a U.S. push for “deprescribing”

  Doctors and researchers know antidepressants don’t work for everyone, and some even agree the drugs are overprescribed.

  finding the right treatment is often a frustrating matter of trial and error

  One method for doing so, based on brain imaging, is already moving toward approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a tool to guide prescribing.

   a statistical and AI tool called PETRUSHKA, which they trained on the sociodemographic details and health histories

By the way, the study (linked in article) is shocking. The fact that at least two PhDs signed off on a study with such an obvious glaring issue ("lack of a double-blind design and the large amount of missing data limit the validity of these results") to get a paper out and promote their vibe-coded webapp is a massive indictment of our academic system. Or at least Britain's, I guess. In case it's not obvious: of course people who are told their antidepressants were asigned by a super intelligent machine based on a detailed quiz will be more patient with them than people who get the "usual standard of care", which, again, is very intentionally and openly "guess-and-check" and often opaque to the patient.

  He and his team have trained a machine learning model on patient records from a clinical trial and used it to predict who would do better on CBT or one of two antidepressants.

  Other researchers are looking for clues to treatment response in the brain activity thought to underlie depression. “That’s really what we’re treating,” says Leanne Williams, a psychiatrist at Stanford University. Her research has identified six distinct “biotypes” of depression based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

  The tool might also identify people who will likely never respond to either psychotherapy or first-line antidepressants, Williams says—potentially allowing them to skip straight to second-line therapies such as transcranial brain stimulation, electroconvulsive therapy, or ketamine.

Sorry for the spam. Just scary and frustrating. I'm at least the author here is trying to frame this in a way that might redirect some of the unscientific, hateful, ignorant urges of the Health Czar.

2. The vast majority of our spending is not discretionary, anyway. You can’t refinance social security.

3. Democrats held the executive for the past two recession recoveries, and spent accordingly at the advice of new school economists. Which worked both times, BTW.

4. The government’s budget is not like a household budget — a deficit isn’t necessarily a terrible thing. Obviously the current situation is absurd, but we should also avoid simplifying complex matters of state like libertarians do with ethics just to avoid hard conversations.

1. First off: the deficit article were commenting under right now. This is unusual and terrible and 100% due to GOP norm breaking.

2. The BBB raised the debt astronomically, so this will continue well past the end of the war.

3. We’re engaged in a war of choice with a huge country with no end in sight and no stated objective, and the pentagon is getting more money than ever.

4. The corruption and graft is so rank and blatant that it might actually make a dent here, which is absurd. God forbid they carry out their ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza and then we pay for Trump City, there. Not to mention all the subordinate graft.

5. Only one party has divorced itself from reason entirely. Democrats are deeply flawed and I disagree with many of them on many things, but none of them dare try the ‘nuh uh shut up’ approach that is central to the GOP in the days of Trump. Imagine if they said anything as absurd as “Haitians are eating our cats and dogs” or “I’ll give everyone $5k” or “I didn’t lose the election that every single watchdog said I did” — they would be lambasted and forgotten within days.

6. Only one party is planning for the other party to ever be in power ever again. That is, assuming you don’t take Miller’s word for it that there are seven bajillion illegal aliens that the democrats ship in to win elections, which just hasn’t happened to work yet because the GOP is just too popular, and hasn’t been uncovered in any actual investigations because they’re just too darn tricky.

Sorry. Presumably this whole thread will be wiped anyway. But this is not a “both parties” thing! We’ve had a balanced budget and a positive treasury balance in my lifetime, and I’m a baby person!

(People said it was impossible then as well, FWIW.)

1. In Science and Reflection, he says that both the 'completely calculated' nature of classical mechanics and the 'statistical character' of quantum mechanics are two representation of an underlying 'objectness of material nature'.

2. In Discourse on Thinking, he's far more concerned with the instrumental, utilitarian nature of machines than literal determinism, a concept he (somewhat confusingly/uniquely) connects to computation/'computational thinking', as opposed to the inherently-human capability for 'meditative thinking'. I personally would say this bit is refuted by LLMs in the end, but because they have intuitive rationality, a capability that seemed impossible to artificially design to the scientists of the time -- not because they involve dice.

3. In What is Thinking?, he gives the closest connection of this dichotomy to one of his better-known main topics, namely [handi]craft as a special subset of work: 'what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.' In this sense machines would be merely manipulating tools, stochastic or otherwise.

4. Overall I get the sense from skimming that lecture that his concern is a little mischaracterized, and in a kind of beautiful way that backs up my "Dune is still about AI" thesis described in a top-level comment somewhere below: his concern is about any society that could build complex machines (a 'technological' one), not the behavioral aspects of the machines themselves. So that concern applies equally to Star Trek (AGI), 1984 (no AGI), and our current post-singularity society (it's complicated/potentially ""just"" guessing).

All of this fits very well into his central thesis, which is continuing the Kantian & Hegelian tradition of examining how humans might be moral, free, and spiritual despite being meat computers of a largely-unknowable nature. In Heideggerland, this is expressed best in dramatic, nigh-unreadable passages like:

  Temporality already maintains itself ecstatically within the horizons of its ecstases; and in temporalizing itself, it comes back to those entities which are encountered in the "there".
  With Dasein's factical existence, entities within-the-world are already encountered too.
  The fact that such entities are discovered along with Dasein's own "there" of existence, is not left to Dasein's discretion.
  Only what it discovers and discloses on occasion, in what direction it does so, how and how far it does so—only these are matters for Dasein's freedom, even if always within the limitations of its thrownness.

Three very quick thoughts:

1. The Votann are remnants of humanity from the time when our Terran super-AIs ('Men of Gold') had built advanced ship-based AIs ('Men of Stone') to enable long-sleep-style interstellar colonization, and the enigmatic "Votann Cores" that guide them(/are them) are strongly hinted to be those same AIs, just degraded over ~19,000 years. They were sidelined later on, after humans discovered FTL through an alternate dimension, 'the immaterium'.

2. The story is very obviously based on Dune, and like everything else in 40k is turned up to 11 and stripped of nuance for effect. Some sentient robots ('Men of Iron') "revolted" after ~three millenia of brutal, Star Wars-style slavery, but the overarching "Age of Strife" was about human wars in an non-unified galaxy, with the robots being a primary weapon; the actual revolt/jihad was a symptom, just like it was in Dune.

3. The 'Adeptus Mechanicus' mentioned above are a parody of cargo cults (religions that worship technology they don't understand) mixed with a dystopian take on the themes of A Canticle for Lebowitz, and are very much depicted with derision. Whatever your thoughts are on AI, dear reader, please never say "abominable intelligence" like it's wisdom rather than the fruit of a dogmatic & ineffective cult!

Of course, 40k lore is notoriously amorphous; some authors have said/hinted otherwise. But I think the above interpretation is the most coherent and interesting and supported overall, IMHO. For example, #2 is supported by the fact that the space elves ('Aeldari'/Eldar) ruled the galaxy at the time and seemed unconcerned by humanity's antics, which wouldn't make sense in light of an actual ASI threat proper.

All he mentioned explicitly was the very last clause, but the others are more important & uniquely-Dunean IMHO, and are central to the plot from the jump through the Bene Gesserit, the Mentats, and the Guild Navigators, all ostensibly Homo sapiens sapiens despite being completely unnatural. Even "Imperial Conditioning" --which obviously plays the biggest part in the first act of the first book-- is arguably the same topic. By refusing to include computers and robots at all, the reader is naturally guided to consider those more familiar tropes in light of the world-building snippets we get. Which is kinda what makes Dune so genius, I think!

Like, to make it explicit... I think having the aforementioned abhumans drive the plot without significant support from inhuman minds raises more subtle questions than we're used to in far-future tales of robots, like:

1. Can one lose their humanity through experience, be it intentional "conditioning" or just the acquisition of power? (see: Paul vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)

2. Once one has lost their humanity superficially, can it be brought back/up/forward? Is love/greif the most plausible path, and thus the most human cognitive processes? (see: Dr. Yueh vis-a-vis Eichmann in Jerusalem)

3. If we try to maintain our humanity in the long term --the default goal of non-insane futurists, though debated in the 21st c.[1][2]-- how do we protect against the natural urge to pursue power, which is (arguably) inherently human?[3]

I'll cut it off there cause this threat will likely be deleted anyway and I'm heavily procrastinating. Long story short: the Butlerian Jihad is not a condemnation of artificial minds, and if even it were, the condemnation would apply equally as much if not more so to the humanist empire in which the story is set.

Also, hopefully obvious, but just in case: it likely began as an excuse to write the stories that he wanted to write, just like the shield thing giving an excuse for swords in space. But I think Herbert deserves credit for what was running underneath that and elaborated on as it became a series of novels rather than cute periodical stories. He was pretty smart!

Also also: we do not discuss the son's book about Butler lol. It is verboten.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_affair

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_We_Became_Posthuman

[3]: This kind of structural conflict could be described as 'internal contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism or 'endogenous contradiction' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogeneity_(econometrics) depending on your preferred flavor of economics.

2. My point was that you don't understand the basics of their position. Just repeating "they're wrong" does not disabuse me of that notion. Also, anything about a "nanny state" is too far below the standards of this forum to reply to at all, sorry.

3. Superintelligence is not closer to speech than nuclear science, obviously. How often does speech lead to thousands, millions, or billions of deaths all on its own? And "their argument relies on part of their argument" isn't a rebuttal; if you read some of the papers, it is far from a presupposition.

4. I'm not sure what you're getting at here, sorry. Oh maybe this is a continuation of the above, rather than a reply to my #4? If so: yes, that's the core of the danger. You have successfully surmised one of the most serious threats.

5. Ok.

6. This just feels like a "many people are saying" argument. No, the patterns and trends are not clear: that's literally the basic question we're discussing right now.

7. That's still not what regulatory capture looks like, but also: no, they do not. Dario met him for the first time recently, and it was about intimidating him into compliance after they refused to make autonomous weapons for the pentagon. Altman has been there a few times, but A) not "on a regular basis", and B) again, that's not how regulatory capture works. The only AI CEO close to Trump is Musk, and even then it's obviously... complicated.

8. Literally the textbook definition of an ad-hominem lol. Never seen it stated so plainly and baselessly!

9. Great question! This is a large part of what's examined by the relevant literature, and they have many compelling arguments of various kinds. My favorite, layperson-targeted version is the blog post Optimality is the tiger, and agents are its teeth[1]

"Predeterminism" isn't a framework. I think the gist of what you're saying here is just "you never know for certain what's gonna happen so don't worry about it", which doesn't need rebuttal.

Yes, transparency and reproducibility sound great! It should be mandatory to conduct this research safely! We are 100% in agreement, in the end. We're just in disagreement about whether you can pattern-match this discussion to libertarian talking points from the early 2010s.

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality...

2. Opening with “these people are batshit” is a pretty undeniable sign that you have no coherent theory of mind for them.

3. 1984 wasn’t about regulation of superintelligence. Governments are the only ones who can say “who can use [fissile material], and for what” — has that created 1984? It started 30 years before that, so it should’ve created 1984 by 1984!

4. No one’s banning “open weights”, they’re banning superintelligence development without any of the protections we find to be obviously essential for far, far less dangerous things. Perhaps they would’ve been open to something more drastic, but post GLM-5.3 that’s kinda moot. The cat’s out of the bag.

5. Investors don’t control Anthropic, and their control over OpenAI is complex and highly unusual to say the least.

6. “Some capitalists have done X therefor all capitalists force all companies they invest in to do X” is just not sound logic.

7. Finally: that isn’t what regulatory capture looks like! It looks like revolving doors and packing boards and shady policies, not publicly campaigning for new statutes.

2. It seems your rebuttal to the article is “well maybe it’s a plot but just not one they’ve ever talked to each other about, but just happen to all secretly believe in the efficacy of”. Which, obviously: ???

3. We know who wrote this post, and it’s not from “the top of AI companies”. It’s from someone desperately trying to prevent the catastrophe that you’ll be up in arms about in 3-6 months.

Assuming I'm not just misunderstanding something critical (happens often!) and you haven't explored this already (very possible!), pointing your agent at this link and asking for some prototypes might be illuminating: https://huggingface.co/models?pipeline_tag=image-segmentatio...

1. Adding bounding boxes only compounds the biggest issue with Jev, which is that it's using a massive model to do what we've been using purpose-built[1] models to do for years(/decades), only a little worse and a lot more expensive. This is fine --great, even-- if presented as a tradeoff.[2] And a product that enables "smart if statements" that are "sci-fi" does not sound like a tradeoff at all. In that light, ending the post with facetiously-labeled graphs that just show it beating a bunch of random names (including models with twenty-seven BILLION parameters) on unknown metrics feels borderline dishonest.

2. "We love the community's desire to help make models better!" feels like Manufacturing Consent but with way lower stakes. I turn on various experimental features and pick nightly builds and all that like many of us do, but this feels... well, at best it's kinda offputting rhetoric for a practice I otherwise condone. IMHO.

3. Their job postings go beyond groan-inducing to vaguely insulting. Take this "Data Demon" posting[3], which is presumably for a data scientist (data engineer...?) but is branded around mocking the Turing-award-winning scientists trying to warn the world about superintelligence. Yes, I had the same reaction: what? Why?? It's giving a corporate culture where A) executives feel entitled to shoot from the hip and inject their personal crusades on a whim, and where B) scientists/science isn't appreciated (or, worse: understood). Criticizing the concept of measurement isn't helping, nor is their choice to label output percentages as confidence scores.

I guess I hope I'm misunderstanding, cause they're gonna make millions regardless, I'm sure. I just know that I can't think of when I'd reach for Jev 1.*[4] for a prod usecase, and this is an awfully big company for a prototyping shortcut.

[1]: https://huggingface.co/models

[2]: of dev speed for cost and accuracy, which is lowkey another way to say efficiency and efficacy. Two pretty massive things to trade!

[3]: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/typesafe-ai/d315d436-e517-4f17-82bb...

[4]: Which, btw, what happened to semver? Did we stop doing semver cause python did? Did I miss a memo/blog? Not a rhetorical question, I swear. Deprecating minor versions just seems unholy, much less minor version thirteen!

Though I suppose it is the B in DABDA... not excited for the societal slump into the second D, much less the wave of people who have yet to leave the first D to enter A :(

...that's not how copyright works. You can't poison an open source project with code that's fully and unreservedly in the public domain, if that precedent stands for much longer and if that precedent is applied to software in a way that's even vaguely analagous to how it's applied to things that judges sorta kinda understand.

Two important caveats, though, before we rush to universalize this:

1. It's based on the smartest model ever released to the public in the history of humanity, Opus 5.5. So if this is true for your codebase, it probably only became so ~post-Mythos.

2. It seems like the hard task isn't really hard enough -- the "trick" is something about PHP, and sounds common enough that it would be well baked into each model. Regardless, there are far, far easier to miss gotchas than "fails on reload", especially in a large codebase where a post-mortem are written about correct code that just runs slower all of a sudden or something, much less cases where you have to rely on users (or worse, metrics) to uncover such issues.

When I joined Google, they gave me the baffling instruction to try to write as few comments as possible. I've since learned that's a semi-popular approach, based on the logic that "the code should speak for itself". I'm just a baby engineer (4 more months to make it onto 30-under-30!), but I find that to be more about self-esteem for seniors and feeling like a craftsman than it is about real, measured tradeoffs.

Plus, comments can A) be documentation[1] and B) be beautiful[2] ;)

[1]: https://github.com/doering-ai/my-basis/blob/main/docs/regex....

[2]: https://doering.ai/work/sublime-python-syntax/

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zHhGa3iQBQcdSifFL/a-critical...

Anyone care to take the time to share why it’s interesting?

(Besides, y’know, being written in French!)