coolkicks

Been looking at therapists for my teenage daughter, she’s been debating therapy for a couple of years and has recently fully committed.

We have good insurance and are financially secure, and holy shit it’s still going to cost an extraordinary amount. I don’t understand how anyone struggling with financial insecurity could even consider having access to therapy as an option.

What a fundamentally broken system, there is not a single type of care that exists that is accessible to the people who need it.

I suddenly developed a theory that GPT and the like are popular because people don’t know how to craft a google (the noun not the company) search.

I think this supports his argument. Having to research desktop environments to decide which is optimized for the potential problems a new user may face, then finding a distro that packages that DE is quite frankly too much for the average user.

I’d argue between 3% and 5% of PC users are willing to research and experiment to find the flavor of Linux that truly works for them.

Linux has come a long way, I still remember using Gentoo as a daily driver and seeing Linux cross 1% of desktop share, but the average desktop user doesn’t know the difference between a kernel and a colonel, and they don’t want to.

I used to be in credit risk for a very large stock market company.

Calling the bottom of the market is the same as betting big and getting 21 in blackjack.

Super cool when it happens, but not skill. The number of grown men I had to hear crying because they were dollar cost averaging down to the bottom until they went broke still disturbs me.

I’m happy this worked for you, but it was not skill.

The study forbes referenced appears to be essentially “how to design offices for gen z”, presuming they really want to use an office.

The tips to drive virtual engagement are pretty standard management material at this point.

Would have liked to see some real evidence to “boomerang” being philosophical, that felt like a cheap misuse of the term to seem more relevant than “what kind of games should be in the break room”

Lots of boring applications that are beneficial in focused use cases.

Computer vision is great for optical character recognition, think scanning documents to digitize them, depositing checks from your phone, etc. Also some good computer vision use cases for scanning plants to see what they are, facial recognition for labeling the photos in your phone etc…

Also some decent opportunities in medical research with protein analysis for development of medicine, and (again) computer vision to detect cancerous cells, read X-rays and MRIs.

Today all the hype is about generative AI with content creation which is enabled with Transformer technology, but it’s basically just version 2 (or maybe more) of Recurrent Neural Networks, or RNNs. Back in 2015 I remember this essay, The Unreasonable Effectiveness of RNNs being just as novel and exciting as ChatGPT.

We’re still burdened with this comment from the first paragraph, though.

Within a few dozen minutes of training my first baby model (with rather arbitrarily-chosen hyperparameters) started to generate very nice looking descriptions of images that were on the edge of making sense.

This will likely be a very difficult chasm to cross, because there is a lot more to human knowledge than thinking of the next letter in a word or the next word in a sentence. We have knowledge domains where, as an individual we may be brilliant, and others where we may be ignorant. Generative AI is trying to become a genius in all areas at once, and finds itself borrowing “knowledge” from Shakespearean literature to answer questions about modern philosophy because the order of the words in the sentences is roughly similar given a noun it used 200 words ago.

Enter Tiny Language Models. Using the technology from large language models, but hyper focused to write children’s stories appears to have progress with specialization, and could allow generative AI to stay focused and stop sounding incoherent when the details matter.

This is relatively full circle in my opinion, RNNs were designed to solve one problem well, then they unexpectedly generalized well, and the hunt was on for the premier generalized model. That hunt advanced the technology by enormous amounts, and now that technology is being used in Tiny Models, which is again looking to solve specific use cases extraordinarily well.

Still very TBD to see what use cases can be identified that add value, but recent advancements to seem ripe to transition gen AI from a novelty to something truly game changing.

This is what republicans have always done well. They organize locally, take over school boards and city councils, drive the change they want to see in local communities and drive support locally to drive voter turn out nationally.

We don’t see democrats crashing school board and city council meetings, participating in local politics en mass to drive local change with near the same effectiveness as republicans, and it leads to underwhelming participation in national elections, as the left sits around wondering “what has the DNC done for me”.

Your friend is paying it today in insurance premiums. Same money, just a different line on the paycheck.

And then if he gets sick, he’ll pay again.

Our willingness in America to pay money to a company that is incentivized by profits, just to not pay taxes is astonishing.

Just looking at employers in my professional career. Two. One for 15 years then the current for 3.

Looking at my direct and diagonal leaders, they seem to average 3-5 years a role, and I consider staying with my prior employer for so long a mistake. I made career progression and promotions there, but it still slowed me down vs changing employers.

Prefer closed, but like many others here, the cat doesn’t allow for that without making her opinion VERY well known.

Below the elite level, relative skill differences can be large enough that a skilled cis women can outcompete a lesser skilled cis men. And that’s where 99% of sports are played so these rules/laws just serve to make cis men not feel threatened by potentially losing in a softball game to a woman.

At the more elite levels, though, the skill gaps are much smaller, and being faster or stronger are the difference. Most WNBA players can’t dunk, most NBA players can. Elite men run 100M a full second faster than elite women. At those levels, men have a distinct physical advantage.

There have been some studies indicating trans women still have higher lung capacity than cis women, more strength etc, but there’s still some uncertainty because the number of studies are limited, and there’s even one study that indicated cis women may have an advantage over trans women.

But considering the laws currently being passed, they aren’t targeting elite athletes, and are instead targeting kids, and not out of the spirit of competition, but out of hate.

Yep, we’re looking at that exact option right now. 6 free to see if it’s going to work then it’s time to max that deductible!

I thought the millennial aspirations were a bit extreme, but as a millennial I get it. We had the Great Recession, outrageous prices for college, home prices are out of control.

And I say this as a millennial doing well. We don’t even think about money day to day or paycheck to paycheck, and are saving enough to largely minimize or potentially mitigate our kids needing student loans. But I am still strategically thinking about money and what will happen when the next recession or financial calamity hits, or hyper-inflation wiping us out.

The cost to live has been trying to outrun our income our entire adult lives, so sure, fuck it, double our income then maybe we have a chance to sleep at night even when it’s going well.