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  • I work in disability support. People in my industry fail to understand the distinction between duty of care and dignity of risk. When I go home after work I can choose to drink alcohol or smoke cigarettes. My clients who are disabled are able to make decisions including smoking and drinking, not to mention smoking pot or watching porn. It is disgusting to intrude on someone else's life and shit your own values all over them.

    I don't drink or smoke but that is me. My clients can drink or smoke or whatever based on their own choices and my job is not to force them to do things I want them to do so they meet my moral standards.

    My job is to support them in deciding what matters to them and then help them figure out how to achieve those goals and to support them in enacting that plan.

    The moment I start deciding what is best for them is the moment I have dehumanised them and made them lesser. I see it all the time but my responsibility is to treat my clients as human beings first and foremost. If a support worker treated me the way some of my clients have been treated there would have been a stabbing.

    • Disabled people are so often treated like children and it just sucks.

    • Like you, I tend to feel that in general, people need to stop trying to force people to live the way they think is best. Unless there is a very real, very serious impact on others ("I enjoy driving through town while firing a machine gun randomly out my car windows"), people should be permitted to choose how to live as far as possible. Flip side is that they gotta accept potential negative consequences of doing so. Obviously, there's gonna be some line to draw on what consitutes "seriously affecting others", and there's going to be different people who have different positions on where that line should be. Does maybe spreading disease because you're not wearing a facemask during a pandemic count? What about others breathing sidestream smoke from a cigarette smoker in a restaurant? But I tend towards a position that society should generally be less-restrictive on what people do as long as the harm is to themselves.

      However.

      I would also point out that in some areas, this comes up because someone is receiving some form of aid. Take food stamps. Those are designed to make it easy to obtain food, but hard to obtain alcohol. In that case, the aid is being provided by someone else. I think that it's reasonable for those other people to say "I am willing to buy you food, but I don't want to fund your alcohol habit. I should have the ability to make that decision." That is, they chose to provide food aid because food is a necessity, but alcohol isn't.

      I think that there's a qualitative difference between saying "I don't want to pay to buy someone else alcohol" and "I want to pass a law prohibiting someone from consuming alcohol that they've bought themselves."

      • I disagree with restricting alcohol for food stamps. In fact, it shouldn't be food stamps, it should be cash. When you attach all these requirements and drug testing and restrictions you are destroying the autonomy of the person you are claiming to help.

        It is like with housing. Many of the housing programs available require drug tests, job seeking documentation, separating men and women, and so on. In some cases this can make a little sense, given that men are much more likely than women to be domestic abusers, but other cases make less sense. If someone uses drugs to cope with their life and then you offer housing only if they stop the thing that is helping them cope they will not be helped, they will be harmed. They will not be able to take the housing and end up off the street in a secure place building a life, they will be still on the street and still on the drugs.

        If I go and work a job and get paid should my employer be able to say "I'm fine with paying you so you can have housing and food, but alcohol? No, I don't want to pay for alcohol"? This would be insane. Your employer choosing what you can do with your money outside of work hours is authoritarian nonsense and yet when it comes to welfare or charity people think it is fine. I disagree vehemently.

        If I give you money to alleviate your suffering who am I to decide how you employ that? I want you to have more money because it is fungible, you can do almost anything with money, so you can make choices. I want you to have more power to effect your life, not less.

        I assume you are an American given your reference to food stamps. Where is the American spirit of independence? Of self determination? Of rugged individualism? It seems quite dead in the modern era of state capture and authoritarian oligarchy. It is a loss and a tragedy.

    • Patient autonomy!

  • AI is a fad and when it collapses, it's going to do more damage than any percieved good it's had to date.

    • I can believe that LLMs might wind up being a technical dead end (or not; I could also imagine them being a component of a larger system). My own guess is that language, while important to thinking, won't be the base unit of how thought is processed the way it is on current LLMs.

      Ditto for diffusion models used to generate images today.

      I can also believe that there might be surges and declines in funding. We've seen that in the past.

      But I am very confident that AI is not, over the long term, going to go away. I will confidently state that we will see systems that will use machine learning to increasingly perform human-like tasks over time.

      And I'll say with lower, though still pretty high confidence, that the computation done by future AI will very probably be done on hardware oriented towards parallel processing. It might not look like the parallel hardware today. Maybe we find that we can deal with a lot more sparseness and dedicated subsystems that individually require less storage. Yes, neural nets approximate something that happens in the human brain, and our current systems use neural nets. But the human brain runs at something like a 90 Hz clock and definitely has specialized subsystems, so it's a substantially-different system from something like Nvidia's parallel compute hardware today (1,590,000,000 Hz and homogenous hardware).

      I think that the only real scenario where we have something that puts the kibosh on AI is if we reach a consensus that superintelligent AI is an unsolveable existential threat (and I think that we're likely to still go as far as we can on limited forms of AI while still trying to maintain enough of a buffer to not fall into the abyss).

      EDIT: That being said, it may very well be that future AI won't be called AI, and that we think of it differently, not as some kind of special category based around a set of specific technologies. For example, OCR (optical character recognition) software or speech recognition software today both typically make use of machine learning --- those are established, general-use product categories that get used every day --- but we typically don't call them "AI" in popular use in 2025. When I call my credit card company, say, and navigate a menu system that uses a computer using speech recognition, I don't say that I'm "using AI". Same sort of way that we don't call semi trucks or sports cars "horseless carriages" in 2025, though they derive from devices that were once called that. We don't use the term "labor-saving device" any more --- I think of a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner as distinct devices and don't really think of them as associated devices. But back when they were being invented, the idea of machines in the household that could automate human work using electricity did fall into a sort of bin like that.

    • The issue that I take with AI is that it's having a similar effect on ignorance that the Internet created but worse. It's information without understanding. Imagine a highschool drop out that is a self proclaimed genius and a Google wizard, that is AI, at least at the moment.

      Since people imagine AI as the super intelligence from movies they believe that it's some kind of supreme being. It's really not. It's good at a few things and you should still take it's answers with skepticism and proof read it before copy/paste it's results into something.

  • React sucks. I'm sorry, I know it's popular, but for the love of glob, can we not use a technology that results in just as much goddamn spaghetti code as its closest ancestor, jQuery? (That last bit is inflammatory. I don't care. React components have no opinionated structure imposed on them, just like jQuery.)

  • Abilify is a beautiful long term maintenance med but wholly inappropriate for an acutely agitated and combative patient.

  • Professionally: Waterfall release cycle kills innovation, and whoever advocates it should be fired on the spot. MVP releases and small, incremental changes and improvements are the way to go.

    Personally: Don't use CSS if tables do what you need. Don't use Javascript for static Web pages. Don't overcomplicate things when building Web sites.

116 comments