Healthcare is one of the most critical fields to our collective wellbeing while simultaneously being one of the most problematic ones, with doctors routinely disregarding, misdiagnosing, and otherwise failing to help or even harming patients, especially anyone who isn't a typical case of a typical issue.
I have more sympathy for almost every other profession affected than doctors.
Do you live in the USA? Living in Europe, my experiences as well as what I'm hearing have mostly been pretty good. Not sure I even know anyone with a major misdiagnosis.
(Everything is way over capacity though. Can't recall a specific one but I do think there's a few "took too long, worse off due to that". But that's a scale & system-wide finance issue, not quality.)
Ties or not, it's true that the label is imprecise and that not everything that's been highly processed is equal.
For example I'd argue that wheat flour and subsequently bread or pasta are in fact very highly processed, and carb bombs to boot, but nowhere near as bad as some other stuff out there.
Or take soy protein nuggets. As ultraprocessed as it gets, but probably healthy if anything.
It's a really complex topic and I feel lkke any sweeping generalizations are bound to be misleading in some ways or others.
I'm not sure who the "you" in the article is, but I find both the article and the summary void of any attempts to explain anything intuitively, extremely math-dense, and essentially incomprehensible.
by far this is the least math-dense and most intuitive explanation of these ideas that I have seen committed to print anywhere. consider that you might need to do the work of developing improved personal understanding, rather than complaining the expositor hasn't done the work of getting to the conceptual essence. sometimes the conceptual essence is mathematical, cannot be further compressed, and that's okay. I struggle to see how this blog post could possibly be "simplified" beyond defining a few terms more explicitly.
Precisely, the mathematical insight is the essence of the post here, you can't simplify it or change it to some other form without destroying the point and the beauty of the insight. And yes, the math here is trivial. The hubris, anti-intellectualism, and lack of curiosity of these complaints, on HN of all places, is really shocking.
Love how the comment below yours states it's one of the most well written blog posts they've read in a while. Classic HN, full of highly opinionated folks.
You are terrified because somewhere deep down, what you want is someone who will act on worldviews similar to your own, and age is a fairly substantial component of that.
Ultimately, perhaps there is a trend, but my observations simply do not match the premise of people monotonically accumulating wisdom as they age, and in fact there are certain types of gullibility that seem to increase with age, such as the willingness to disregard and disparage scientific or objective fact in favor of personal beliefs, and to prioritize social status over signals of expertise/intelligence when judging authority. And don't forget that 80%+ of successful scams are against older people.
I think there are almost definitely tradeoffs between cognitive flexibility versus cumulative lifetime experiences, and we shouldn't discount the former - just look at how utterly dysregulated tech industries are because of out-of-touch representatives who listen to elites over experts in the field.
Age will change your perspective on politics. In general I think humanity's future looks extremely promising. We're on the verge of the automation of all 'basic' cognitive work, finally 'really' unlocking the space frontier, flirting with advanced robotics with unimaginable potential (especially paired with the first advancement) and much more.
But none of these things are going to be brought to us because of politics or politicians. They're being brought to us through technological and economic advancement. And I think the only risk we have along the way is ourselves. So at this point I couldn't care less what a politician's values are - I simply want somebody who won't get us into WW3 or bring us to the verge of it. So if you assume I'm looking for worldview alignment, my 'worldview' would come down to 'please don't screw up so badly that you cause the extinction of humanity.'
In this context, what does "closest" mean? Most similar token embeddings? Most similar Q embedding to prior K embeddings? Most similar positional embedding?
Are you, in essence, implying that the Key-Query attention mechanism is basically a neural function approximation of the Nadaraya-Watson kernel or something very like it?
Considering how unlikely even the most ideal world would be to cater to the exact conditions we've evolved to adapt to, I'd say "more habitable than earth" is impossible without extreme terraforming of a lottery ticket planet.
Some guesses:
Easily breathable atmosphere + liquid water + pleasant temperatures. Predictable weather? Mediterranean climate year round across whole planet? Entire world spanned by archipelagos, no continents (naturally condusive to smaller localised community building?) No native plants but rich soil for growing whatever plants we choose? Abundant sunlight with gentle constant breeze but few strong winds or storms? No volcanic or tectonic activity?
I'd say no pathogens but they'll come with us regardless.
I assume they mean "more habitable for humans". We're currently adapted for ice caps, abundant liquid fresh water, protective ozone layer and 21% oxygen levels, which is one moment in a 4 billion year history for this planet.
We also need tectonics, vulcanism and erosion. Just "not where I live, thank you" tectonics.
That's the is-ought fallacy. We know humans can survive on many different levels of oxygen saturation, and it's clear that very high oxygen content is sometimes helpful. We are not "adapted for ice caps", and they are clearly not a requirement for our survival. Sure, ice caps help maintain Earth in a climate that is favorable to us, but think about all the many different climates that humans have existed in for thousands of generations. There's no real reason to assume ice caps are necessary for a favorable climate. Not to mention the fact that ice caps seem pretty common in the universe.
Similarly, the ozone layer is not a requirement, the requirement is that we have some protection against harmful radiation. I don't know how many different possible ways there are to produce a world with minimal UV light, but I'm sure it's more than 1. And besides: are you seriously suggesting that Earth is clearly optimally habitable regarding UV light, when a large percentage of all humans have to take active measures to protect their skin from frying every time they go outside for more than 30 minutes? It's actually very easy to imagine worlds where it's much more pleasant to be outside.
Why would you even think humans require tectonics, vulcanism, and erosion? This is the most obvious is-ought fallacy. Humans cannot live on a planet unless it has earthquakes and giant death-gas-spewing lava mountains? What?
Abundant fresh water I'll give you. This is something that all our evidence suggests Earth is definitely S-tier at, and rare in our neighborhood of the universe.
> I'd say no pathogens but they'll come with us regardless.
I think NOT bringing the "right" microbes would be the problem, since it's not well understood. Childhood leukemia is linked to over cleanliness (lack of hepatitis A) [1]. Fecal transplants are being tested for neurological disorders, with some positive results!
Similarly, germ free rats have all sorts of problems, from under developed intestines to significant problems with brain development!
Who knows what's required, that we just happen to pick up while kids, sharing snot and mud with each other.
I like this view, thanks for the link. Hep A was listed as a proxy for hygiene in that study, so the inverse correlation with acute lymphoblastic leukemia was not directly causal. Hep A itself likely doesn't prevent or treat leukemia, rather something about low hygiene conditions does. Maybe some common bacteria or other virus. The core point stands, we live in and depend on a messy biome, in particular ways we don't yet understand precisely.
it seems to me there must be at least some temperature gradient, but I imagine it could be sharper or shallower than on earth. Thus an egypt like equator and a milan like pole (or near to pole at least) seems plausible
On that note, there are some very interesting possibilities, like a tidally locked planet that has a thin ring of habitable space with everything in one direction too hot and to cold in the other. Of course if this would really be habitable and not pummeled to dust by storms due to the big temperature gradient is another question.
It doesn't have to be "not free speech" to be deleterious, that's an insane argument.
A large part of how human settle on opinions and beliefs is by inference from what and how often is said around them, calibrated around in-person interactions.
Social media warp this horribly both through algorithmically selecting what information to present users with, and through impersonal "big account->user" that remove the stakes normally present in in-person communication, which completely breaks our perception of how important statements actually are.
I have more sympathy for almost every other profession affected than doctors.
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