TechTakes

The more I read the less it makes sense, largely because the LLM that they used to fluff up the original napkin pitch decided it should promote high end medical equipment like it was another AI powered furby knock-off. Yeah, building a community around ct scanners seems definitely the way to go.

Towards the end they basically stop just short of claiming that building the medical tricorder from startrek is the inevitable outcome of this pivot.

We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs. The cultural, physical, and mental health benefits of all of this are hard to comprehend, but also hard to overstate.

Deploying this stuff at scale at so called midjourney spas while supposedly working with FDA to eventually get approval just screams that the actual business plan is letting Peter Thiel collect full body scans indiscriminately.

Surprisingly, "democratizing ct scanning" doesn't appear anywhere in the post.

What's a Dimes Square lady to do?!

This situation is the first time I've become aware that there was a longtime Dimes Square hangout called Kiki's. I'm gonna go ahead and consider that a mental health check that I happily passed

Hey we got lisp out of it.

Glitch just wrapped a Youtube series by putting their final episode onto big screens in multiple countries. There's been a lot of media noise about the difficulty of getting films into theaters, and a lot of blaming Glitch, but there's not been any understanding about what Glitch actually did differently that is scaring Hollywood. I think it's that, just like with the Youtubers producing Backrooms and Iron Lung and FNAF, the thing Hollywood misses is the audience demographic. Glitch and other Youtubers are targeting an emerging young-adult audience which wants edgy, gritty, emotionally sincere content that fills the gap between PG-13 and R ratings. To older folks, e.g. Murder Drones is facile cringe, while to tweens (young teens, PG-13 sensibilities) it's too intense and scary. But it's a happy medium for catcher-in-the-rye emo young adults, which is why every second t-shirt sold at Hot Topic has a murder drone on it.

By literally no coincidence, Glitch's next greenlight is a grimdark gritty deconstruction which critiques the dystopia of Disney parks, illustrated by their brand-new 2D animation department, designed by a former Disney showrunner who left because Disney wouldn't let them tell stories aimed at young adults. (Dana Terrace, not Alex Hirsch.) Disney's not the only game in town; Turner previously ran shows by Owen Dennis and Rebecca Sugar while putting pressure on them. Lotta animators with big dreams who have been told "no" by big producers; in particular Lauren Faust supposedly has been waiting for decades for somebody to give her an animation team without creative limits, like Glitch just gave Terrace. (Faust worked on The Iron Giant and animated the character of Sawyer in Cats Don't Dance; the sheer poetry of her career could be enough to transform the industry (again).)

This feels like yet another case of "what no postmodernism does to a mf". Because I can kind of agree they ASD is a bit of a weird diagnosis in some respects, but that's entirely because of an ongoing discussion between different social models of mental diversity. On one hand, much of the autistic community has embraced a model rooted in neurodiversity. The associated behaviors aren't "abnormal" and happen to nearly everyone to some degree, but some people experience them in different ways that impact how they interact with other people and the world. In this model, we need to emphasize empathy and support to help everyone find a place in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled.

But Scott as a practicing psychiatrist is strongly invested in the older model of mental illness or mental disability, where some people have mental and behavioral problems that make life more difficult and dangerous for them and those around them, and those people need help to mitigate those problems so they can exist in society. This is obviously a less kind and more authoritarian model than neurodiversity, but it's easy enough to understand the appeal in circumstances where the challenge of "how do I help people be happy and successful" necessitates asking "how do I reduce or eliminate the risk of physical violence from this person." Hell, compared to the other model that gets invoked to deal with that question, criminality, it still at least acknowledges that people with high support needs are people whose well-being deserves consideration. A patient is a human being at least to the same degree that a child is, effectively.

But Scott, being afraid of postmodernism, can't really allow himself to recognize these as separate models that are valuable in different circumstances, not the least of which is because he's a fashy little bastard who would have to give up the authority of being a capital-D Doctor in favor of just being an expert on certain elements of the human mind and body. So instead he and his friends are totally neurotypical, yes. Don't listen to them describe their own experiences, listen to the Doctor Man.

A real pre-WWII understanding of autism on display. It's also honestly profoundly upsetting to me to see people who have had the experience, at least as a child, of having sensory issues and poor communication skills, not be able to relate at least a little to the notion of someone having a violent meltdown over something they can't coherently explain. Somehow even more pick-me behavior than Hans Aspberger.

3. Shit piles up at the bottom of the hill

4. Bottom of the hill elevates until it reaches the enshittifiers

5. Dinosaur eats man

6. Woman inherits the earth

The AI safety company when they actually have to make their AIs safe instead of just making vague suggestions

As I recall the impetus for this was that the team working on grok's code generation ability was preferring to use cursor. Imagine making a model so shitty that even the kind of ai-brained buffoons who want to work on fucking grok don't want to use it. Now consider that apparently that model is grok itself.

The obsession with utility-maximizing Bayesian agents only gets weirder as time goes on. You couldn't really get further from the paperclip maximizer concept than an LLM, and yet they still won't shut up about unaligned goals and hidden utility functions.

The header image is gold.

While we're suggesting stuff, you can just make a nuudel instead!

(It's a free german Framadate instance.)

i've had a good experience with rallly, in case you're looking for alternatives.