It’s a well written, engaging article. Why would it need a disclaimer if they used AI on part of it? They’re not arguing against the usage of LLMs.

The behavior seems to be so deeply ingrained in every single doctor I’ve seen that it seems impossible to change. I suspect they must have this drilled into them in school and residency, then it seems like every decision is constrained by insurance requirements. As far as I can tell, the situation is hopeless.

Maybe you’re comparing it to some idealized view of what human therapy is like? There’s no benchmark for it, but humans struggle in real mental health care. They make terrible mistakes all the time. And human therapy doesn’t scale to the level needed. Millions of people simply go without help. And therapy is generally one hour a week. You’re supposed to sort out your entire life in that window? Impossible. It sets people up for failure.

So, if we had some perfect system for getting every person that needs help the exact therapist they need, meeting as often as they need, then maybe AI therapy would be a bad idea, but that’s not what we have, and we never will.

Personally, I think the best way to scale mental healthcare is through group therapy and communities. Having a community of people all coming together over common issues has always been far more helpful than one on one therapy for me. But getting some assistance from an AI therapist on off hours can also be useful.

We keep getting more cool features in the tools, but I don't see any indication that the models are getting any better at understanding or managing complexity. They still make dumb mistakes. They still write terrible code if you don't give them lots of guardrails. They still "fix" things by removing functionality or adding a ts-ignore comment. If they were making progress, I might be convinced that eventually they'll get there, but they're not.

One problem is that the language we've been given is one of defects (ADHD, ASD) and often people are stuck using that label even if they don't see their trait as a defect. So we're stuck saying "ADHD" because psychiatry decided that it's a defect. In reality, nearly every "disorder" has some other context-dependent benefit.

And while there's no "neurodivergence" in nature, there is a divergence from what is considered "normal" by society. "Normal" is an artificial construct, but we all have to live with it, and there are many aspects of my nervous system that clearly function in a way that's outside of two standard deviations from the mean, and this causes me a lot of problems in a society that can't tolerate that. These are very very real, and 95% of the time, I never say a word, and no one else has any idea that I'm suffering. I'm not telling anyone else that they're the asshole. Most neurodivergent people are living like this, despite what you're implying, that we're all just walking around being assholes to everyone we meet. That, is bullshit.

My argument isn't that psychiatric symptoms don't exist or aren't real and there is no real underlying phenomenon. My argument is simply that we've drawn the lines between the units of study too high up and we should be more granular. This level of nosology was chosen in 1952. Do you really think they got it 100% right almost 75 years ago? And what is the mechanism for defining and maintaining these categories? A bunch of committees get together every few years and decide on them, then they tell us all what's "true". Bullshit. What are the odds that a committee will define itself out of existence? Pretty slim. [1]

I have traits that could be considered as autism, ADHD, obsessive compulsive personality disorder, PTSD, bipolar II, social anxiety disorder, and probably a dozen more disorders. But by quantizing the disorder at the current level, by necessity, the other traits are cropped out of view. Relevant information is lost and irrelevant information is blurred together. And the level of overlap between disorders is absurd. They cannot possibly be "real" because the lines between them aren't even distinct.

The useful unit to study is the individual trait, not the cluster of traits that is different in each individual. The traits are more granular and map more closely map to underlying biology anyway. The current model is akin to what the geocentric model was in astronomy. It's outdated, wrong, and holding us back from a more accurate, detailed view.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Which is to say, not really. I say this as someone who has been diagnosed as autistic, and identifies as autistic. All of these diagnoses are presented as clear, well defined constructs that exist in the world, but in reality they’re fictions that that committees have drawn around a vast gradient of human traits.

No individual human truly fits any single diagnosis. For example, I have two family members that depending on how you frame their behaviors could be described as either autistic or narcissistic, yet these are supposedly completely different disorders. Prior to being diagnosed as autistic, I’d been diagnosed with some of the ones suggested in the article as well. Was I misdiagnosed? I don’t think so. None of those constructs are real either. So, they’d not even wrong. For a time, some were useful. Some were harmful. But seeing myself as autistic has been a lot more useful.

What matters to me about identifying as autistic is that it allowed me to find other people who experience the world similarly to me. Until I found other autistic people, I felt like I was a single alien stranded on Earth, alone. Finding other autistic people was like finding out that there were millions of other aliens like me hiding in plain sight.

I hope that someday we can move beyond the 1950s-style nosology of the DSM and have a more rigorous science of mental health, but right now, it’s what we’re stuck with.

And as another commenter has pointed out, HTML does exactly what you ask for. If it’s done correctly, it doesn’t contain font sizes or layout. Users can style HTML differently with custom CSS.

Unfortunately, the meaning of the word “literally” has morphed into almost the opposite of “literally”. Most people just use it as an intensifier devoid of any true meaning. Makes sense that an LLM that doesn’t have any sense of truth would just stuff that in there.

We’ve dispensed with ethics as a basis for human interaction, and the results are exactly what one would expect: a dystopia.

And the people making the most money off this system insist that it’s all for the best and that we should double down on this strategy. Any mention of putting limits on greed and exploitation is met with responses like, “what are you, a socialist?” as if the only two choices for structuring a society are either a rapacious hyper-exploitative capitalism and an oppressive Soviet state, and there’s no other option.

Capitalism needs constraints. Capitalism in the service of society can be a great thing. Capitalism without constraints is a cancer that will destroy everything in the pursuit of profit.

They took investors, who agreed to the rate of return on their investment. That doesn’t sound like charity.

Now, your example of a CEO that wants to fire everyone assumes that that’s the right decision. How well has that kind of thinking worked for other firms like Boeing? That type of authority structure introduces its own set of distortions, which usually skew towards shareholders, and often not towards long term sustainability.

As a worker, I would be against that decision for selfish reasons as well as for rational reasons. It sounds like a bad idea. If they want to sell commodity glassware, then that’s a race to the bottom. But they’re selling quality, which requires humans with skill.

> In general coops are not good at tough decisions and innovation.

This needs to be backed up. Mondragon in Spain has thrived for decades. In America, mutual aid societies used to provide health care, unemployment insurance and other benefits before being squeezed out by other groups who were better at things like regulatory capture.

There is a long history of cooperative ownership that goes beyond the stereotypical hippie grocery store. I think it’s too quick to dismiss Duralex.

For an employee owned co-op, a more anarchistic organization structure that allows for more employee control of everyday decisions could actually allow the company to adapt and change more easily. The ones making decisions have skin in the game, both as workers and owners.

Hmm. By this measure, most Americans today are not capable of rationality.

I’m not defending what the Republicans are doing. I’m just clarifying it, so at least people can discuss what’s actually happening instead of having knee jerk reactions.

Don't blame developers for management decisions.

Fire 80% of the C-level employees (make them justify their positions, DOGE-style); investigate and publicize the internal decision-making processes that lead to Mozilla becoming a de facto subsidiary of Google; do a full auditing of the financials and determine how much money the organization really needs to fund browser development (Servo and Ladybird seem to be getting shit done with a lot less money than Mozilla. How is that possible?); do an auditing of all non-browser related initiatives (stuff like MDN is worthwhile, but what other BS is sucking up money and time?); talk to the existing development staff about what's working and what's not and what opportunities exist that an outsider wouldn't know about. I would listen to the developers. Developers are often an underutilized business resource.

This would give me a basis to start thinking about revenue. Once it's clear what fat can be cut (and I think the cuts would be huge), then it'd be clearer exactly what revenue model might work.

At this point, it's worth going for broke. Mozilla is effectively dead, so there's nothing to lose. If it fails, that's still better than the status quo.