Ken McLeod[0] is teaching a 6 week class Tuesday evenings on the Diamond Sutra at The Alembic[1][2] in Berkeley. The first class was last week. It may be possible to join now and watch the first class online.
Ken recommends the Red Pine[3] and Thich Nhat Hanh[4] translations.
How do you mean? I think the article (and my experience) suggests that you do have to be paranoid. [I looked up paranoid, just to be sure I knew the exact definition, and I didn't. It's an "extreme and irrational" fear. Is looking it up parnoid? Hahaha.] Colloquially, paranoia is extreme and not necessarily irrational. Think of Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive." Or Kurt Kobain, "Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not after you."
Anyway, the way I frame the issue of software quality, is to hold the view that there are always errors, and the best you can do to apply extreme vigilance in attempting to ensure errors occur rarely.
GPT4o access is a handy feature, but, what I was hoping to hear about is an improvement in Siri's language "understanding."
In today's WWDC presentation, there were a few small examples of Siri improvements, such as an ability to maintain context, e.g., 'Add her flight arrival time to my calendar,' wherein Siri knows who "her" refers to.
In my day-to-day experience with Siri, it's clear Siri doesn't have the kind of ability to understand language that LLMs provide. It still feels like clever son-of-Eliza hacks with stock phrases. If your utterance doesn't match with a pre-programmed stock phrase, it doesn't work. The other day I said something like "Play the song you played before the one I asked you to skip," and Siri didn't seem to know what I wanted. OTOH, GPT4o can easily handle statements like that.
Does anyone know to what extent Siri's underlying language models are being upgraded?
I agree, this is the biggest annoyance with voice assistants today. The good news is that, as you noted, the technology to interpret complex/unclear requests is definitely already here today with ChatGPT.
I think that Apple demoed this today where the presenter changed her mind mid-sentence during a weather query.
I'm hopeful that means they've added a LLM to interpret the intent of user requests.
That's something that I keep wondering about. The existing voice assistants are all garbage across the board. Whatever you say about Siri, Google's assistant is even worse. Meanwhile, for the past couple months, I was able to fire up ChatGPT app and speak to it casually, in noisy environments, and it would both correctly convert my speech to text (with less than 5% errors) and correctly understand what I'm actually saying (even in presence of transcription errors).
All it takes to make a qualitatively better voice assistant would be to give GPT-4 a spec of functions representing things it can do on your phone, and integrating that with the OS. So why none of the companies bothered to do it? For that matter, I wonder why OpenAI didn't extend the ChatGPT app in this direction?
> In today's WWDC presentation, there were a few small examples of Siri improvements, such as an ability to maintain context, e.g., 'Add her flight arrival time to my calendar,' wherein Siri knows who "her" refers to.
Didn't Cortana do this? Pretty underwhelming in 2024.
I thought from the Apple keynote that Siri is getting a big update to be based on Apple Intelligence, not that this context stuff was getting hacked into the existing Siri model. They talked about new voice transcription features, the ability to correct yourself while talking, deep knowledge of your personal context, etc.
It sounds like a bigger update, where they’re applying gen AI models more broadly across tons of things (including I things like photo categorization), but I guess we’ll see.
I think ketamine is niche, and it will remain so. It's one of many tools. MDMA also assists in restoring brain plasticity[0].
For me, by far the most interesting development in mental health is Chris Palmer's work, which asserts that most mental illness is primarily a metabolic issue. If you think that can't be possible, read his 2022 book[1]. Here's a podcast[2].
I get depression and activity/exercise aren't easy to marry, but exercise and getting fit seems like a much better thing to try before mdma or LSD burns.
Exercise is supposedly superior to all pharma antidepressants.
And in the vein of the metabolic stuff, exercise can change your gut bacteria and metabolism on a fundamental level that isn't as fringe, it's pretty well documented.
But it takes like a month to get the train rolling, no pill popping.
Exercise helps with sleep regulation.
Exercise helps with pooping regularly.
Exercise helps moderate appetite, excessive or inability to eat.
A very underrated aspect is it increases your pain threshold. Depressives have tested as less pain tolerant and if the correlation is a factor, exercise helps.
Seconding exercise is the single best and easiest way to help. Intense exercise, but can be short. Consult the GP before flogging yourself to avoid unexpected death.
Dr. Palmer's book was inspired by his discovery of the 80+ years of research establishing that "mental health" diagnoses are caused by metabolic problems.
> Metabolic abnormalities have been identified in the brains and bodies of people with mental illness since the 1940's.
> We have a plethora of scientific research to support this.
I don't think the ketogenic diet is the best intervention, but it's a start. My friend figured out that she's a poor methylator who is harmed by the food fortification folic acid. Adding a methylated form of Vitamin B-9 to her routine flipped a switch for her, from "depressed" to "not-depressed", but the mental health professionals forced on her didn't care.
Dr. Palmer tweeted about his professional colleagues hurting people like my friend with anti-psychotics. While tranquilizers make the patient's symptoms seem better, they also harm the patient's metabolism. Whoops.
Will read through this. But have a quick question: Would it not be reasonable to guess that people having mental issues will have metabolic issues developed as later side effects. The reason is that mental issues puts a person in confused/lost state along with all the anxiety/feelings that it induces. This will causes them to neglect taking care of their body needs. Then that should trigger metabolic changes.
I think you are wrong. I've been getting ketamine treatment and it's nothing short of miraculous. The clinics are all booked solid because of so many referrals from patients. I'm pondering how I can invest in these clinics.
Yes. I scanned the OP link for any mention of nutrition, the gut or microbiome and there was nothing. Such a disappointing oversight for a supposed expert on depression.
Several adults in my friendship circle (retired or semi-retired) have evolved to spending nearly their entire waking lives online. They're able socialize normally, but they don't make the time to do that as often as in the past. This is tantamount to hikkormoridom.
One friend went to visit two other friends who live together in New Mexico. He imagined they'd be out and about doing stuff during his visit, but the hosts remained preoccupied by their online activities. The visitor could have stayed home and texted.
Good luck building apartments in active mudslide areas. Berkeley residents will be lucky not to lose the single family dwellings that are already built. Slide hazards will only get worse with ongoing climate change. See the map at the following link!
On your set top box, you'll find a bunch of inactive ports on the back. One of them (I don't remember which) is there from an outdated law which was to bolster some digital VHS technology. I think it's called like VHS-D. I learned this being a FiOs technician and would look up any frequent question asked over and over again at the end of installs.
Ken recommends the Red Pine[3] and Thich Nhat Hanh[4] translations.
[0] https://unfetteredmind.org/ [1] http://berkeleyalembic.org/ [2] https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/practicing-the-diamond-sutra-w... [3] https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-Sutra-Red-Pine/dp/1582432562/ [4] https://www.amazon.com/Diamond-That-Cuts-Through-Illusion/dp...
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