I’d say it’s mostly a North-European thing, not the whole world. I am a latin american living in Sweden and the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it). They trust the system so much that whenever it doesn’t work, it’s basically ”well bummer”. You become the 1% for which the system has failed, and you’re supposed to just take one for the team (since everyone else is having a good time anyway). The thing is simply that you have to learn to see the good side of the system and understand that you can’t have the cake and eat it too, unfortunately.
As another 3rd world citizen living in Northern Europe, I usually describe it as "processes and rules over common sense". They understand your situation, they agree with you, they can solve your problem, but they will not do it because it goes against some obscure rule, or it would not follow a specific mandatory procedure step by step, and who knows what are consequences.
And quite frankly, they don't give a fuck. They have been conditioned not to give a fuck from an early age; the system works 99% of the time, so nobody really has to care about each other. There is literally no benefit in giving a fuck about another person, in fact it is quite possible that you'll end up being punished by the system for breaking the rules. It is a Leviathan whale state swimming through the sea with millions of little fish sucking on it, and they sure as hell don't care about the few who fall off during the trip.
I think it's a "busy tracks" problem in general, which yeah, is a problem in Europe in general. You can't just stop a train in the middle of some track, there are a bunch of other trains coming too, who can't just pass unless you get to a place where that is possible, which isn't everywhere.
None the less, the rest of what you say is true of Sweden, but I don't think it's the reason a train refuses to stop on some train tracks.
My point is that, in a country where people act like well, people (and not robots), someone would be bothered by this and might try to solve the problem in some creative and unexpected way. Someone might think "damn, we're ruining these peoples' christmas, let's do something" and then fix it somehow. Here it's more like "well bummer, deal with it" in both cases. I doubt that a bunch of adult, highly-skilled people could not have a conversation over the phone and arrange for a train to stop 5 minutes on a track so people could get off. Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident? I think that a lack of willingness to give a fuck is much more likely.
> Are you saying that there are so many trains in the same track at the same time that stopping for 5 minutes would cause an accident?
No, but these places generally prefer to take care of the collective, even if it means slightly worse conditions for some individuals. This is impregnated into our brains from early on, and somewhat humorously "codified" in the Law of Jante, among others. From the outside, for the last two decades, it seems to be slightly changing more and more into another direction, but that's how it was when I was born and raised there at least.
Once you understand the common perspective of "sacrificing the individual for the group", it becomes a lot easier to understand this sort of reasoning.
Personally, I don't agree with it, together with a bunch of other weird social rules, hence I don't live there anymore. But the other side of the fence, where every rule is constantly broken by everyone, "just in this case" but 100x times a week, isn't so much better after all. Just different. Some people seem to be wired for some things, others not so much.
> the overwhelming lack of empathy and humanity you’ll experience in the healthcare system is borderline unbelievable (until you learn to expect and deal with it).
Curious to hear what strategy you've learned over time.
The most important thing is to learn to expect and plan ahead, so that you don't get caught by surprise as much as it is reasonably possible. I do not expect anyone to act with humanity, so I start playing the system as early as possible. If I think something might be a problem in two weeks, I start calling them today, knowing that it'll take them two weeks minimum to take me seriously. If I go the the ER, I take movies and games with me (and lots of paracetamol) because I know it'll take several hours for anyone to even say hello to me, let alone do something concrete. I also, maybe more importantly, do not expect anything from the human side. Basically I see them as robots, so I deal with them as robots: explain everything calmly, repeat myself 100 times, and even more importantly, do not get angry. You get angry, you lose. It doesn't matter if you have an internal bleeding and you're dying, the moment you start screaming, nobody will take you seriously anymore. You have to be slow, strong, and systematic: repeat yourself, call again in 1h, then in 4h, then next morning, then next morning, until at some point something happens.
If you get behind the cockpit of the dangerous new prototype(of your own volition!), it's really up to your own skill level whether you're a crash dummy or the test pilot.
Say what you will about this piece, I didn’t detect any AI in it and for that I thank Charli. I’ve been desperately for any original thoughts whatever that come out of a human being’s brain and in that sense it was an interesting read. However the real pearl was the link to Lou Reed’s interview, what a gem! It got me into a rabbit hole of watching Lou Reed making “fun” of obnoxious journalists on YouTube and I haven’t laughed this much in a long time. It also reminded me of this classic one from Iggy Pop: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=78S0yrMLfTU&pp=ygUcaWdneSBwb3A...
I believe I listened to Charli XCX music once, my girlfriend has grandchildren. Not really my thing, but it's great that people are still being influenced by those interviews.
I still listen to the Velvet Underground all the time, but if I listen to Lou Reed's solo stuff, it's either Walk On the Wild Side or those interviews.
Maybe "The Kids" from Berlin once in a while.
And "Sweet Jane" depending on whether you consider Loaded as a VU album.
I also think she missed the point there. Normal people bust their asses on a daily basis to do a good job at whatever it is they do, with more often than not, under rewarding compensation and a lot of problems to overcome. I think it is normal for average people to think that it isn’t fair that some of these people are getting so much overwhelmingly good stuff for things that can be reasonably seen as futile.
Slightly off-topic: I have an honest question for all of you out there who love Advent of Code, please don't take this the wrong way, it is a real curiosity: what is it for you that makes the AoC challenge so special when compared with all of the thousands of other coding challenges/exercises/competitions out there? I've been doing coding challenges for a long time and I never got anything special out of AoC, so I'm really curious. Is it simply that it reached a wider audience?
I have only had some previous experience with Project Euler, which I liked for the loop of "try to bruteforce it -> doesn't work -> analyze the problem, exploit patterns, take shortcuts". (I hit a skill ceiling after 166 problems solved.)
Advent of Code has this mass hysteria feel about it (in a good sense), probably fueled by the scarcity principle / looking forward to it as December comes closer. In my programming circles, a bunch of people share frustration and joy over the problems, compete in private leaderboards; there are people streaming these problems, YouTubers speedrunning them or solving them in crazy languages like Excel or Factorio... it's a community thing, I think.
If I wanted to start doing something like LeetCode, it feels like I'd be alone in there, though that's likely false and there probably are Discords and forums dedicated to it. But somehow it doesn't have the same appeal as AoC.
I think the corny stories about how the elves f up and their ridiculous machines and processes add a lot of flavor.
It is not as dry as Project Euler for example, which is great in its own right.
And you collect ASCII art golden stars!
I think one is the feeling of community - we have a workplace leaderboard and we compete with each other, discuss solutions to the problems, how we overcame them etc.
The second is the timing and pacing - the fist few days are about warming up, then comes a couple decently challenging puzzles, after which the whole thing gets very difficult. Having the discipline to actually spend the time every day to do the puzzles feels like going back to the gym and actually sticking to it.
I also get to solve these kind of coding puzzles at work very rarely - maybe once every couple of months - so the whole thing feels like an intense workout for my brain.
The downside is of course is that it's exhausting - later puzzles often took 1-2 hours for me to solve - during days where I have work related stress, this is not easy.
For me, it's a bunch of things. It happens once a year, so it feels special. Many of my friends (and sometimes coworkers) try it as well, so it turns into something to chat about. Because they're one a day they end up being timeboxed, I can focus on just hammering out a solution or dig in and optimize but I can't move on so when I'm done for the day I'm done. It's also pretty nostalgic for me, I started working on it in high school.
The worst part of this is how it has this kind of buzzfeed-like style of semi-tongue-in-cheek-but-still-politically-correct aesthetics. Is this what regression to the mean is in the future of AI writing? Are we doomed to read buzzfeed everywhere now?
Try to get your LLM of choice to find its way out of a labyrinth that you describe in text form. It's absolutely awful even with the simplest mazes. I'm not sure the problem here is memory, though? I think it has to do with spatial reasoning. I'd be willing to bet every company right now is working on spatial reasoning (at least up to 3D) and as soon as that is working, a huge amount of pieces will fall into place.
Spatial reasoning is weak, but still I frequently see models come up with the right answer in reasoning steps, only to make the wrong move in the following turn because they forget what they just learned. For models with hidden reasoning it's often not even possible to retain the reasoning tokens in context through multiple steps, but even if you could the context windows are big but not big enough to contain all the past reasoning for every step for hundreds of steps. And then even if they were the retrieval from context for abstract concepts (vs verbatim copying) is terrible.
Text is too lossy and inefficient. The models need to be able to internally store and retrieve a more compact, abstract, non-verbal representation of facts and procedures.
