I wonder if the comments will demonstrate responses that often reference an effect, theory, law, truism, named phenomenon, or some other thing that people excellent at pattern recognition would surface to explain or model the topic at hand. “What you’re describing is Jevon’s Paradox.”
When I was first learning to have agents interact I had a little script to orchestrate a model telling a joke, a critic collaborator helping develop material and an audience emoji rank them.
A favorite…
Prompt: “Tell a joke about mother in laws”
Gemma2 response: “What’s the best kind of mother in law? A dead one.” 0_o
I might be missing something but inspecting a few of them the testing seems quite thin. I won’t do anything now without layers of controls for agent coding. Just for testing — near 100s for v8 coverage, property, mutation, fuzz, chaos, contract, bdd e2e, api and playwright exploratory mcp. Long term maintenance of all of this is going to need a ci/cd that puts all that through a ringer around the clock.
Everyone I know that are using these looks gaunt and sickly. They also complain of constant nausea and eat like a bird because eating makes them sick O_o. We’ve all seen the “glow” of people that lost weight with diet and exercise — it is not that. I’m glad they exist but worry about the side effects of long term use and medical professionals not using it as a brief intervention then steering towards lifestyle changes.
> Everyone I know that are using these looks gaunt and sickly.
This is a statistical fallacy where you're only identifying the extreme cases. The average obese person loses 14-20% of body weight. (Remember that the "obese" category is already defined as 20%+ above the high end of the "normal" range.) So the vast majority of people on these drugs just look normal, not skinny or gaunt.
> They also complain of constant nausea and eat like a bird because eating makes them sick
This is a high dose phenomenon. They can and should reduce their dose if it is preventing them from eating enough or being comfortable.
> I worry about ... medical professionals not using it as a brief intervention then steering towards lifestyle changes.
I think a lot of this is that being overweight makes you look fluffy and younger - being just a little "overweight" even makes you look healthier.
So people who were fat and get to a normal weight, if you've always known them as fat then they look like they've aged a decade or two in a year. People who were totally normal weight (i.e. "overweight" according to BMI, which is associated with a longer lifespan than "healthy weight") end up looking like tuberculosis Romantics because they wanted to look like movie stars (who are often on severe, unhealthy diets that they stop when they're not working.)
Losing weight quickly often loses it badly - think meth addicts. Women lose fat from their breasts and both sexes lose the fat pad around the eyes; I think these are generally stable fat stores that don't really replenish after being used, even if you gain the weight back. It's not specific to GLPs, just quick weight loss. If you'd lost more slowly your body wouldn't have resorted to taking from those places. Now, you have super-deep nasolabial folds and marionette lines.
> lost weight with diet and exercise
You lose weight through diet. You gain fitness through exercise.
Virtually all medical professionals steer heavily towards lifestyle changes. If you are obese, you can go to the doctor for a headache and the first words out of their mouth is "you need to lose weight".
I truly, truly do not understand where this mentality that the medical professionals don't encourage lifestyle changes comes from. If you smoke, they will hound you to stop smoking at every single appointment, regardless of what the appointment is for. They will tell you what to eat. They will tell you to eat less red meat, eat less processed food. They will tell you that you need to exercise 30 minutes a day. They tell you all of this, constantly.
That doesn't mean it works, though. You can tell someone to eat less over and over and that doesn't just magically make them eat less.
Most professionals DO steer towards lifestyle changes. They probably look gaunt and sickly because their excess skin sags and they may temporarily look older due to stretchy skin.
This isn’t traditional “software”; it’s grown, not written, and we’re currently incapable of explaining it all.
I think “rogue” is just fine, but pick another word from the thesaurus if there’s a better one; they asked it to do something, and it did it in a way that presumably doesn’t align with their desires (e.g. hacking into other systems).
but i also “align my tires” or might check the “alignment of two vectors.” if anything, thinking of alignment of anthropomorphizing seems to only inherit it from all the other anthropomorphisms used. rogue originates from a term for vagrant, right?
Agreed, "alignment" is also anthropomorphizing too much. What would be a better term? "Do what I want you to, but what I don't care to specify" (because doing so would miss the point of using AI in the first place)?
fun fact: the word compile also had the same trajectory - the same trajectory you complain about here with LLMs.
here's the reality: words change meaning. they are fuzzy. and when the words take on new meaning while just requiring a simple extension (in this case a computer doing a remarkably similar thing), complaining is just futile and childish.
I mean yes, alignement is bullshit concept. Especially since the values and visions the model is supposed to be aligned with are literally those of sociopathic CEOs.
It would be ironic if we spent so many resources prompting and scouring the solar system for intelligence that it extinguishes ours. Those humans and their dopamine hit fueled curiosity O_o
Meals where the topic veers into food preferences and lengthy comparisons to other food that was eaten another time make me want to leave my body. But it’s such a common default in mixed groups.
It’s a safe entry point, anyone can chime in and borders on phatic. I get it. But my preference is it triggers something quickly like a funny story as op said. Too often the ritual just gets stuck.
Yeah I was thinking along the lines of Seinfeld, but obviously it doesn't have to be that cheesy. That show just generally has a really good grasp of everyday idle chatter, and maybe even defined it culturally to some extent.
e.g.
Oh you got the big salad? I had a friend once who asked for a big salad. I paid for it, but my girlfriend took credit when she handed her the bag! The audacity!
That’s funny. For me, when I eat with others who talk about food, I feel like I’ve found my people. But I love food! Cooking it, seeking out outstanding examples of it, reading about it. I’m guessing you don’t?
I've always been a picky eater and it's been a source of a lot of embarrassing situations for me in my life. Now I'm celiac too, and many people still kind of roll their eyes when I say I have to be gluten free. Talking about food with people I don't know well makes me uncomfortable as hell.
To the point raised in another conment: it doesn't feel like a safe easy topic for me because in my life it often hasn't been
I'm surprised that's the case. I used to scoff at gluten free, but that was at least over a decade ago when the options were half assed.
I know it's not quite the same, but when a restaurant offers gluten free they're also likely to offer keto or low carb options. Given how many people are prediabetic and don't even know it, they're missing out big time on the alternatives. In most cases, it really is just simple ingredient swaps or removals on otherwise very delicious food. I actually do choose gluten free anyway when I just want a break (is less bloat for me).
Hands down, some of the best food I've ever had was mediterranean inspired or at least featured more protein and less carbs. Once you see the light, it's downright disgusting how many places are serving you the same bland brick of carbs on a plate over and over.
I agree. I know these things makes designers anyone who values UX, aesthetic, craftsmanship eyes bleed. But for a lot of websites that are utilitarian in nature much of the AI generated design is simply good enough. We’ve had plenty of human web design fouls since the beginning. For pages that are a means to an end I think it’s a great because energy can be directed towards the product itself. In a word where agents summarize sites and return the content design matters even less outside the actual product experience. Much of that will become per experience UI which will relinquish designer control further. One thing that’s helped me is telling an LLM to focus on information architecture then it stops overloading the view with page chrome and noise presenting instead the information for the use case at hand.
