sedivy94

SVG illustrations, too? Delicious! This is how an online textbook should be done. Bravo.

32 y/o male. I took an in-person assessment earlier this year. It was an 8 hour battery of tests split across two days. In no particular order:

- Clinical Interview

- Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale – Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV)

- Wechsler Memory Scale – Fourth Edition (WMS-IV)

- Conners Continuous Performance Test – Third Edition (CPT-3)

- Delis-Kaplan Executive Functioning System, selected subtests

- Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST)

Are you familiar with any of those? I did some research after receiving my report and apparently the combination of tests listed above are well-respected, about as good as it gets. I’m curious what your take is.

The subjective part of the assessment was actually the clinician making sense of the data. My cognitive assessment (IQ and its subtypes) scored fairly high, I averaged something like 115 (84th percentile). But my memory assessment scores (audio/visual memory/working memory, immediate/delayed memory) tanked tremendously, I averaged around 90 (30th percentile).

My positive diagnosis was based on the variability of scores and the clear cognition-memory gap. The results made sense, aligned with my experience in life (I fell asleep in almost every lecture in college, sustaining attention while taking notes was a heavy audio-visual working memory exercise for me).

I personally haven’t adopted any of this as my identity but it opened a door to do some metacognition and reflect on how I interface with the world. Also the stimulant medication didn’t magically fix everything, sometimes the hyper focus is worse, but there was one HUGE benefit that I didn’t realize I was missing - emotional regulation. I’m a heavy ruminator and pretty much suffered in silence most of my life, my inner dialog is much more organized and calm, and I can comb through my thoughts easier now.

P.S. I cannot recommend enough - check out “HealthyGamerGG” on YouTube. He does some deep dives on ADHD and other diagnoses. Classically trained psychiatrist with something like 5 years of training as a Buddhist monk. Very insightful guy who’s both data-driven and spiritual, helping a lot of people.

I am doing a little facepalm over the L2-L3 distinction, thanks for being gentle and thoughtful. Sometimes I interrogate how things are, imagine what another paradigm would look like, but always end up where I started... I see that and think, hm, maybe the design of networks as we know them are expressing some sort of structure in the Platonic space.

I took a course called “Introduction to Internet Architecture” back in 2017 with a wonderful professor. The course opened with a prompt, “What is communication?” We started with smoke signals and worked our way up the OSI layers (including voltage-level encodings on the wire). I remember drawing those layers and asking, “What problem is each layer trying to solve?”

Also that XKCD comic is a classic. Love it. I don’t see any value in overhauling the protocols of today. It seems like the future (or present) of networking is overlays. When this recent cert covered SDN, it really abstracted away everything I had just learned and I felt a little sad about it honestly - as if switch/router configuration would some day be ubiquitously software-defined, getting totally buried by the application layer and becoming almost apocryphal like assembly or machine code… something we know exists but rarely touch.

IPv6, in a way, takes the concept of a MAC address and puts it on steroids. This became evident to me when I learned about EUI-64 addresses. And then my brain melted when I learned that any interface can be assigned an arbitrary number of unique addresses with varying purposes or contexts because the address space is truly *that big*.

When I consider that quality of IPv6’s design, it communicates to me an old and ideal vision of what we thought the internet would and should be - a hyper-connected, shared infrastructure where [Layer 3] identity is universally unique such that connectivity between any two arbitrary nodes is possible (which obviously isn’t true for NAT w/ overload).

I’m just a lowly SysAdmin who finally decided to get his CCNA - so I’m a nobody - but as I worked through the material I felt like I was paging through a history book or biography of how the Internet’s life came to be and all the mistakes made along the way. Most features felt like patches for design considerations that were overlooked. Examples: DHCP Snooping, STP’s various * Guards, and the mere fact that Layer 2 and Layer 3 addresses are distinct concepts.

I don’t think there’s any disagreement that NAT was co-opted as a security feature. I never hear that said in a positive way, either. I think if we were to start over, with IPv6 as the default assumption, the tools we’d develop for network security would look very different, but not at all impossible or any more difficult.

But again - I’m a nobody. Just thinking out loud here.

I’m not doing any coding with AI, so I’m the odd one out. Mostly use it for research: information retrieval and grokking technical concepts for exam prep. Does that fall within “knowledge work”?

Anywho - I switched to Opus last week and felt torn. It’s displayed somewhat higher competency in some responses, and the artifacts (diagrams) are splendid, but I despise its writing style. Grok is indeed fact/truth oriented, direct, and less personable (which I vastly prefer). Maybe I’ll switch back to Grok.

One does not need to be human to understand. Animals understand. Saying “he” or “she” would be closer to anthropomorphism than the parent comment, but still does not sufficiently satisfy the definition of anthropomorphism (giving human form).

I see you pushing back on related topics in a few comment threads. I’m not sure if I can define “understanding” but I think “intelligence” is a fair synonym for this conversation. I see your passion for clarifying that LLMs are not intelligent, and I’m sensing you’re conflating that with “consciousness” and trying to hedge against other people inadvertently making that same error.

Intelligence is not uniquely human. And not constrained to consciousness. Even consciousness itself, under fringe definitions like exhibiting non-deterministic behavior, is not constrained to living beings. Systems, for example, exhibit intelligence all the time - groups of people, colonies of ants, weather systems, self-organized criticality like blooming forest fires or abelian sand piles, evolutionary processes, and so on.

Your counter argument - that LLM responses are “just” statically probable (i.e. predictions) - actually supports this notion. Many intelligent statements we make are probably right or probably wrong, in part or in whole. We as humans are far more than statistical computers, but our intelligence in isolation doesn’t seem far off from that of LLMs (not mechanistically, but rather qualitatively).

3Blue1Brown recently posted a video called something like “Compression is Intelligence”. Worth a watch.

The parent comment wasn’t making that comparison. In fact, quite the opposite. The communism comment emphasized personal experience with a boot in one’s face, not that the boot was communist.

Americans’ apathy to your concerns and their support of this administration is a direct consequence of the emotional blackmail tactic you employ. I share some of your concerns, but also have an awareness that enforcing the law to correct for past immigration policy failures will be ugly. The emotional blackmail is a learned behavior fueled by social media campaigns that effectively traumatize the hell out of us by amplifying violence and often removing their context.

Anthropic signed a $200 million contract with the world’s largest military and hadn’t considered if it would be used for military operations? When an article reads like fiction, I can’t help but assume there’s an entirely different political disagreement happening behind closed doors.

Military personnel are currently only allowed to use Signal for mobile communications within their unit. Classified information is a different story, though.

Novelty of stimulus is a huge factor, especially as training continues over years. Failure from a set of 20 is very different than failure from a set of 5, and bodybuilders will periodize their training to cycle through the different flavors of stimulus. I think a big contributor might be neuromuscular adaptation. Cycling through those different intensities over training periods measured in months will make this apparent anecdotally.

The activation energy or stimulus required for hypertrophy in untrained individuals is so low that it’s hard to differentiate the results. Studies like this absolutely need to be done in trained individuals if you want reliable data.

Minnesota, not Wisconsin. Same latitude and a fair point.

Everything you listed are tail risks of COVID, even in individuals with comorbidities, and are far more characteristic of the early strains than what’s circulating today. The only exception in your list of side effects is myocarditis, which is also a side effect of the COVID vaccine. Furthermore, the vaccine’s target population is individuals over 65 years old, immunocompromised individuals, obese individuals… not newborns or infants.

Alarmism, militant shaming, and omission of details like the ones I mentioned above are three strategies that steer vaccine hesitant people away from taking vaccine advocates seriously. Personally, I would raise concerns about anything but COVID and ease up on the Newspeak.