Out of curiosity, what kind of physical shape are you in? I’m nearing 40 and have wanted kids my entire life, but similarly, haven’t found the right partner. If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself. But I’m also in excellent physical shape and feel no physically different than I did in my 20s (other than being stronger and more coordinated now).
I have health issues so there is that. I think most 40 yo if they go to the gym on a good routine can have the energy. Add in a reasonable job (not an AI startup with a hammock in the kitchen). But 40 you are rolling the dice. 40+ you can die from things and it is not unheard of. It is quite old in a way. You can also have issues unexpectedly that depleat capacity.
Just reread your comment. Don't kill yourself!!! Help raise your niece or nephew or friends kids. You can pass on social inheritence! And you can work in a cube at Google and send half the money to kids charities.
> If I ever felt I was too old to have kids I’d probably have no choice but to kill myself
sperm quantity and quality decreases with age. studies exist that suggest higher risk of autism when father's age >= 45.
you're not too old, but you should probably test & freeze some good sperm before you might actually be too old by the time you find the right person. this way you won't ever feel like you're too old to have kids. then the question becomes more of "how long and in what manner will my remaining health allow me to enjoy them"
I had kids 'early' for my peer group (early 30s when most are pushing 40) and there is a noticeable difference in the amount of energy I have. It's not playing games with kids (the stereotypical keeping up with the kids at the park) it's that early years of childhood mean that you have 5+ years of bad / shorter sleep and get sick more than you probably have since you were a child.
Unless the baby was born into more debt than those people, no. It’s a fact that the baby is wealthier than they are. A substantial portion of our population is in debt. This is a fact.
It’s only “misleading” if you’re so out of touch that you don’t know a substantial portion of the population is in crippling debt.
There’s nothing misleading about the fact that negative net worth is worse than zero. And a person without debt factually does have far more wealth than 10 million people in debt.
Real estate, automobiles, credentials/degrees, and businesses are all assets that would counterbalance their debt. (Credentials and degrees are not liquid, but you'd be hard pressed to argue that a doctor's license isn't worth many dollars).
The much more likely situation is a person with no assets or money and some credit card debt. Indeed, a person with simply no money is better off than such a person.
Right, and they're arguing that the quoted statistic isn't counting credentials and degrees as assets, because there's not a convention for how to value them.
I think it has its place, say, summarizing a large legal document under discussion. That said, if part of what someone says involves citing AI, I’d rather they acknowledge AI as their source.
I think making it a “rule” just encourages people to use AI and not acknowledge its use.
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.
Or so you think. Humans aren't any good at that whole "self-awareness" thing.
Even the "no empathy" sociopaths can spend decades thinking that they're perfectly normal, everyone is like them, and people just pretend to be sad and grieving at the funerals because that's some kind of established convention and breaking it would be very rude.
What I'm saying is: maybe you just think you don't show any signs of autism - because you think your experience is "normal", and you think that everyone has the same struggles as you do, even when it isn't true.
Or maybe you genuinely aren't autistic at all! It's just very, very hard to say at a glance.
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.
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.
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.
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