Don’t know if it’s the most stupid, because it might alleviate bed sores in a situation of long term illness but levitating about one centimetre when in rem sleep seems pretty useless.

Plenty of employers (in non-union/creative/competitive industries/in-demand roles) push employees to burn out. Doesn’t matter if you burn out you couldn’t hack it, just get the next body in.

I just quickly read a couple of discussion on the definition of ‘literally’ that don’t particularly pick up on the following, but in the ai era this doesn’t really mean anything.

I remember being told that originally used to mean ‘figuratively’. I.e. as in ‘in literature’ as opposed to ‘in reality’. This seems to be in keeping with its modern use as an intensifier.

I’m not interested in a debate on this, as it doesn’t really matter to me. I’m just passing on what I was told, and offering offering a differing perspective.

tl/dr: I identiy with some of what you say. Counseling might help but don’t expect an easy panacea. I busy myself with positive things to crowd out the negative when all else fails, and although it is hard for me to sustain that effort in my current situation, when I do that stuff it does work.

The weight of my past experiences became a burden that I haven’t been able to really manage for a long time now: traumatic childhood coupled with and exacerbated by undiagnosed ‘autism’ - in quotation marks because although it is an important part of my story, and an accurate dianosis, it is a bit of a ‘diagnosis du jour’, and nowhere near the self-image I have constructed and I struggle with how I see myself. I very much identify with your experience of having an inaccurate self-image. I came up with reasons as to why I suffered burn out that just weren’t real and need to try and deconstruct that story that I have told myself.

I understand what has happened in my life, and why and how I have ended up where I have, but that isn’t in and of itself enough for me to manage. I personally need quite a large and regimented daily program of stuff (none of it too fancy - exercise, things that give me purpose, and ultimately crowd out the negative things) just to stay on an even keel. I am often not able to sustain the effort and struggle. I need more help than is available in my current situation, and so I am not able to contribute in the manner I can - I am normally a very high achiever.

Counseling can help, but my experience was that finding a counselor that was good for me wasn’t straightforward. In fact after lots of trying I hardly managed it; one helped me through a particularly difficult period, but that was it. I am far from ‘cured’ in any meaningful sense at all.

Datacentre-hosted LLM’s have a long way to go to be accurate enough for mass deployment. It looks to me like it will take a miracle of some sort for them to manage it before this bubble pops. It could be decades or more, after all we don’t have a real understanding of how the brain works, so hoping to mimic it now seems a bit premature.

I can see RAG and fine tuning making an LLM accurate enough to be functional, enough for a range of natural language processing computing tasks (with a decent amount of human input that ultimately is used for fine-tuning). But even if just for cost reasons (in RAG’s case), you will surely want your LLM hosted locally. I don’t see a need for that data centre.

Venture capitalists/silicone valley bros might have burned through trillions to do the work to get trained LLM’s useful enough for people to run in their own organisations/at home.

A general retreat to Tor is probably necessary at this point for people who want a something like a non-tracked web culture.