Gaywallet

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Be the change you want to see in the world! Make text posts, or start discussions in the threads of links that inspire you 💜

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Steroids in themselves are a synthetic testosterone

This is an extremely outdated understanding of steroids. While forms of testosterone are often still used for performance enhancement, the vast majority of anabolics are not testosterone at all. There are a variety of different classes of anabolics and they are often used in junction with each other. But modern doping goes much further than just that, with all kinds of new drugs such as SARMS (selective androgen receptor modulators) acting upstream to androgen receptors, drugs which affect HGH or thyroid function, erythropoeitin (EPO) and other interventions to increase blood oxygen efficiency, beta-blockers and other drugs to enhance recovery and performance through other means as well as stimulants and other drugs to increase performance in the moment.

In general I would say it is best to avoid any discussion about performance with respect to gender because any level of sports where there is money and reputation at stake is going to involve more kinds of doping than you could possibly imagine and the performance of these individuals is entirely based on how well they can hide how much they are doping and avoid testing. As a fun little anecdote, about a decade ago the Olympics changed its policy on blood tests, allowing them to hold onto blood to be retested in the future as new techniques to detect doping were developed, and there is one year in which the gold medal for a specific weightlifting event is now in the hands of the 8th or 9th place individual as all other individuals have been disqualified since.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

it’s not nice to cast ‘brain conditions’ in a negative light nor to accuse people who are acting in self interest of having any conditions other than not caring about their fellow human!

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

just popping in because this was reported - I would suggest being supportive of others who are trying to accomplish the same kind of things you are rather than calling them “utterly delusional”

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

if doctors actually pay attention to what they’re sending out instead of using it as a “make patient go away” button.

Less than 20% of doctors used what the AI generated and instead wrote something themselves. It does not sound like any of these doctors were using it as a “make patient go away” button and they seem to be taking their messaging seriously if they rejected the vast majority of suggestions. However, importantly, their cognitive burden was decreased - indicating that the AI helped jump start their thoughts in the same way that someone handing you a draft novel makes writing a novel easier.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

A potential problem at many places, I’m sure. But of all places, Stanford is one that’s likely to have less of this issue than others. Stanford has plenty of world renown doctors and when you’re world renown you get a lot more pay and a lot more leeway to work how you want to.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

Less than 20% of doctors using it doesn’t say anything about how those 20% of doctors used it. The fact 80% of doctors didn’t use it says a great deal about what the majority of doctors think about how appropriate it is to use for patient communication.

So to be clear, less than 20% used what the AI generated directly. There’s no stats on whether the clinicians copy/pasted parts of it, rewrote the same info but in different words, or otherwise corrected what was presented. The vast majority of clinicians said it was useful. I’d recommend checking out the open access article, it goes into a lot of this detail. I think they did a great job in terms of making sure it was a useful product before even piloting it. They also go into a lot of detail on the ethical framework they were using to evaluate how useful and ethical it was.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

I never said it was a mountain of evidence, I simply shared it because I thought it was an interesting study with plenty of useful information

Gaywallet, 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I am in complete agreement. I am a data scientist in health care and over my career I’ve worked on very few ML/AI models, none of which were generative AI or LLM based. I’ve worked on so few because nine times out of ten I am arguing against the inclusion of ML/AI because there are better solutions involving simpler tech. I have serious concerns about ethics when it comes to automating just about anything in patient care, especially when it can effect population health or health equity. However, this was one of the only uses I’ve seen for a generative AI in healthcare where it showed actual promise for being useful, and wanted to share it.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Extremely useful article, thank you for sharing!

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Finally picked up ghost of tsushima and started playing through it. Reminds me of RDR2

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

adorable

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

They were going to kill these people whether an AI was involved or not, but it certainly makes it a lot easier to make a decision when you’re just signing off on a decision someone else made. The level of abstraction made certain choices easier. After all, if the system is known to be occasionally wrong and everyone seems to know it yet you’re still using it, is that not some kind of implicit acceptance?

One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

It also doesn’t surprise me that when you’ve demonized the opposition, it becomes a lot easier to just be okay with “casualties” which have nothing to do with your war. How many problematic fathers out there are practically disowned by their children for their shitty beliefs? Even if there were none, it still doesn’t justify killing someone at home because it’s ‘easier’

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.

All in all this is great investigative reporting, and it’s absolutely tragic that this kind of shit is happening in the world. This piece isn’t needed to recognize that a genocide is happening and it shouldn’t detract from the genocide in any way.

As an aside, I also help it might get people to wake up and realize we need to regulate AI more. Not that regulation will probably ever stop the military from using AI, but this kind of use should really highlight the potential dangers.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

When you abstract out pieces of the puzzle, it’s easier to ignore whether all parts of the puzzle are working because you’ve eliminated the necessary interchange of information between parties involved in the process. This is a problem that we frequently run into in the medical field and even in a highly collaborative field like medicine we still screw it up all the time.

In the previous process, intelligence officers were involved in multiple steps here to validate whether someone was a target, validate information about the target, and so on. When you let a machine do it, and shift the burden from these intelligence officers to someone without the same skill set who’s only task is to review information given to them by a source which they are told is competent and their role is to click yes/no, you lose the connection between this step and the next.

The same could be said, for example, about someone who has the technical proficiency to create new records, new sheets, new displays, etc. in an electronic health record. A particular doctor might come and request a new page to make their workflow easier. Without appropriate governance in place and people who’s job is to observe the entire process, you can end up with issues where every doctor creates their own custom sheet, and now all of their patient information is siloed to each doctors workflow. Downstream processes such as the patient coming back to the same healthcare system, or the patient going to get a prescription, or the patient being sent to imaging or pathology or labs could then be compromised by this short-sighted approach.

For fields like the military which perhaps are not used to this kind of collaborative work, I can see how segmenting a workflow into individual units to increase the speed or efficiency of each step could seem like a way to make things much better, because there is no focus on the quality of what is output. This kind of misstep is extremely common in the application of AI because it often is put in where there are bottlenecks. As stated in the article-

“We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day.”

the goal here is purely to optimize for capacity, how many targets you can generate per day, rather than on a combination of both quality and capacity. You want a lot of targets? I can just spit out the name of every resident in your country in a very short period of time. The quality in this case (how likely they are to be a member of hamas) will unfortunately be very low.

The reason it’s so fucked up is that a lot of it is abstracted yet another level away from the decision makers. Ultimately it is the AI that’s making the decision, they are merely signing off on it. And they weren’t involved in signing off on the AI, so why should they question it? It’s a dangerous road - one where it becomes increasingly easy to allow mistakes to happen, except in this case the mistake can be counted as innocent lives that you killed.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

I cleaned up some of the comments because there was some bickering and fighting. This is a reminder for everyone to be nice on our instance.

It’s okay to not like the new flag. It’s not okay to call other users racist because they enjoy one pride flag over another.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

I’m leaving this comment up because I think it’s fine to point out that the rainbow stands for anyone. But I’m also leaving this reply here to let you know that you need to disengage with this thread. Insisting that a pride flag is racist is not exactly creating a welcoming environment here or being nice to people who feel included with specific flags which highlight their identity.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Given the unprecedented attacks on trans folks and the much higher murder rates of poc queers I think giving them space on the progress flag is more about making a statement about inclusivity and intersectionality than anything else.

Trying to include more groups like bisexual is just missing the point and people arguing that the progress flag should stay the way it is (although no one is talking about the intersex inclusive one which is an interesting statement on the erasure of intersex individuals), is more about the recognition of that statement and trying not to water down the message with a dash of design because it’s already pretty crowded.

Ultimately I do not care which flag you fly. It’s okay to say that you don’t like the design of a particular flag, but you should stop a second before commenting that and think a bit about what you could possibly accomplish with such a statement. It’s not your flag and you’re not flying it, so ultimately does it matter what you think of it’s design? Do you walk up to people with shirts you think are designed poorly and say “your shirt sucks, get a new shirt”? All you’re going to do is make them defensive and you’re pretty likely to start a fight, especially if you go off on some weird tangent about how you think the flag is bigoted in some fashion. The old adage ‘if you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all’ is pretty much designed for situations like this.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

The entire purpose is that it doesn’t represent an entire any specific group, but the unity of the spectrum of human sexuality.

A minor point to bring up here, but being transgender is about gender, not sexuality, and I think you unintentionally just highlighted a very good reason why including the trans flag can help make that statement of inclusion and unity.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

This is akin to the classic argument that no one has gotten communism right, and in theory it’s a good model. The reality is that humans are going to human, and some things do not work at scale because humans will inevitably do the human thing and some systems just aren’t designed well for human behavior. The insistence that people just aren’t following the definition that you’ve chosen disregards how words come to be - people create them to describe something new which was not previously defined, and they are generally created on the fly by people, not by people sitting down and writing out a specific definition before publishing and/or using it. Definitions also change, over time, to reflect how the words are being used or how the world itself has changed.

With all that being said, you did ask for sources on how capitalism plays out in the real world in response to people abundantly telling you that capitalism is harmful, so here’s a few sources you might find interesting that approach the harms or outcomes of capitalism as it has played out in the world in various countries.

1. The Impact of Advanced Capitalism on Well-being: an Evidence-Informed Model
2. Capitalism, socialism, and the physical quality of life
3. Testing hypotheses about the harm that capitalism causes to the mind and brain: a theoretical framework for neuroscience research

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

Yes I understand, hence the preface about why caring about what definition one chooses for a word is a pointless argument. I guess I misunderstood what you were asking for with your comment about “how it plays out in the real world” and thought you were inviting the question about what damages a system ruled by money causes to the world, regardless of whether you call it capitalism or commercialism.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

This could be easily interpreted as hostile or negative, I’m removing it. If you wish to be helpful to others, I’d suggest that you never start a reply with “No it doesn’t” when someone is sharing something they could be happy about.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

We defederated from hexbear, please don’t post links to hexbear on our instance. If you’re a beehaw user and believe hexbear is worth reconsidering, feel free to start a conversation in support explaining why you think they should be refederated with.

Gaywallet, 2 months ago

At no point am I arguing that it is a made up social construct. I’m just letting you know about my existence. If my existence threatens you so much that you must throw me into a box that is not you, then go ahead and do so. I’m not out here shouting at the world about how people like me exist, I’m merely replying to your attempt to erase me. There are compatible world views which don’t erase me - which many other people have pointed out here.

I’m sorry that your country is taking away your right to life saving medical care. The same thing is happening in my country. I’d rather spend my time and energy on preserving access to medical care for everyone than fighting with folks online. Best of luck, I hope things improve for you. 💜