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Comment Re:Why only boys? (Score 1) 57

Here's a little more detail.

Researchers a few years back ran tests. ADHDers and neurotypicals were asked to harvest berries and edible plants.

Neurotypicals tended to over-harvest and damage bushes to the point where recovery would be slow if possible at all, and tended to pick areas clean, wiping out local populations of edible plants.

ADHDers tended to move relatively quickly from area to area, harvesting a decent amount from each area but not excessively. The quantities tended to be at the sort of level that have long been established as a good balance, such that plants and populations would tend to actually do better the following year. Not only that, but they tended to gather more.

https://www.psychologytoday.co...

Crofts and small farms rapidly went to three-stage and four-stage crop rotation, but different fields would be with different crops. This meant that the failure of a single crop would be much less of a survival thing.

You'd see fields with a mutitude of diverse crops, because diversity was critical. Failure was highly likely, so you localised it. Failure in one area had no meaningful impact overall. Things like the Irish potato famine and the parsnip failures across France in the 1700s were relatively rare in history. Likewise, when industrialisation wiped out cottage industries, farms that had been very successful suddenly went bankrupt and mass starvation was common. The ability to task-switch and have a large number of small projects going was essential to life at the edges.

You're absolutely right, more ADHD would have indeed curbed the excesses. The industrial revolution caused huge problems by trying to do too much with too little diversity. Which eventually destroyed the economies built around the early mills, because the markets were too easy to undermine. There was no capacity to switch. But during the IR, the obsession with coal meant nobody really looked at alternative fuels or alternative activities. Economies became tightly constricted, which was devastating when it came to global warming, but equally devastating when it came to distributing metal-devouring bacteria (which did enormous damage to infrastructure) and radioactive particles (old mill areas are still unusually radioactive).

More ADHD wouldn't have eliminated the problem, but it would have diversified the solutions and would have diversified the markets, resulting in a much more robust, much healthier marketplace and a much more robust, much healthier population.

Comment Re:Why only boys? (Score 1) 57

Uh, no. As in, 100% of gatherers would be ADHD. IF they weren't, you'd be extinct within the year. 20% of the hunters would also be ADHD, because over-harvesting was also going to wipe out your food source. 100% of your explorers would be ADHD, 100% of your experimenters would be AuDHD.

ADHD was essential to survival. If you didn't want to die out, you stuck the neurotypical outside so that the wolves and other nasties actually hunting (tigers wouldn't be present) would get them. Neurotypicals were the main threat to survival.

Comment Re:Well Duh! (Score 1) 101

My biggest beef with the whole self-driving thing is that we should NOT have started with cars.

Why not a self-driving cart that takes you around the store? Or a self-driving golf buggy? Or a self-driving airport passenger carrier to get you to your gate? Or even those little "trains" that some shopping centres have for the kids which are just wheeled vehicles?

THAT'S where we should have begun. A limited controlled environment, low-speeds, little impact, useful, even a pay-for service (do you want to walk to your gate, or get on a little cart that'll drive you there for $1?), and iron out all the myriad problems with driving in close proximity to pedestrians, etc. in a safe and controlled environment.

The fact that those things AREN'T mature technologies tells me that self-driving car people have NO INTEREST in our safety. None whatsoever. If they did, they would have started small and built up.

Hell, even a self-driving bus makes far more sense, even if it goes slower. They often already have their own dedicated lanes!

What they did is exactly what you describe in your last sentence. Think about the quickest way to profitability and screw the testing, research, consequences, even the laws in some cases.

Comment Re:Honesty (Score 1) 102

> I think this is the result of their trainers trying to reduce hallucination.

Most probably. I don't like LLMs burning my precious tokens blathering on about being honest, but I will accept the tradeoff. Grudgingly haha.

> My iron rule is that Claude is not allowed to modify git state, not even to stage or unstage, and definitely not to commit. As long as that rule is followed, any mistakes can be cleaned up easily.

I have a repo in a sandbox with no remote. Claude is quite good at pushing commits to this repo during its own milestones during development, and it will use it to hunt down bugs when tests fail after a commit, stepping back to a commit before this session's work to see if this is a new bug , or a new way to expose an existing bug. If it sees that it is a new way to exercise an existing bug, it will binary search its way through the commits until it narrows down what changed, and then looks at how to fix it.

Comment Re:Honesty (Score 1) 102

I disagree with all your assertions.

> AI has access to your command line to autonomously execute commands. No no no.

Ok, I must admit that I did cast that line off the back of the good ship ColaMan without any further information in order to see if anyone would bite.

You think that particular command line has anything of worth in it? The only thing in there that I can't recreate with one command is the local Git repository that the LLM commits its changes to. And that's only because I manually copy it out of the LLM's sandbox on occasion. I should probably automate that one day.

> you enabled an LLM to do destructive things and then complain when there is destruction.

There has been no destruction in it's little sandbox that I care about. It created a faulty command that got escaped by the shell, and oh shit, nothing of importance happened, because even if that command had been 'rm -rf /' I just would have had to return to the last backed up git that I had. That takes about 5 minutes I suppose. The amount of effort that LLM has saved me over the last two months is probably about a year's worth of full time coding, so I'm going to look past any accidental nuclear holocausts where it turns all the sand in its sandbox to glass.

Look. LLMs are just tools. Some tools are great, some tools are shit. This particular class of tool is great at all that boilerplate stuff that can get you 50 - 80 percent of the way to completing a task that you need to do today, if you already have enough skill to know how to do the task. It's been quite useful going through all my old projects in 'code review' mode, because it can often see security/usability/structural issues or improvements that I frankly could not be arsed to deal with when I wrote them. It is in no way ready to replace a human for any sustained length of time, and anyone with a shred of intellect can see that.

Personally, I don't think the AI bubble is going to last much longer. So I'm quite happily burning up Anthropic's compute time finishing off/cleaning up heaps of small home and work projects before a single question costs $8.25 for the LLM to answer.

Comment Re:Why only boys? (Score 1) 57

No, it's more likely that girls and women learned to mask symptoms early for survival reasons.

If you look at hunter-gatherer societies, ADHD is paramount to survival because it avoids over-harvesting. Too little ADHD produces cultures prone to driving plants and/or animals extinct. ADHD is a critical stop-gap that prevents this. Studies show ADHD gatherers will not only collect more, they will do so in ways that cause far less damage, resulting in a far better second harvest and far better sustainability.

Into more modern times, ADHD was a valuable survival trait. Too little and you became vulnerable to diseases, pests, crop blight, etc. If you wanted a stable population, right the way through to the industrial era, you needed a high level of ADHD in the population.

It is only when neurotypical bosses decided that they had to micromanage everything and decided who lived and who died on the streets that you see ADHD symptoms suddenly and massively suppressed. But masking changes nothing. The levels will still be the same, they're just hidden.

Comment Re:Why only boys? (Score 1) 57

It isn't. The under-diagnosis of girls is astronomical.

You are assuming ADHD is a new thing. No, it isn't. It is a survival thing. ADHD was critical in a very large percentage of the population for the bulk of the last 350,000 years. Without it, humanity would have gone extinct. It's merely not appropriate in a world in which neurotypicals make neurodiverse solutions a "bad thing".

Comment Re:No shit, Sherlock! (Score 2) 57

I never got myself into the whole "masculinity" obsession, even back in the 70s and 80s. The result of this was a discovery that computers launched me head-first through far fewer windows and pelted me with far fewer rocks. So, yeah, I was definitely seen as disposable though my childhood and teen years by pretty much everyone. (It's one reason anyone looking back at those as "golden years" is unlikely to win me over.)

Escapism is pretty much all I had at the time, and these days remains pretty much all I have - reality has grown far worse over the years and knowledge by the neurotypicals has not come with empathy but ammunition. There is guilt and shame in playing with creative writing or inventing, and the demons have got really bad on occasion, but you're right, it's not doing anyone any harm.

Comment Honesty (Score 5, Insightful) 102

I'm seeing more and more references to "Honest" in AI output, or AI-related comments.

The AI didn't make an "Honest" mistake. It does not have the capacity for honesty. The output from a LLM is phrased in such a manner to provoke empathy, in a similar way to how Microsoft re-jigged all their user interaction dialogs to include "We" to soften the blow of their crappy software failing the user for the 5th time today. (Side note: "Something went wrong" is the most infuriating error message ever.)

When I ask a LLM for a code review it often blurts out "Honest note:" about some shortcomings. I don't care about "honesty". I care about safe, working, robust, code. The fact that LLMs are tripping over themselves trying to be "Honest" about mistakes in their "path of most statistics" output is a concern if you care about trying to make them operate outside their sandbox in the real world.

Yesterday Claude quoted a word in backticks during an automatic git commit and my shell escaped it tried to execute it. Luckily the word was just an English word with nothing matching in my path. But this is basic, basic, basic stuff. It's been committing things to git ever since it was built, and yet, it keeps tripping over itself. In my code one of the tests keeps failing due to seed data timestamps not lining up with the datetime the test was run. I can see that. Every time Claude runs the tests, it burns up tokens going, "Oh this particular test failed I'll just dig into things and see what's going on, **$$**$$**$$** oh it's just a timestamp issue". Never once does it commit that to its memory file, so eventually I told it to remove the test, and it just added a comment to it saying "Ignore this test due to timestamp misalignment", which it could have done the very first time, if it actually had a brain.

LLMs are a very handy tool if used right. I can get huge chunks of boilerplate code out of them with just a few sentences and that's great when I'm hashing out a concept. But to promise the world (and your investors) that LLMs are ready to replace people out in the real world, where "Honest Mistakes" have Real World Repercussions, that's outright fraud at this stage.

Comment Re:Archiving data (Score 1) 95

> It will randomize over a surprisingly short time if it doesn't have power for data maintenance.

If you plug in a USB stick, you just power up the controller and the flash memory chip. You have to read everything and write everything to charge the cells back up again, there is no background refresh going on like in DRAM.

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