i grew up in rural canada and we used this all the time. it didn't even have to be in a box - if you could convince the driver to let you put it on the bus, you could ship it. and as long as it was going to another stop on the same bus route you could load it onto the bus yourself and the person you were shipping it to could take it off the bus, so there was no worrying about how the shippers were going to treat your stuff.
it was almost as good a service as having a friend with a truck that was going that way. but sadly, no more greyhound in canada.
Another interesting cultural development here is that the scope of parental responsibility has started to extend into what is conventionally considered adulthood, obligating parents to pay for their child’s post-secondary education. By contrast, children have effectively no legal obligations to their parents in old age. This privileges those who invest in financial instruments in lieu of having children, since the instruments will (at least in theory) provide the investor with the resources necessary to hire help in their old age.
o1-pro: anything important involving accuracy or reasoning. Does the best at accomplishing things correctly in one go even with lots of context.
deepseek R1: anything where I want high quality non-academic prose or poetry. Hands down the best model for these. Also very solid for fast and interesting analytical takes. I love bouncing ideas around with R1 and Grok-3 bc of their fast responses and reasoning. I think R1 is the most creative yet also the best at mimicking prose styles and tone. I've speculated that Grok-3 is R1 with mods and think it's reasonably likely.
4o: image generation, occasionally something else but never for code or analysis. Can't wait till it can generate accurate technical diagrams from text.
o3-mini-high and grok-3: code or analysis that I don't want to wait for o1-pro to complete.
claude 3.7: occasionally for code if the other models are making lots of errors. Sometimes models will anchor to outdated information in spite of being informed of newer information.
gemini models: occasionally I test to see if they are competitive, so far not really, though I sense they are good at certain things. Excited to try 2.5 Deep Research more, as it seems promising.
Perplexity: discontinued subscription once the search functionality in other models improved.
I'm really looking forward to o3-pro. Let's hope it's available soon as there are some things I'm working on that are on hold waiting for it.
> The DOI for a document remains fixed over the lifetime of the document, whereas its location and other metadata may change. Referring to an online document by its DOI should provide a more stable link than directly using its URL. But if its URL changes, the publisher must update the metadata for the DOI to maintain the link to the URL. It is the publisher's responsibility to update the DOI database. If they fail to do so, the DOI resolves to a dead link, leaving the DOI useless.
At a corner store I frequent, they recently changed POS systems, and the new ones show a tipping screen. The person there always quickly dismisses it; I think they haven't figured out how to disable it, and are a little embarrassed that the machine is asking you to tip for just ringing up your items.
(Well, they also make espresso drinks and made-to-order deli sandwiches, so I guess it's appropriate to tip if you order those.)
Yes, as I said, the company is based in China. Maybe you're trying to say Taiwan isn't in China because it isn't governed by the CPC, which makes as much sense as saying Switzerland isn't in Europe because it isn't part of the EU. Even if it were correct, it's irrelevant to the advantages I'm talking about.
TSMC in Arizona is implementing fabrication processes brought to production readiness by the hard work and expertise of people at TSMC in China, which can draw on the whole Chinese electronics ecosystem that doesn't exist in the US anymore.
He releases weekly 40-minute episodes covering topics like far-future engineering, aliens, planetary science, and all sorts of insane questions most people would never think to ask let alone spend 40 minutes answering. I stumbled upon this channel in 2020 and am so glad I did.
He produces similar content to Isaac Arthur but in shorter chunks, generally 20 minute episodes that are the ideal content for falling asleep (in a good way).
This is a series with 60-90 minute episodes released every 2-6 weeks. The production quality is insanely high, and the content is generally related to cosmology and history of science, often presenting answers to questions in a form of narrative from early scientists to modern day cosmologists.
Most WSF videos are 2-3 hour long conversations between host Brian Greene and either a single guest (like Stephen Wolfram recently) or a panel of a few guests. Brian Greene is an excellent moderator who possesses an unrivaled ability to articulate and ask thoughtful questions about the most complex of abstract concepts, in a way that a non-expert can understand and appreciate them.
Robert Lawrence Kuhn interviews guests in multi-part 10-20 minute videos asking deep questions about topics like consciousness, cosmology, physics and philosophy. Some of these episodes are old uploads, but I believe some of them are new as well. He's had some excellent guests, like Roger Penrose, Leonard Susskind, Nick Bostrom, and many others.
This one is more of a guilty pleasure, and it's a bit of a fringe channel that built most of its following from the UFO sub-culture. But the host Curt Jaimungal is highly articulate and asks thoughtful questions of guests that might not join other more mainstream podcasts. His open-mindedness has attracted a wide range of guests, from Lue Elizondo and Steven Greer, to Noam Chomsky and Stephen Wolfram. Generally speaking the guests are more weighted toward the "Intellectual Dark Web" variety, but don't let that stop you from watching. I first encountered this podcast because it was the only one to interview Salvatore Pais, the researcher whose name is on the US Navy patents for technology so futuristic that most consider it disinformation (I agree).
Every few months, they release a new video showing reverse engineering techniques and exploring various exploits they found. I normally don't watch tech content on YouTube, but these videos are always worth it, with unexpectedly rich information density on-par with exploit writeups, and presented in a way that takes advantage of the video format.
I listen to this podcast on Spotify, but it's worth including here because it's actually the only podcast I listen to. The episodes are great and Jack is a solid narrator. I recommend starting with episodes 99 and 100 about NSO Group.
Maybe tom7 will release a video this year, I hope he does, because they're all worth a watch. I don't even know how to describe them other than saying he does weird things with computers...
This channel posts reviews of small form-factor computers like routers and and SoCs. I don't watch it frequently, but occasionally there is a video that piques my interest. It should be interesting to anyone who likes content about homelabs.
Featuring content vaguely similar to ServeTheHome, Jeff Geerling posts videos about building things with Rasperry Pis and the like. It's a bit too clickbaity for me but he does have some decent content.
Most people have heard of these so I won't describe them, but they're always worth a watch. If for some reason you haven't heard of one of these, I suggest you click:
I think impartial observers have not spent time in actual government bureaucracy. Basically everything will seem like “they’re cutting something important!” Or “they’re stopping critical research!” because every government contract needs justification; so naturally they will all sound good. The data and accounting itself is such bad quality in all cases that it is impossible to be perfect at this; there are entire industries dedicated to simply analyzing and tracking contracts and spending. None of them are above ~90% accurate. Many “analysts” born over the last couple weeks are talking about things they know nothing about; for example measuring savings off calls on BPAs or IDIQs is silly because a call = spent money. You cannot save money you have already spent, but you can stop the vehicle.
I’m not saying DOGE is definitively good or even that they are going to actually accomplish their mission (probably their cuts will become a piggy bank that gets raided by OTA’s at the end of the fiscal year). But it is absolutely true that the federal government is endlessly wasteful; it’s insane watching everyone around me get gaslit into thinking the government is actually efficient.
What is on paper for government contracts is totally different from reality. Most of these programs accomplish nothing, are totally un-utilized, filled with employees who literally do not show up to work.
I could write a novel with examples but here are some notable anecdotes:
- Once, I built an intelligence solution for a large-ish intelligence program within a civil agency. After 6 months it was not used once but cost the government a cool ~12M$. Only after a full year did the program leadership finally take a look and discover, wait a second, none of these people have worked more than a week total in the past year. Only half got laid off, the rest are still gainfully employed elsewhere in the government. Many such cases!
- I’ll probably get skewered for saying this here but, let’s talk about the defense tech darling Palantir. Of all of Palantir’s contracts, only about 5% (~10) have more than 100 users. Average case is 10-20 total users, 1-2 weekly active users. Several contracts that have never had a single user. All expensive contracts (10M+), mostly building basic internal tools that replace Sharepoint. On paper all of these contracts sound amazing, they make for great resume filler as well. This is what your tax dollars are being used for!
- Dozens of cases of the government spending on “XYZ tool” that sounds super critical. In reality they are paying $12M for a postgres database and an extremely basic data entry UI on top. Also, I can’t believe I am about to defend Sharepoint, but realistically something like tracking 10 SIM cards can go in an excel spreadsheet and doesn’t need a $12M “inventory tool.”
- Many cases of projects investigating bird flu in depth and tracking its spread as early as 2022. You would think this is critical with bird flu being a thing right now; however none of these $20M+ contracts have accomplished much at all.
You have to understand bureaucrats behave like Google PMs. They essentially are chasing a promotion that comes with amassing and utilizing a large budget and having a bunch of reports doing the same. The only way to go from GS-12 to GS-13 to GS-14 to GS-15 is just to spend recklessly. They are experts at justifying their budget and navigating internal hierarchies. However bad your experience with corporate politics, know that government is 100x worse.
(Disclaimer: “government” above refers to civil, exclusive of DoD)
As someone who's done most of the substances listed in the article; none of this matters.
First of all, you can't take 16 people with the drug-taking profiles listed and reliably account for their drug and alcohol intake. 100% of their sample came into the lab as drug seeking individuals. Expecting them to only take drugs under your supervision is a fairy tale. Expecting them to tell the truth about their alcohol intake is also a fairy tale. I'm not trying to be incendiary, I am speaking from experience as a recovering alcoholic with 5 years sobriety.
Second of all, 10 day spacing between doses is insane, and dangerous. Having done this particular drug many times, I can tell you that it takes at least 2 days to feel "normal". And by that, I mean "as normal as you're ever going to feel." You see, LSD changes you... forever. Each time I took LSD I only ever "came down" 99.5%. That other 0.5% stays with you for years, if not forever. You never fully "come down" all the way. You're always just a little "less" than you were before.
Thirdly; this particular drug is not just mind altering, it is life altering. It unlocks things in your mind that permanently change your perception. I don't know anyone who's taken this drug who disagrees with this statement. This permanent altering of your consciousness is literally the thing you pay for and hope to receive.
Honestly science will probably never get LSD right. In order to do so the scientists would need to experience LSD first hand, several times before they could reasonably ever begin planning such an experiment. "You just don't know what you don't know."
My great grandmother, who was 83 or 84 at the time, had had a brain tumor (which was removed once it got to between golf ball and baseball size) and was pretty far along into Alzheimer's as she got got close to her death.
For the last several months, she wasn't able to feed or clothe herself, and she was basically immobile.
The day she died, she got up, went to her room, made her bed (unthinkable in the state she was in), put on her "Sunday's best" and laid down peacefully in the middle of her bed and passed.
Her daughter (my grandmother), was floored. She just said she must have just known it was her time, and that she had a few minutes of lucidity before dying.
Whether there's any truth to that I'm not qualified to answer, but if you had seen the state she was in for quite some time prior to that day, her actions would certainly have been surprising to say the least.
Have done both clinical Ketamine and Psilocybin therapy.
Ketamine was very interesting. Proper completely dissociative "K-hole" experience. I feel like it helped with Anxiety, but I can't pinpoint "why" from an introspective perspective.
Psilocybin on the other hand. Was a hero dose, and I'm a changed person afterwards.
Could feel the "layers" of my identity being stripped off, almost regression to a more child-like state. Very interesting experience. Had strong synesthesia: sounds would produce colors, colors would produce tastes, fun experience.
Near the peak of the experience I had these strong recurring auditory hallucination of my mothers says all these random words from my youth, these were accompanied by strong feeling of anxiety. After a lot of post-experience integration and reflection I realized that my mothers anxiety about the world was effectively "programmed" into my brain during my upbringing. e.g. Generationally transmitted anxiety.
Therapy always talks about childhood trauma, etc, but actually experiencing it was another level, and really helped me on my journey to being a less anxious person.
Before the Psilocybin experience, I suffered from existential depression: what's the point of living if the sun is going to explode in ~x billion years. Towards the peak of the experience everything was super chaotic, I felt like I was being transported into different realities (e.g. realities with different laws of physics, or different space time geometries). This was hugely anxiety inducing and would otherwise be called a "bad trip." I felt "lost" in this sea of all different realities.
As I was coming down from the peak and started to reintegrate, I had a strong distinct sense of "coming back" to our current reality. It felt like finding a safe tropical island in a sea of chaos: e.g. our currently reality is a safe space and point of stability in a sea of chaos and uninviting realities.
I was truly, deeply, grateful to be able to return to the familiar and it made me really really deeply appreciate myself and the blessing that our reality is to us.
Post the experience I also acquired the ability to observe my emotions from a third person perspective. e.g. rather than feeling "angry" I could tag the emotion "angry" and react accordingly, almost as if I gained ring 0 access to my brain when I previously only have ring 1 access.
All-in-all probably the most profound and healing experience of my life.
1. Deeply felt and understood my anxiety was generationally passed on from my mother's anxiety,
2. Eliminated my existential depression, giving me a deep appreciation for the beauty of our reality,
3. Gave me ring 0 access to my emotions making me a much more stable, calm person.
Anecdotally, this is true even as an adult. As a non-trad student the application side of things as they are taught are fairly effete, we learn how to translate graphs in algebra, quadratics, polynomials... I don't recall much in the way of meaningful application in either trig or algebra and what was there was remembered solely in the context of future examination.
In one hand I would argue there is virtually no incentive for play, or discovery, or superfluous activity with the math due to grading, and in fact it's disincentivized as it is one factor of a multivariate optimization problem. On the other hand I would argue that it's taught too fast as an effect of the former condition - as someone who isn't in a highly mathematical branch of STEM the use of mathematics is comparably infrequent when considering the TEM, as such atrophy sets rapidly after examination. And this could be said more generally with the S as well, though there is some degree of reinforcement there.
As things are, I feel that the timeline is askew, the won't if these institutions to produce biologists along the same timeline as they did a few decades ago is a little ridiculous considering the ballooning of quantitative discovery that has occured since, for instance, it wasn't so long ago that DNA was a conceptual exercise.
Moreover, the failure of education to keep with the times and adapt a realistic curricula for the modern era is also inhibitory. Indeed I would argue that the current academic zeitgeist is working against itself. At once being a trade program and while also trying to facilitate the development of "academia" itself are forces acting against one another. The number of premed students running the gauntlet in my program far outweigh the number of people with [let's say] legitimate interest in learning about the concepts in the program, which are also made to compete with the premeds in the limited slots available for lab internships. In my experience this leads to a chilling effect. Fortuitously, once in a lab things tend to be a little more facorable in terms of rapport.
I sincerely hope US and Canada can regrow some manufacturing capacity. I think the only way to do it is by a one-two punch, and middle class like me are going to seriously get hurt, but I still want it done, for the sake of later generations and for a better, safer, more competitive humanity. Safer because a successful reform removes the need of a world war.
The one-two punch is:
1) A massive devaluation of housing, stocks and other similar items. The reason for this is we need to introduce local, more affordable merchandises, which can only be brought by cheaper lands, cheaper labor -- but no one is going to work $6 an hour (about 45 Yuan per hour, more or less on par with the better paid Chinese manufacturers I think) unless, unless housing and renting costs a fraction, like, 20%. That's why I said we are going to get seriously hurt. This is basically a wealth transfer from the richer to the poorer.
2) Educate a whole generation that labor is honorable, so that engineers, scientists, technicians and such get more respect (I mean real respect, not the superficial one nowadays) than lawyers and bankers. It's a social change that takes at least one generation, perhaps two. Maybe I didn't put it right, but by saying getting more respect I'm basically saying getting an equal pay and equal say.
But I'm seeing is that US is taking another darker road.
What leverage does the US government actually have?
Is "we just won't fund your drug, even though people will die and you're the only option on the market" actually something that could happen? Would that be politically palatable to anybody?
I guess there's patent invalidation and forced genericization, but that would kill innovation real quick.
I think a far better idea would be to impose very strict caps on admin / non-medical costs, potentially at the expense of paying a bit more to fraudsters, changing FDA regulations to minimize (death from side effects + death from no available drugs) instead of just the former, as well as becoming a lot more aggressive about expensive and unnecessary procedures that doctors perform to get rich quick.
Everyone is going to make this about money or unions or etc, but my employer briefly worked with some ATC employee groups and I can tell you exactly why they are short staffed:
- The FAA has strict hiring requirements. You have to be mentally and physically capable, and by their own admission less than 10% of applicants are qualified for the job. https://www.faa.gov/air-traffic-controller-qualifications
- The training and onboarding process is incredibly long, and turnover is high
- The fundamentals and technology of the job have not changed in decades, despite air traffic exploding in recent years
- Most people are just not capable of the amount of stress and risk associated with the job
- Seriously, it's a really freaking stressful job
I would argue an ATC employee is worth every penny, but I also don't think there is a magical amount of money where you are going to suddenly double your pool of candidates willing to do this kind of work. These people are already very well compensated, and at a certain point you are just going to be cannibalizing other talent pools.
The real need is new and modern technology that automates much of the mistake-prone, human-centric tasks. But nobody wants to risk introducing changes to such a fragile system.
The crazy thing is that ORACLE was a CIA program that Larry got a contract for. He named his company after it.
A genius aspect of Larry is that, like Steve Jobs (his best friend), he knew how to milk a gifted 50x programmer. There was a co-founder who did all the heavy code writing, while Larry did the schmoozing (not an unimportant job).
Our legislative branch is unable to even minimally fulfill its Constitutional duties.
We haven't declared war since WWII, but we've waged a number of them.
The Congressional budget process is fundamentally broken and increasingly nondemocratic - the leadership of both parties get "continuing resolutions" passed while they draft a mountainous "omnibus" bill that includes all their pork and graft, then they whip the members of the majority party to pass it without reading it.
The Congressional oversight committees are usually captured by the industries and/or agencies they oversee.
Congressional hearings are not used to inform Congress or the people; they're nakedly partisan acting gigs for committee members.
Congress has unconstitutionally delegated much of its authority to a bureaucracy run by the executive branch, intending to have it operate independently of the president. Now we have a president who is choosing to exercise his authority over the executive branch.
Of course, it is illegal and unconstitutional for the president to eliminate programs that are established by law. But remember the executive branch bureaucracy ONLY exists to allow the president to implement the laws passed by Congress. If the laws aren't explicit or delegate to an executive branch agency HOW they law/program will be implemented, then the president has enormous authority over how to implement it, and there is nothing Constitutionally wrong with that. So if the president says "we don't need 10000 people to implement CFR 1.2.3 section 4, we only need 10", and he can implement the law/program as passed by Congress with 10 people, then he's allowed to do that.
The big problem is that Congress MUST depend on the executive branch to, er, execute. Whatever is required to implement the law, that isn't specified in the law, is up to the executive branch, and the President is the head of that branch.
And all this BS about "classification" again only exists to enable the president to do his job. If the president says someone can have access to something, that is non-negotiable, as two USAID folks found out over the weekend. The bureaucracy has for decades used classification to make a currency out of secrets and to try to avoid oversight. Looks like that ride has ended.
Fomenko's theories, mentioned in the article, are pretty fascinating. I love the romance of the idea that history is all wrong and that everything was made up at a variety of chokepoints around literacy and access to original documents.
Fundamentally it seems implausible (extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence and all) but it's fun to read about, although I have not braved his actual writings to get context (I do, oddly, have a couple of mathematical textbooks that he wrote, however).
The most interesting thing that I saw was his critique of carbon-14 dating. And while I don't concede the central point, it led me down a rabbit hole of realizing that carbon dating is a lot more complex and rule-of-thumb driven than I would have thought, because in the end it relies upon historic atmospheric C14/C12 ratios that we mostly have good information on from ... radiocarbon dating on artifacts of known provenance. That's not the entirety of the story but it was surprising to me that something that is so often thrown out as an example of formal scientific methods in history is so heuristic and complex, rather than a simple application of math and physics.
I agree that reasoning and consciousness are different, however what I do not see being discussed by the AI research community is the necessity to define and then develop "artificial comprehension".
At this point in time, the act of comprehension is a scientific mystery.
I'd say 'consciousness' is the ongoing ever present comprehension of the moment, a feedback self conversation assessing the current situation a being finds itself. This act requires reasoning, as comprehension is the "sandbox" in which reasoning occurs.
But what is comprehension? It's the instantaneous reverse engineering of observations for verification of reality: is what I observe normal, possible or a threat? If one cannot "understand" an observation then the potential the observation is a threat grows. That 'understanding" is reverse engineering the observation to identify it's range of possible behavior and therefore one's safety in relation to that observation.
Comprehension is extremely complex: arbitrary input goes in and a world model with one's safety and next actions comes out.
"... insanity is often marked by the dominance of reason and the exclusion of creativity and humour. Pure reason is inhuman. The madman’s mind moves in a perfect, but narrow, circle, and his explanation of the world is comprehensive, at least to him."
[Former member of that world, roommates with one of Ziz's friends for a while, so I feel reasonably qualified to speak on this.]
The problem with rationalists/EA as a group has never been the rationality, but the people practicing it and the cultural norms they endorse as a community.
As relevant here:
1) While following logical threads to their conclusions is a useful exercise, each logical step often involves some degree of rounding or unknown-unknowns. A -> B and B -> C means A -> C in a formal sense, but A -almostcertainly-> B and B -almostcertainly-> C does not mean A -almostcertainly-> C. Rationalists, by tending to overly formalist approaches, tend to lose the thread of the messiness of the real world and follow these lossy implications as though they are lossless. That leads to...
2) Precision errors in utility calculations that are numerically-unstable. Any small chance of harm times infinity equals infinity. This framing shows up a lot in the context of AI risk, but it works in other settings too: infinity times a speck of dust in your eye >>> 1 times murder, so murder is "justified" to prevent a speck of dust in the eye of eternity. When the thing you're trying to create is infinitely good or the thing you're trying to prevent is infinitely bad, anything is justified to bring it about/prevent it respectively.
3) Its leadership - or some of it, anyway - is extremely egotistical and borderline cult-like to begin with. I think even people who like e.g. Eliezer would agree that he is not a humble man by any stretch of the imagination (the guy makes Neil deGrasse Tyson look like a monk). They have, in the past, responded to criticism with statements to the effect of "anyone who would criticize us for any reason is a bad person who is lying to cause us harm". That kind of framing can't help but get culty.
4) The nature of being a "freethinker" is that you're at the mercy of your own neural circuitry. If there is a feedback loop in your brain, you'll get stuck in it, because there's no external "drag" or forcing functions to pull you back to reality. That can lead you to be a genius who sees what others cannot. It can also lead you into schizophrenia really easily. So you've got a culty environment that is particularly susceptible to internally-consistent madness, and finally:
5) It's a bunch of very weird people who have nowhere else they feel at home. I totally get this. I'd never felt like I was in a room with people so like me, and ripping myself away from that world was not easy. (There's some folks down the thread wondering why trans people are overrepresented in this particular group: well, take your standard weird nerd, and then make two-thirds of the world hate your guts more than anything else, you might be pretty vulnerable to whoever will give you the time of day, too.)
TLDR: isolation, very strong in-group defenses, logical "doctrine" that is formally valid and leaks in hard-to-notice ways, apocalyptic utility-scale, and being a very appealing environment for the kind of person who goes super nuts -> pretty much perfect conditions for a cult. Or multiple cults, really. Ziz's group is only one of several.
> Weird to see a community I followed show up so close to home and negatively like this.
I had some coworkers who were really into LessWrong and rationality. I thought it was fun to read some of the selected writings they would share, but I always felt that online rationalist communities collected a lot of people with reactionary, fascist, misogynistic, and far-right tendencies. There’s a heavily sanitized version of rationality and EA that gets presented online with only the highlights, but there’s a lot more out there in the fringes that is really weird.
For example, many know about Roko’s Basilisk as a thought exercise and much has been written about it, but fewer know that Roko has been writing misogynistic rants on Twitter and claiming things like having women in the workforce is “very negative” for GDP.
The Slate Star Codex subreddit was a home for rationalists on Reddit, but they had so many problems with culture war topics that they banned discussion of them. The users forked off and created “The Motte” which is a bit of a cesspool dressed up with rationalist prose. Even the SlateStarCodex subreddit has become so toxic that I had to unsubscribe. Many of the posts and comments on women or dating were becoming indistinguishable from incel communities other than the rationalist prose style.
Even the real-world rationalist and EA communities aren’t immune, with several high profile sexual misconduct scandals making the news in recent years.
It’s a weird space. It felt like a fun internet philosophy community when my coworkers introduced it years ago, but the longer I’ve observed it the more I’ve realized it attracts and accepts a lot of people whose goals aren’t aligned with objectively “make the world better” as long as they can write their prose in the rationalist style. It’s been strange to observe.
Of course, at every turn people will argue that the bad actors are not true rationalists, but I’ve seen enough from these communities to know that they don’t really discriminate much until issues boil over into the news.
I wonder how much room there is for misfits these days. Young people have to nail it or fail with a high student debt burden.
I think in the past we missed a language to label the "weird" and unproductive people. But I know of communities were it was common for an employer to "hire" such people for a period, then pass the buck to another employer. Now the thing is, in the past, it was for the public normal to see a commercial enterprise as a social enterprise too.
Nothing of that is left anymore in today's Management Schools. In the technocratic thought of Nazism it started by just killing "unsocial elements" (read: people with disabilities).
The Euthanasia Program required the cooperation of many German doctors, who reviewed the medical files of patients in institutions to determine which individuals with disabilities should be killed. The doctors also supervised the actual killings. Doomed patients were transferred to six institutions in Germany and Austria, where they were killed in specially constructed gas chambers. Infants and small children with disabilities were also killed by injection with a deadly dose of drugs or by starvation. The bodies of the victims were burned in large ovens called crematoria.
(https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-murder-of-people-with-disabilities)
Okay, that escalated quickly. But talking about fitting in has to answer what it means to be human. And if we as society are actually at ease with people that are not as productive in current business processes. We obviously don't want to kill them, but on the other hand we require them to be "normal". Helping kids learning/trying to adapt a bit is not bad per se. But can we handle it when it doesn't work?
The point is: there isn't a "right" way. That's exactly what the author is trying to say. By failing to recognize the ways in which they were different, they forced a mode upon them and here we are. A whole medicalized generation addicted to stimulants trying to fit in where in past generations you had artists and rebels and seekers and every other kind of misfit that made life interesting and unique and challenging to the status quo.
The article says it had to be open source because otherwise people wouldn't trust the Chinese but ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba also do LLMs and are not open source.
It's funny reading an article interviewing the ceo:
>Until now, among the seven major Chinese large-model startups, it’s the only one... that hasn’t fully considered commercialization, firmly choosing the open-source route without even raising capital.
>While these choices often leave it in obscurity, DeepSeek frequently gains organic user promotion within the community.
The ceo's actual argument for open source is quite interesting, basically that it helps attract the best people and the value is in the team. It's kind of what used to work for OpenAI before it became the ClosedAI division of Microsoft.
it was almost as good a service as having a friend with a truck that was going that way. but sadly, no more greyhound in canada.