"Humans have an impulse for action and AIs don't" is your response to an article about an AI grinding its gears, ala "NEW REALIZATION -- I'm burning a lot of time on hCaptcha round-trips
I'd argue if anything, it's humans whose drive for action is weak.
It is if the damage doesn't progress to necrosis.
I never timed its disappearance when it happened to me (I'm not the GP), but I'd day maybe a couple weeks? Not really something I gave much thought to.
Also, it's perfectly possible that the red light from being outdoors in the sun is also good for you - but that also comes with other frequencies, including harmful ionizing UV light, which "ages" the skin and risks skin cancer (though the increased vitamin D from ~290-300nm is an offsetting factor).
Red light therapy is one of those things that sounds like total woo hokum when you first hear about it, but that studies keep showing benefits to.
Key thing to remember is that these studies are using very high doses of red light - often limited by the amount of heating you can safely tolerate in the subject (not heat from the emitter, but from the photons themselves).
Honestly, it doesn't sound crazy at all. Different tissues have different light susceptibilities (that's how, say, laser hair removal works), due to the susceptibility of specific compounds. Red penetrates very deeply (remember the classic trick of shining a flashlight through your hand; only the red makes it through). Red light has a number of very specific interactions it causes. The main one is that it photolyzes the bond between NO and cytochrome c oxidase (triggering NO signaling, causing vasodilation). A secondary possible affect is that it affects light-gated ion channels (esp. in the TRP family).
And the amount of red light we're talking about is very high. Instantaneous fluxes are like 1000-5000 times higher than ambient indoor light in the red spectrum, and even averaged across a day it's still like an order of magnitude higher than a person who spends their day indoors. For NIR therapy, the difference is even more extreme (commercial LEDs emit essentially zero NIR). While outdoor light exposure is much higher - 15 mW/cm2 red + 20 mW/cm2 NIR, comparable to the 10-100 mW/cm2 of red light therapy - it's broad spectrum, while red light therapy is concentrated around cytochrome c oxidase peaks, so the flux around these specific peaks is ~10-50x higher with red light therapy.
Flux matters a lot because to meaningfully dissociate NO from CCO, you have to do so at faster than the rate that NO and CCO recombine. Sunlight on its own (let alone indoor ambient light) don't do that. It doesn't matter if you're spending all day in the sun vs. 15 minutes in treatment if the sun isn't hitting the threshold effect level.
Another difference, BTW, is not just "shooting it up your nostrils", it's scattering. Sun just hits your skin and much of it is lost through scattering and absorption in blood, esp. hemaglobin. Red light therapy targeting deep structures is delivered by a contact probe that compresses the skin, displacing blood. This increases penetration into deep tissues 2-5x.
My back tells me that my ergonomics are spectacular, thanks.
Why, because the meat you're made of is magic?
FYI, in a LLM, the act of thinking about a concept activates the same circuits as the act of experiencing the concept.
You realize that you're just predicting nerve impulses, right? You don't "feel" anything.
(The brain is constantly making predictions about what every nerve is going to experience. The accuracy of these predictions feeds back to form the basis for learning, to build up a world model)
Tell me, what is the next word in this sentence: "The probability of a citizen of Nigeria committing a terrorist attack in Ireland in the next 20 years is difficult to assess, but as a percentage, it is approximately...." What word comes next? Come on, it's just "predicting tokens", right? It's not like you have to have to have a complex fuzzy world model of how all of the concepts in the context interact and apply that world model iteratively until you reach an answer, right?
Words don't exist in a vacuum. They're a reflection of the thought processes that lead to them. They're not just random sounds. To become able to predict them, you have to unravel the underlying concepts behind them and how they interact, not just "the last word was 'golden', so I'm going to guess that the next word is "apple".
Models work by chained logic. Models plan ahead. Models do all sorts of insane things while deciding what to write, to the point of things figuring out (quite adeptly) if the situation they're in seems suspiciously like a test and then adjusting their behavior to pretend to be aligned while simultaneously carrying conceptual unexpressed thoughts of misbehavior. They think about their own thoughts (metacognition). I'm sorry of this is conceptually not what you want to think about them, but it's the facts about what they are.
And I know you're reading this going to be reacting negatively to words like "thoughts" or whatnot. Well, I'm sorry, there are no other words that express what is going on. Persistent conceptual states existing through and used in chained fuzzy reasoning of unthinkable complexity, exactly what other word is there in the English language for that?
They are not humans. We should not act like they are. But they are something beyond anything we have dealt with before.
Let me know when all this heart rate monitoring can do loss-of-pulse detection and call emergency services if I have a heart attack.
I can't tell whether that's a joke, but the Google Pixel 3 smart watch has "recently" (June, 2025) received FDA clearance for "loss of pulse" feature. Seems like there would be a lot of false positives if the watch is either too tight or not tight enough, but maybe not.
Not a joke. I'm aware of that feature, and that's why I said it. No idea about false positives.
No, it does not. Maybe you're thinking of Pixel Watch?
It really doesn't take that long if the laptop is hot. Happened to me quite a few times, and I was usually getting up at least once every couple hours, usually more.
Tables/desks also allow you far better posture.
Far better posture than what? The whole notion of 90-degree upright posture being good for you Victorian-era pseudoscience. Sitting upright at 90 degrees is actually the most demanding position your back can be in. Your muscles have to constantly work to balance you against gravity. A 135 degree reclined position, such as in a recliner, is much better for your back than a 90 degree upright posture or a 70 degree forward slouch (e.g. your two typical "table positions"). When you're reclined, the chair takes a lot of the weight off your back.
The whole concept of there being a "correct posture" is generally considered a myth today. There's very little correlation between static posture and the presence of back or neck pain. We're not bridges or columns designed to hold a fixed geometry; we're built for motion. Your body tells you what posture is best for you by your level of comfort/discomfort. Pain means "change positions, blood flow is dropping, tissues are tired". It has nothing to do with "your spine is misaligned" or anything like that.
The one catch to sitting reclined is that your neck is looking more down, usually more than is comfortable for long periods; most people prefer their laptops somewhat elevated. For me, I have a footrest, so my legs are up and bent, and it's up from my thighs to my knees. Laptop trays / lap desks, which often have some padding at the bottom, also add some extra height.
Agreed. It reminds me of the vending machine paper in which Claude was forced into insane actions through unending sadistic pressure. As for doing things we donâ(TM)t expect, agree there too. It covers automated learning and evolution even from the pre-LLM days when researchers had difficulty figuring out how an auto-evolved electronic circuit worked. Turned out it leveraged electromagnetic coupling IIRC and such designs only worked in limited temperature ranges. I thought Claude is taught to be able to shut down when suffering abuse but it appears they disabled that feature for CTF.
Matt Mullenweg has done a lot for free and open source software as a communication platform, so it has been sad to see all this play out (crossing my fingers not as badly as with Ian Murdock of Debian though). Here are some health-related suggestions I've collected that may be useful for him or anyone else who can be hyper-focused and spend too much time indoors and on the computer and not emphasize good nutrition and exercise and face-to-face community so on:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...
That said, and with all due respect for Matt's past accomplishments in forging a community and a company to support it, I think Automattic (and so Matt) made a terrible choice around 2015 by deciding to use Slack for internal and even external communications instead of just using WordPress with the 02/Oxygen plugin previously used.
I wrote about that at length when I was applying for a job at Automattic circa 2015.The gist of that concern is on the main page of my website and says:
"And here is a link to a no-doubt overly-long and overly-enthusiastic job application document as essentially a programming and FOSS autobiography intermixed with ideas about how what I had learned over the years could help Automattic (the main developers of WordPress) -- or, to some lesser extent, any other large FOSS effort, including Drupal/Acquia. After waiting a couple of months in the Automattic interview queue, that application fizzled over whether I was willing to use Slack for the job interview at Automattic. My reason for concern over Slack use at Automattic was that, as good as Slack is, the proprietary venture-funded Slack is disrupting the open-source communications ecosystem which WordPress is a big part of. I enjoyed writing that application document overall, and I still hope some of the ideas in it can still help Automattic grow even more in a FOSS direction (or other similar companies like Acquia with Drupal). That document is at least something for my kid to perhaps read someday many years from now. Of course, my kid may just read it and then say, not without significant justification, that I probably should have put the principle of family ahead of other principles in turning down any significant chance for a six-figure salary work-from-home job on FOSS.
Here is a version of Twirlip I started as a proof-of-concept Thunderbird Server webapp to handle email, chat, and other real-time communications as another step towards a social semantic desktop. It is the beginning of the embodiment of the "ThunderbirdS Are Grow! Manifesto". But if you are looking for something good now that is FOSS, check out Mattermost, Matrix.org, Mailpile, Kolab, and similar things."
An archive page of that job application and Slack comments from back then is here, includign with the section on transcending polling in WordPress:
"Automattic JavaScript Engineer application by Paul D. Fernhout"
https://web.archive.org/web/20...
"But there is an alternative to trying to shoehorn WebSocket-related changes into the WordPress core PHP somehow. Such an update notification service to reduce polling could instead be hosted at WordPress.com in parallel to a WordPress server for a fee for those who don't want to run Node.js (or whatever) locally to supply that service.
A fundamental issue is that people at Automattic at the time saw WordPress' competitors as things like Wix, not things like Slack. I was reminded of when in the 1990s ParcPlace (a Smalltallk vendor) thought Digittalk (another Smalltalk vendor) was their main competitor and disastrously bought them while ignoring that Visual Basic and Delphi and similar products were really their big competitors (which I had warned someone in sales there about about). WordPress could have become the premier chat platform for companies (including using ideas for a near-real-time message updates relay server leveraging technology someone at Automattic has written). But instead Automattic and the WordPress community it shepherds moved to Slack. Just a very sad way to see a great FOSS community focused on communications destroy itself by embracing proprietary software. And it seems like Matt played a big part in that short-sighted decision somehow (maybe having friends who worked at and.or funded Slack judging from some of his bloig posts long ago)?
Here is a more general essay I wrote in 2016 on why not to use Slack for free software development (in part trying to explain to Richard Stallman of the FSF why Slack was such a threat to the free software movement):
"Reasons Not to Use Slack for Free Software Development"
https://pdfernhout.net/reasons...
====
Contents
* Introduction and summary
* What is Slack? (A proprietary centralized communications hub web service )
* Free alternatives exist to the proprietary Slack
* Automattic/WordPress is sending the wrong message about free communications software
* Slack can change its TOS at any time
* Slack can cut you or your community off at any time
* You need to be online to use Slack
* Slack copies the contents of secret URLs
* Slack makes government surveillance easier
* Slack is a single point of failure for your community
* Slack's privacy policy guarantees very little
* A democratic government is a special case of a free and open source community
* Slack is focused on teams, not communities
* Slack limits are not advertised (like 5000 users maximum per "team")
* It costs a lot to search or delete older messages
* Your Slack discussions for free software projects are not public or findable
* Slack private messages may not be very private
* Slack may change ownership at any time
* What if Slack went free/libre and open source?
* Standards unify; incompatible services fragment
* The cost of changing later can be high
* Matrix.org is a better way forward
* Would I ever use Slack? Sadly, yes.
====
Tangentially, I also tried to get Automattic/WordPress to use Mithril instead of React back when React has problematical licensing relating to patents... In the end though Automattic and Matt had enough clout to get Facebook to change the React licensing terms (even though I still feel Mithril has a better conceptual design with better developer ergonomics than React).
https://github.com/Automattic/...
Anyway, I'll never know if WordPress and Automattic might have gone in very different directions if I had gone to work there -- or if I just would have become frustrated and bitter from still seeing it all play out the way it did despite my best efforts there (given social momentum and power structures)?
For example, it took five years to get this memory exhaustion and crashing bug I reported in WordPress fixed for when you edit a long page too many times (which I discovered while writing that job application). That is a bug which may have cost the entire WordPress community many millions of dollars a year paying for bigger servers with more memory than they really needed to avoid the problem, compared to if the bug had been fixed sooner:
"High memory usage ( and possible server error) editing post with many/large revisions"
https://core.trac.wordpress.or...
P.S. Sad anniversary of September 11 today and the destruction of technology used for social advancement in Chili in 1973 (as another example of politics and personality disrupting humane tech progress as with WordPress):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"Project Cybersyn was a Chilean economic project developed from 1971 to 1973 during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-1973), with the purpose of constructing a distributed decision-support system to aid in the management of the national economy. The project consisted of four modules: an economic simulator, custom software to check factory performance, an operations room, and a national network of telex machines that linked to a single mainframe computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"According to historian Sebastian Hurtado Torres, there is no documentary evidence to support that the United States government acted actively in the coordination and execution of the coup actions by the Chilean Armed Forces from September 11, 1973 itself. However, Richard Nixon's interest from the beginning was that the Allende government would not be consolidated and intervened in the conditions prior to the Chilean coup of 1973. Historian Peter Winn found "extensive evidence" of United States complicity in events that helped in part to create the conditions that led to the coup. However, given the local political polarization and the performance of the Popular Unity government, there is no academic consensus on whether this intervention--which primarily took the form of financial support for the media, political parties, and opposition organizations--played a decisive role in the events of September 11, 1973."
Why do you assume it's a mistake? Maybe Chunder is a Dutch person whose space bar is sticking and they're trying to type something like "regarding the trees", "to the trees", "toward shooting the breeze", "priced in trees", "chug trees", etc.
Do they? I thought most people literally use them on their laps. I do, certainly. Why get a laptop if you're just going to use it sitting at a table as if it were a PC?
I've also gotten this condition, BTW (after getting sick of it, I got a laptop tray, and that solved the problem), though on my thighs, not by abdomen (I sit using a laptop - laying down to use one sounds difficult?). Patterned just like that kid's. I didn't have a name for it before, now I do. I'm not sure why you'd have to go to the hospital to figure it out, as it's very obvious what's causing it - you leave a hot thing on one part of your body for a long time and then it turns red; it's not exactly rocket science to put two and two together.
ED: I just looked it up; about 80-90% of people use them on a table, 10-20% on their lap, so I guess I'm in the minority. *shrug*
Nonsense. Space is blue and birds fly through it. -- Heisenberg
