> The company says that the drug was generally well tolerated, but that’s on the oncology scale.
> ...
> He’s been on daraxonrasib since early this year, and describes it this way: “. . .it’s a nasty drug. It causes crazy stuff like my body can’t grow skin and so I bleed all out of a whole bunch of parts of me that shouldn’t be bleeding” If you go to that link above, be prepared, because he also looks like he’s had aqua regia thrown all over him (and apparently feels a bit like that, too). But his tumor volume has gone down by about 75%, and there’s a very strong chance that he wouldn’t still be alive at all without having gone on the drug.
I'd first run across this decades ago in the context of FDA drugs trials, in which adverse incidents were noted. My understanding at the time was that certain chemotherapies tended to interfere with skin regeneration, particularly in areas subject to high wearing (hands, feet, elbows), or rapid replacement (particularly mucous membranes, lips and mouth especially).
Not all chemotherapies are brutal, but some can be quite fiendish, and quality of life is a legitimate consideration when considering whether to proceed with treatment. Informed decisionmaking and consent in a context where expertise is rare and clinicians don't directly experience the adverse effects is difficult at best.
I am in the enviable position to not be actively dying from an untreatable disease, so obviously haven’t seen things from the other side of this sort of situation.
But to me, that doesn’t sound like a life worth living. Obviously different people will have different thresholds for when to throw in the towel, and I’m glad that we are finding medicines to allow people to make the choices that align with their own drives.
Still, I can’t help but think that this is the sort of life virtually none of us would choose to inflict on our pets, even if cost was no option. We give them a far more graceful exit from this world than we give ourselves, and I think that’s worth considering.
I am truly terrified of death. I wish I wasn’t, but an infinity of nonexistence somehow seems unbearable (though, obviously, it will be trivial to bear in practice). I still hope that when my time comes, I will find the strength to exit gracefully if my life ever gets to the point where each day is filled with pain and discomfort, and where I can’t actually take part in any of the things I enjoy about life.
I hope that this is only a temporary treatment for this guy to get the tumor to a point where it can be operated on or treated with other therapies. Because his life sounds like a living hell and that breaks my heart.
Well, I am in the situation you are so afraid of. Chemo, radiation and other treatments suck big time, let alone the effects of the cancer itself.
BUT ... this is not a binary situation, where suddenly life becomes unbearable. There's so much worth living for. And not just the obvious big things in life (kids, family, friends), but also many many small things. Man, that first cup of cappuchino once the effects of chemo wear off alone is almost worth all the puking beforehand :) Or having a nice piece of cheese. Seeing my small herb garden grow. Etc. etc.
The trick is to live a peaceful, content life. Be grateful for what you have. Enjoy your short time on earth.
Of course it’s never binary. And different people value different things.
I don’t think I was clear that I’m not afraid of being simply uncomfortable in my final days, but that there are absolutely medical treatments that can extend one’s life at extreme cost to quality of life. And there’s a threshold where I hope I’ll choose quality over quantity.
Sometimes you don’t know what that cost will be before starting treatment. Sometimes you’re holding out hope that the treatment will help you actually make it out the other side alive and healthy again. Sometimes you want to make it through long enough to see a child graduate, or meet a grandchild on the way, or some other meaningful event. There’s a million reasons one might choose between treatment options. And I don’t begrudge anyone for making the choice that’s right for them.
I’m sorry to hear what you’re going through, but I’m glad that it sounds like you’ve chosen a path that brings you the most fulfillment possible.
I’m sorry to hear what you are facing and send any good vibes I can. I lost my wife to a particularly nasty metastatic cancer (melanoma). There were a few complications that delayed her immunotherapy, which ultimately led to her death.
There is a targeted therapy that applies to many melanomas, but hers did not have the mutation that made it an option. Perhaps this treatment will be tweaked and developed to be less awful and offer that gift of time that my wife didn’t have.
Cancer and other diseases are insidious. While she didn’t make it, she had hope. And the reality is her hope was built on the shoulders of countless others who faced certain death and whose experiences led us to the 60/40 odds that melanoma patients have today.
I think the two key things to consider is that: (1) humans are quite good at getting accustomed to their current situation, and (2) these degraded living situations generally happen gradually. There's no hard cutoff where one might suddenly think "welp, I've passed my threshold of wanting to live just now". Boiling the frog, if you will.
There are so many different situations I could not imagine happily living in even when I try to, but then I try to think about how I would feel if I was born into the situation from day one. I wouldn't really know any other life, and so it would just be my life. With that in mind, the most troubling thing mostly seems to be what I have perceived to have lost, rather than what I currently have. That helps me understand how you can keep on living. Even when you lose something, you still have what you still have.
Sasse is a bad example of the drug. Entire institutions, at least the two I'm working with as a caregiver, have gone through the trials of 6236 without a single case of the rash as bad as his.
Insensitive comment in general. "Throw in the towel" really pissed me off.
I’m glad to hear that that’s not common. From the description GP gave it did not sound like a simple rash.
Obviously I am not saying that people should choose to forego treatment to avoid minor discomfort. I am saying that there are thresholds of quality of life where I think—given both foreknowledge of a treatment’s consequences and emotional distance from the situation—many would choose a shorter, higher quality of life than a longer, drawn out daily battle with little of the things we enjoy.
This may sound condescending but: you sound young, not disabled, and extremely sheltered from being exposed to disabled people.
I am in a position to be intimately familiar with illness. I will say that health is a spectrum and the mind is incredibly resilient. You will surprise yourself as you inevitably age how much your mind will adapt to always hurting. There is more to life than body discomfort. This patient sounds like he has his faculties and is making an informed decision to continue living, because his life is worth the discomfort he is going through. I am reminded of a line along the lines of every day you experience, no matter how terrible, is very likely a day that someone else yesterday would have desperately wanted.
There has been recent attention on what treatments oncologists choose for themselves when diagnosed with terminal illnesses—having seen firsthand what happens to quality of life for their patients—and what members of the general population choose.
Doctors tend to choose the treatments that bias quality of life over quantity of life. That’s all I’m getting at here. I personally hope that if it ever comes to it, I will have the strength to choose something like three months of high QoL over one year of grinding daily misery as I have personally seen others do.
Having your skin fail to regenerate, bleeding everywhere, and having skin that looks like you’ve had aqua regia poured over it seems to me like a poor quality of life. It sounded like a life of pain and one in which it would be difficult to do a lot of the things that bring me joy. Perhaps it’s not as bad as it sounds, and this is a poor example of it. I’m not judging this guy for his choices; they’re his to make. And maybe I’ve overestimated the amount of pain he’s in. But from the description above, it sounded awful.
I find both the honesty and tact of your comment a generous gift. After watching the Sasse interview, reading the parent comment and reading your comment, I’m reminded abstractly how much of the emotional and psychological work of reconciling biological mortality is built on personal cognitive context that a mind-body builds over its cycles living in the world. So much about mortality is shared. But so much of the context for interpreting mortality is radically personal.
Why do you feel the need to attack the person character by stating he is probably young and/or has not dealt with disability in his social circle? This is needlessly aggravating and actually pissed me of when reading it.
I mean, he looks uncomfortable, but you would be surprised at how much people can tolerate when there is no alternative. Here is an interview I found [0].
I think he looks better than every 90 year old. But he also mentions that it still is terminal.
> Still, I can’t help but think that this is the sort of life virtually none of us would choose to inflict on our pets, even if cost was no option. We give them a far more graceful exit from this world than we give ourselves, and I think that’s worth considering.
I often think about this, wondering how many of those animals would have chosen death if given the choice, and how often it is simply a way to spare the owner from seeing something that upsets them.
Always. Everything that pet owners do to their pets is driven by the owner's human feelings and not the pet's animal needs. Obviously, because we can't communicate with the pets and they can't tell us what we want. And we have total control over their lives so we do what we want.
I'm personally particularly upset by the easy conviction with which most people neuter their pets. I can rant for hours on the ethics of that, or the complete lack thereof, in my opinion. I'm shocked there is so little debate on that, even by philosophers and particularly of animal rights activists who really, really should know better than support such a cruel, egregious and obvious violation of an animal's individual existence.
At least in some countries neutering an animal for anything but medical reasons is illegal. Maybe I should move to Norway.
The harm of neutering and spaying needs to be balanced with the harm of having dramatically greater numbers of feral cats and dogs, whose lives are often what I will charitably describe as not enviable, and with the problems having large numbers of feral animals can cause to an area.
The alternative we in America have settled on right now is shelters which perform euthanasia on unwanted animals. I would love to know how communities that have banned these procedures deal with the issue.
There are plenty of places in the world were stray cats and dogs are normal and there's nothing wrong with that. You may find their lives not enviable; but you are a human. Er, presumably. Plenty of strays in Greece where I'm from are taken care of by volunteers so they're well fed and they have shelter and medical care when they need it. The greatest danger is traffic accidents but that's also true for domestic animals and neutering certainly doesn't protect from that.
You use the word "feral" but I find that's a bit of a loaded term because it makes it sound like those animals are wild and violent. They're usually not, or at least not more than domestic animals. In the UK, where I live, there are no strays and still there are thousands of dog attacks, some causing injury or even death every year. Cats of course don't attack humans unless you really piss them off and even then it's not like they can seriously injure you.
You could also think about all the "feral" animals we do not try to neuter in large numbers like pigeons or seagulls. Much of what's wrong with their lives is that people treat them like dirt. That's not a problem you solve by castrating an animal, or at least a non-human animal. Why only neuter cats and dogs? Because we care more about them? That sounds like some kind of perverse inversion to me.
And let's not forget: the only difference between a "feral" or stray cat or dog and a pet is that someone's taken the pet in. I suppose in civilised countries you only get your pets from a certified breeder and you know their pedigree but where I come from if you want a cat or a dog you can just take one from the street. Or, often, they come to you on their own; cats mostly, but dogs, too some times. That was the case for most of the animals I've ever cared for: basically all the cats and a couple of the dogs too.
>> I would love to know how communities that have banned these procedures deal with the issue.
There's a famous documentary about the stray cats of Istanbul, called Kedi (meaning "cat" in Turkish). I haven't watched it yet but it sounds like the thing you'd want to watch if you haven't grown up with strays all over the place:
There's eg https://summit.sfu.ca/item/11130 from a Tamara Smyth and Frederick Scott; Google scholar shows some citations but not necessarily conical brass in particular. That link is about trombones, so also not conical. (I read that and tried to implement some stuff in it, see https://nuchi.github.io/trombone/ for a browser-based playable version.)
Conical and cylindrical bores definitely differ but I don't see why they'd be different specifically with respect to the lip interaction, can you say more about that part?
Not really. It's certainly intended for the basic "fan out m tasks to n workers, and the fanout producer wants to know when they're all done" and can be abused for some more, but I don't think it does anything to help with the "consumer died, I want the producers to be able to know this rather than just continuing to push messages into a queue forever" case.
I've written wrappers to handle things the way I want, but it always feels like a bit of a hack. (Usually I use a stop sentinal internally and reach inside to unbound the queue before I send it to avoid blocking). Just wish it were built in.
> The same decomposition works in higher dimensions.
I don't think the same argument works in higher dimensions. On a circle, we can canonically pick a semicircle corresponding to each point (we have two choices, let's say we pick the clockwise one).
In higher dimensions there's no canonical choice of half-sphere. In odd dimensions one could pick a canonical half-sphere per point but it might turn out that some other non-chosen half-sphere for that point contains all the other points. In even dimensions there isn't even a way to canonically pick a half-sphere for each point (this is a consequence of the Hairy Ball Theorem).
(For all I know the actual numbers might turn out to be the same, I don't know. I'm just saying that the argument doesn't work.)
Well, it's easy to pick a half-n-sphere corresponding to a point on the surface. You just take the half-sphere centered at that point. For our two-dimensional circle, it would be the arc defined by the diameter that is perpendicular to the radius running between "the point" and the center of the circle.
At that point you've lost the ability to say that only one such half-sphere defined by a dropped point can be a valid solution, and you've also lost the ability to say that if a valid solution exists then there must be a valid solution defined by one of the points you want to include in the half-sphere, but you can define a canonical half-sphere for any point.
I was uncomfortable with the idea of picking "random points on a circle" to begin with, because of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability) , but the article doesn't even address whether the concept is well-defined. We can always choose a point on the perimeter deterministically from any chord (...that isn't a diameter), so the ill-definedness of the problem of choosing a random chord seems like it would infect the problem of choosing a random point on the perimeter.
Right, I was taking it as given that the problem of choosing a hemisphere canonically for a point meant "such that the argument works in the same way as for the circle".
Bertrand paradox just doesn't apply here, there's a natural measure on the circle and all higher dimensional spheres. I wouldn't expect an article on this subject to need to make that clarification unless it's dealing with chords or some other situation without a natural measure.
If I choose my four points as the endpoints of two chords chosen by the "random radial point" method described on the wikipedia page, is it still true that the odds of all four being covered by a semicircle are 50%?
Seems unlikely, because the density of chords is much higher near the center of the circle than the rim. (The density of chords is infinite at exactly the center). This combines with the fact the points are farther apart when their bisector is closer to the center, making it harder for all 4 of them to be on a half-circumference.
I have no idea, but I wouldn't expect so unless it was by coincidence? Not sure what chords have to do with any of this. There's a canonical way to choose 4 points uniformly and independently at random on the circle, and it's got nothing to do with chords.
I remember being very taken with this story when I first read it, and it's striking how obsolete it reads now. At the time it was written, "simulated humans" seemed a fantastical suggestion for how a future society might do scaled intellectual labor, but not a ridiculous suggestion.
But now with modern LLMs it's just too impossible to take it seriously. It was a live possibility then; now, it's just a wrong turn down a garden path.
A high variance story! It could have been prescient, instead it's irrelevant.
This is a sad take, and a misunderstanding of what art is. Tech and tools go "obsolete". Literature poses questions to humans, and the value of art remains to be experienced by future readers, whatever branch of the tech tree we happen to occupy. I don't begrudge Clarke or Vonnegut or Asimov their dated sci-fi premises, because prediction isn't the point.
The role of speculative fiction isn't to accurately predict what future tech will be, or become obsolete.
I think that's a little harsh. A lot of the most powerful bits are applicable to any intelligence that we could digitally (ergo casually) instantiate or extinguish.
While it may seem that the origin of those intelligences is more likely to be some kind of reinforcement-learning algorithm trained on diverse datasets instead of a simulation of a human brain, the way we might treat them isn't any less though provoking.
when you read this and its follow-up "driver" as a commentary on how capitalism removes persons from their humanity, it's as relevant as it was on day one.
That is the same categorical argument as what the story is about: scanned brains are not perceived as people so can be “tasked” without affording moral consideration. You are saying because we have LLMs, categorically not people, we would never enter the moral quandaries of using uploaded humans in that way since we can just use LLMs instead.
But… why are LLMs not worthy of any moral consideration? That question is a bit of a rabbit hole with a lot of motivated reasoning on either side of the argument, but the outcome is definitely not settled.
For me this story became even more relevant since the LLM revolution, because we could be making the exact mistake humanity made in the story.
And beyond the ethical points it makes (which I agree may or may not be relevant for LLMs - nobody can know for sure at this point), I find some of the details about how brain images are used in the story to have been very prescient of LLMs' uses and limitations.
E.g. it is mentioned that MMAcevedo performs better when told certain lies, predicting the "please help me write this, I have no fingers and can't do it myself" kinda system prompts people sometimes used in the GPT-4 days to squeeze a bit more performance out of the LLM.
The point about MMAcevedo's performance degrading the longer it has been booted up (due to exhaustion), mirroring LLMs getting "stupider" and making more mistakes the closer one gets to their context window limit.
And of course MMAcevedo's "base" model becoming less and less useful as the years go by and the world around it changes while it remains static, exactly analogous to LLMs being much worse at writing code that involves libraries which didn't yet exist when they were trained.
I actually think it was quite prescient and still raises important topics to consider - irrespective of whether weights are uploaded from an actual human, if you dig just a little bit under the surface details, you still get a story about ethical concerns of a purely digital sentience. Not that modern LLMs have that, but what if future architectures enable them to grow an emerging sense of self? It's a fascinating text.
That seems like a crazy position to take. LLMs have changed nothing about the point of "Lena". The point of SF has never ever been about predicting the future. You're trying to criticize the most superficial, point-missing reading of the work.
Anyway, I'd give 50:50 chances that your comment itself will feel amusingly anachronistic in five years, after the popping of the current bubble and recognizing that LLMs are a dead-end that does not and will never lead to AGI.
> More specifically, "Lena" presents a lush, capitalist ideal where you are a business, and all of the humanity of your workforce is abstracted away behind an API. Your people, your "employees" or "contractors" or "partners" or whatever you want to call them, cease to be perceptible to you as human. Your workers have no power whatsoever, and you no longer have to think about giving them pensions, healthcare, parental leave, vacation, weekends, evenings, lunch breaks, bathroom breaks... all of which, up until now, you perceived as cost centres, and therefore as pain points. You don't even have to pay them anymore. It's perfect!
have you pondered that we’re riding the very fast statistical machine wave at the moment, however, perhaps at some point this machine will finally help solve the BCI and unlock that pandora box, from there to fully imaging the brain will be a blink, from there to running copies on very fast hardware will be another blink, MMMMMMMMMMacevedo is a very cheeky take on the dystopia we will find on our way to our uploaded mind future
> Codex uses apply_patch: It takes a string as input, which is essentially an OpenAI-flavored diff, and instead of relying on a structured schema, the harness just expects this blob to follow a strict set of rules. Since OpenAI folks are without a doubt smart, I’m sure the token selection process is biased to fit this structure at the LLM gateway for the Codex variants of GPT, similar to how other constraints like JSON schemas or required tool calls work.
It still has to work to get an exact match, or at least I didn't read the code to see if there's any fuzzy matching used.
Note the two codex models were the only ones doing worse with the author's proposed format. The author found them doing better with replace than with apply patch, but since the author appears to be unaware that they use a schema for constrained sampling, I think a more realistic benchmark should enable constrained sampling for the apply test.
Is it the case that 'they' are simply two ways of immersing the same two tori in R^3 such that the complements in R^3 of the two identical tori are topologically different?
If so, isn't this just a new flavor of higher-dimensional knot theory?
They don't appear to care about the images of the immersions or their complements, aside from them not being related by an isometry of R^3. They're not doing any topology with the image.
In other works, they have two immersions from the torus to R^3, whose induced metric and mean curvature are the same, and whose images are not related by an isometry of R^3. I didn't see anything about the topology of the images per se, that doesn't seem to be the point here.
yeah I have, but I think only when it gets stuck in a loop and outputs a (for example) array that goes on forever. a truncated array is obviously not valid JSON. but it'd be hard to miss that if you're looking at the outputs.
Can anyone explain (or link) what they mean by "injection", at a level of explanation that discusses what layers they're modifying, at which token position, and when?
Are they modifying the vector that gets passed to the final logit-producing step? Doing that for every output token? Just some output tokens? What are they putting in the KV cache, modified or unmodified?
It's all well and good to pick a word like "injection" and "introspection" to describe what you're doing but it's impossible to get an accurate read on what's actually being done if it's never explained in terms of the actual nuts and bolts.
I’m guessing they adjusted the activations of certain edges within the hidden layers during forward propagation in a manner that resembles the difference in activation between two concepts, in order to make the “diff” seem to show up magically within the forward prop pass. Then the test is to see how the output responds to this forced “injected thought.”
> ...
> He’s been on daraxonrasib since early this year, and describes it this way: “. . .it’s a nasty drug. It causes crazy stuff like my body can’t grow skin and so I bleed all out of a whole bunch of parts of me that shouldn’t be bleeding” If you go to that link above, be prepared, because he also looks like he’s had aqua regia thrown all over him (and apparently feels a bit like that, too). But his tumor volume has gone down by about 75%, and there’s a very strong chance that he wouldn’t still be alive at all without having gone on the drug.
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