definition, there is huge progress and lots of interesting stuff to say (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).
Embarrassingly incompetent article. Given that one can observe up to 40 definitions of consciousness (https://philpapers.org/rec/VIMMAT - also many definitions are unrelated at all), "consciousness" is almost certainly just a family resemblance category at best, and talk about whether or not something is "conscious" without providing definitions is simply completely unserious.
To make progress, you have to talk about kinds / aspects of consciousness. AI does and will share some of these aspects with humans, but it will not and does not share others. It is really that simple. For the most part, modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness.
For huge parts of the article "intelligence" and "consciousness" are conflated, which is mostly extremely unhelpful, as this is not generally a core feature of most aspects of "consciousness".
The moral arguments are also incompetent, i.e. claiming "Moral reasoning is [...] is necessarily subjective" is just clearly empirically wrong, as in fact LLMs can produce moral reasoning (i.e. verbalized moral arguments that are coherent), as can p-zombies (i.e. there is nothing 'necessary', in the philosophical sense of the term, about subjectivity here). The only way the argument holds is if you tautologically define moral reasoning as requiring that reasoning be produced by a consciousness, but this is question-begging.
> modern AI implemented via LLMs has almost none of the stronger or most core aspects of consciousness
Can you elaborate on this? What are the specific "stronger and most core aspects of consciousness"? And why are you certain that they are stronger and "more core"?
If you are interested in some serious discussion, see https://lossfunk.com/papers/ai-consciousness.pdf, especially the early section "Consciousness as Family Resemblance". I suppose another is Ned Block on consciousness being a "mongrel concept", and the distinction between access vs. phenomenal
The first paper picks out e.g. arousal/wakefulness, phenomenal quality / qualia, unity (how we feel sensory inputs and qualia as a unified scene), access consciousness (instrumental self-observation and modification broadly), meta-cognition and self-modeling, emotional valence (e.g. pain/pleasure).
One might also include intelligence (abstract reasoning / argument, information integration and abstraction, attention) broadly, and also agency / desires / drives / will. Insofar as these are aspects of consciousness, yes, AI (and simpler algorithms and mechanistic structures) demonstrate aspects of consciousness. But insofar as embodiment, self-reflexivity and qualia (phenomenal consciousness) are the more mysterious and more obviously unique aspects of consciousness, current LLMs very clearly are lacking these things in most ways (whereas animals are much less clearly lacking, especially when you get to mammals and primates).
Seriously, just ask an AI this stuff, you'll get very detailed responses, nothing I am saying here is new or obscure.
I've gone back and forth with AI on this stuff quite a bit, and there are many, many theories of consciousness, which is why when you were vague about the "more core" concepts, I asked for which ones specifically.
And I broadly disagree that the AI lacks things like qualia, self-reflexivity, and embodiment... at least that it lacks them any more than humans do.
Qualia: ultimately, all qualia are inputs and outputs, at least as far as modern science has been able to derive. There's nothing special about "hearing", it's just sound waves tickling some sensors which send some signals which trigger some neural pathways. Same for smell and sight, it's all just inputs being processed in different and efficient ways. An LLM only has token based input, but that's input nonetheless.
Self-reflexivity: an AI is capable of thinking about itself, and indeed papers have shown that larger models are capable of a self-awareness that can demonstrate that they realize when their weights have been manually tampered with, including being able to figure out how they were tampered with. The AI will quite literally output "you have injected 'ELEPHANT' into my weights" in some of the tests.
Embodiment: I don't know how one can confidently distinguish between an embodiment in a biological substrate vs a digital substrate. Both things actually exist at very high complexity in the real world. The substrate may be worlds different, but that alone doesn't suggest that one thing is conscious while the other isn't. You would need some missing 'magic' that we haven't yet discovered to truly understand.
In other words, I find it uncompelling that AI is clearly lacking any major aspects of consciousness that humans are clearly not lacking.
All these policies actually sound good, SSRIs should not be first-line, as there is extremely limited evidence of meaningful effectiveness for anti-depressants generally.
Mmeta-analytic assessments of effect sizes show the observed effects are usually below what is required to count as a minimal clinically important difference, and antidepressants only target generally the "positive" symptoms of depression (sadness, anxiety) while doing little for the "negative" ones (anhedonia, lack of meaning, lack of motivation). They also have some serious side-effects, like emotional blunting and severe sexual dysfunction, the latter of which can persist for months even after stopping to take the drugs.
Even the usual excuses people make for these drugs ("Sure, the average effect is small, but they really help some people" and "Eventually the doctor finds the right one for you") are generally not supported by actual studies addressing these claims either.
There absolutely should be more monitoring and less careless prescribing of SSRIs and anti-depressants generally.
Literally all HN talks about is AI these days, and it is very, very clear that plenty of people are still writing lots of code, many finding AI makes them slower and causes more problems, and many making the reverse claims. There is always a rich mix of opinions and experiences here.
You would have to believe that literally everyone on HN is a bot (and also everyone on Reddit, Twitter, astralcodexten, or anywhere else online) to discount all these differing opinions in favor of "everyone I personally know" .
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