actually interpreting the DSM-V and running diagnostics is exclusive to clinically trained psychologists and psychiatrists. even LCSWs are remiss to offer a 'diagnosis' after years of talk therapy with a client. most official diagnoses happen within a matrix describing a cluster of symptoms paired with an eval of severity and impact on life, and a battery of tests that have been empirically and rigorously validated
as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird"
it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones
you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'
Why are people so eager to gatekeep who gets to call others mentally ill? I don't understand it. I don't have to be a doctor to say that someone who is constantly coughing and having a fever is sick, nor do I have to be a doctor to call someone with no legs disabled. What's different about mental illness?
I don't disagree that there might be more subtle cases that are hard to tell by a lay person. But Matt is not like that. You are free to read his posts from the WP Engine lawsuit, including his post on hacker news, or his prior posts from some tumblr moderation drama. To me, the consistency and degree of his actions crosses the boundary of "bad day at work" and lands firmly in the "crazy guy in the park screaming at squirrels" territory. In fact, I'd argue that if he doesn't have tech wealth and was instead working a more traditional white collar job he might have already ended up just like that.
Had the same experience on it when it was going by Windsurf. Had to wire up a skill hooked to terminal runs or else it would hang or freeze and never finish literally every single time
I see issues with other harnesses too but not with the regularity I was getting from this. And the one moat they had with the better UI for per-project multi-agent orch disappeared and now is standardized
I think the other example is Israel which seems like the much more obviously belligerent, actively colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
> colonial nation state that the US is largely propping up (and wouldn't exist otherwise)
This is a baseless, American-centric notion I've heard frequently in New York and San Francisco.
If America pulled support from Israel, it would find partners in other countries. India and China are at the top of the list–they want Israeli weapons technology and intelligence. Russia would probably play too. And depending on the kind of mess we leave Iran in, some Gulf countries may also find a way to come to a nuclear technology transfer deal with Tel Aviv.
oh? I didn't know China and Russia had such solid relationships with Israel. my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
> my understanding was that Israel has been repeatedly condemned by both and last I heard, the free-trade agreement with them has been stalled for years. but what do I know?
India-Israel trade has been growing since diplomatic relations between the nations were established in 1992 (including since the war in Gaza) [1]. In 2025 they signed a bilateral investment agreement. And Israel is a growing defence provider to India.
I know less about the China relationship, but it remains a major trading partner with Isrel [2]. (I do not believe there are significant military relations. China has recently been calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide, and I'll note they started doing this a year ago, before Trump bungled into Iran, though for obvious reasons Beijing isn't dwelling on the question.)
Russia is currently embedded with Iran, but nothing about that is geostrategic. Israel and the USSR once had close relations. Putin needs weapons for Ukraine. An Israel searching desperately for partners would be useful to Moscow.
Note, too, that both China and India have governments in power that explicitly reject the rights of their domestic Muslim populations.
Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge. The average Chinese citizen also is much more willing to call it a genocide and if there's one thing the Politburo knows to do, it's not to unnecessarily foment unrest by collusion
I don't personally think it's likely relations would improve on this and I consider myself much better read on the goings-on of the PRC than most
For the other nation states you discussed, I'm far from an expert on them so you very well might be right. But I doubt it'll be straightforward if the US were to cease aid. I also seriously doubt Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US. An un-invaded Iraq in combination with Iran would have put its existence at major jeopardy
> Israel sanctioned BYD and China sanctioned Israeli cybersec firms back recently to my knowledge
Yup. China is also shipping arms precursors (and very likely intelligence) to Iran. China and Israel aren't friends. But Israel pivoting from the U.S. absolutely brings it back to the table. China isn't, like, sanctioning Israeli firms in general, or even Israeli firms in the West Bank.
> doubt it'll be straightforward or that Israel would be so aggressively expansionist without the 300 billion or so they've received from the US
My personal hypothesis is the aid turned Israel into a monster. Removing the aid, however, won't change that. It just means more broad-based munitions.
Israel and Gaza have natural gas. The world has shown it will tolerate a lot of nonsense from an energy supplier, particularly a nuclear-armed one.
I don’t know why so many people take it as a given that Israel only exists because of America.
They used to be aligned with the USSR and we did a lot of work to peel them off into our own domain. They also have their own military industrial complex and are perfectly capable of manufacturing the weapons they need domestically.
And they can redirect resources to the war if we removed it.
If anything, removal of our support probably leads to the use of dumber less targeted weapons like carpet bombing or good ole white phosphorus that they’ve already demonstrated use of in past conflicts.
If we were giving them 30+% of their gdp then yea, dropping that probably stops the conflict. 2% is just a budget reshuffle.
you should look up how much the 2008 financial crisis shrank the US GDP. 2% of an entire nation state's GDP especially with aid concentrated in gov\mil sectors of which a huge part of Israel's private sector is dependent on for grants is not a 'budget reshuffle'
It is when there’s an existential threat which, agree with Israel’s government or not, they believe the neighboring Islamic factions are.
I’m not claiming it would be easy but it’s definitely not an amount that losing would end the war overnight, which was the original claim I responded to
Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
Are you saying 10's of thousands of bombs US supplied to level the entire cities and countryside to the ground is preferable to IL having to get this elsewhere, because why exactly? What does precision have to do with it?
You can scroll around here to see what US did by providing all those mostly free bombs:
> Israelis can't carpet bomb. They don't have the tech.
What? I’m not even responding to the rest if this is how you open up.
Carpet bombing is so low tech I can’t imagine a country in the modern age that couldn’t create the technology even if they couldn’t afford actually deploying it. It’s a matter of logistics and having enough bombs.
It’s literally just dropping a fuck ton of dumb bombs on an area to “carpet” it, unless we’re talking past each other and you were referring to something else.
Give me enough guano, charcoal, sulphur, steel, and flint and I can cobble together carpet bombing from my kitchen without ever having to go up the tech tree past a few hundred years ago.
Hell Hamas themselves under heavy sanctions have shown they have the technology, they merely lack the surfeit of resources to implement it.
This isn’t me arguing with you, I’m just flabbergasted that someone could say with a straight face that Israel doesn’t have the technology to carpet bomb.
I want us to decrease or end our alliance with Israel for political reasons related to how their government has interacted with ours(the US) but I am constantly surprised by these people who honestly think that Israel wouldn’t collapse the moment US support ended, like they didn’t fight several existential wars and win previous to our support.
Israel vs Palestine is not a major conflict, especially given the one sided nature of the fight.
Israel + US vs Iran is a majorish conflict but the US is directly a belligerent in that one.
> also, arguably, the half-century of creating, establishing, funding, and build-up of NATO largely supersedes the point that Trump cut spending there temporarily. that all came from American coffers and the current conflict there is a long hangover from that
Glossing over the Russian propaganda points accusing a defensive pact as a reason for starting a war, that still means that the conflict “ could be over tomorrow” is incorrect even if the US ended all support today.
>Keyhole, a small San Francisco-based company that developed software for creating three-dimensional models of the earth’s surface [was] provided seed funding in 2003 [by a CIA-backed VC firm, In-Q-Tel], and
within two weeks, military and intelligence agencies were reportedly using Keyhole’s software to support the U.S. war in Iraq. The following year, Google acquired Keyhole for an undisclosed sum. It was renamed Google Earth.
[...]
>A distinctive aspect of the shifting military-industrial complex is the crucial role played by venture capital (VC). Some observers have noted that the rapid rise in VC funding for defense tech firms has been spurred by recent global conflicts, particularly the war in Ukraine, and more recently, escalating conflicts in Gaza and other parts of the Middle East. According to this line of reasoning, the widely publicized use of drones, satellite imagery, Starlink, and other technologies are generating interest among investors, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a shifting “ethical red line” that is prompting VC to back defense tech startups.
I think an honest answer would be to account for software bloat over time. I'm one of those luddites who likes to keep a phone for a minimum of five years. in order to accomplish this, I select phones that have higher-than-average in-class RAM so that things I care the most about (snappy feeling, app loadtimes) stay good for longer
especially for Apple, I imagine if I were buying a phone knowing they historically throttle processors on older models, I'd try to at least control the one aspect that wouldn't make sense to throttle
would love to see some sources for this particularly in tech/video-game land that are much less laden with decades-old, corporate-collusive union bosses like there are in auto-manufacturing (the regular anti-union punching bags) :)
It is the central thesis of unions; unions represent workers, not the product. When you do more for workers (ie making it harder to let them go, striking, increasing benefits, etc) this comes at the cost of the product.
But that's just a thought experiment. There's also a mountain of evidence showing unions hurt the product (here's a study on increased recalls with higher union participation: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4082) and that they hurt innovation (here's a study on innovation, showing a reduction in patent quality https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...). Unions care about workers at the expense of product, management cares about product at the expense of workers. They are at opposite ends.
in your first cited study, product recalls are an incredibly bad indicator of unions decreasing product quality. if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere - ie the quality of material you source, the machinery you purchase, etc. that's a management decision. you could just as easily seek marginally less profit and continue as you were, with your existing vendors, but that's not how management ever works
in your second cited study, the only measurement for 'innovation' is 'quantity of patents.' it has nothing to do with quality and if you know anything about how banal patents tend to be, there's an inverse correlation between quantity of patents and true innovation
a couple easily Googled one-off, low-quality studies doesn't prove a point and neither does a thought experiment. I could just as easily point to the numerous examples of union shops making very specific, artisanal products of stellar quality like union-made Red Wings
> if you're trying to minimize labor getting more of the share while preserving existing profit, you reduce overhead elsewhere
This is my point, rephrased. Unions argue for workers, thus hurt the overall product. If a union holds a strike, the money has to come from somewhere, so it comes from either innovation/research or from the existing product.
I gave you two good studies and the overarching logic, I'm not sure what other evidence I can provide. I implore you though to consider the fact unions, and in particular private unions, simply don't work. This isn't a matter of management vs non-management, it's a question of whether they do or don't work, and the evidence suggests they don't work. The exception to this is sufficiently short-term studies, which hide the fact people lose their livelihoods to unions all the time.
you're just moving the goalposts. I asked for evidence that unions are responsible to quality decreasing and then you provided two very limited, inherently flawed studies (one of which doesn't address quality at all). meanwhile, there are countless examples of union-made goods that are of very high-quality and better than industry-average
also, it is about management (ie shareholder short-turn returns thinking) vs labor. better trained, higher paid workers are shown to be better, more productive workers - the research on this is broad, expansive, and unequivocal:
>We assess the effect of the minimum wage on worker productivity among more than 40,000 salespeople whose pay is partly based on performance and who are employed by a large US retailer that operates more than 2,000 stores. Using a border-discontinuity research design, we document that workers become more productive after a minimum wage increase, and this effect is stronger among workers whose pay is more often supported by the minimum wage
unions are a system by which better pay, benefits, training, and safety protocols are enforced. I'm sure you yourself hold the deeply embedded logic that goods made in developed nation states where QoL is high and so is pay are inherently better than goods made in sweat shops and places with rampant worker abuse
it's not a difficult calculus that drives that. if you treat people better, they'll do a better job. if you treat them like shit, they'll do a worse job, intentionally and just from accumulated stress
that said, if you're the one making the decision to fuck up your product quality because you want to squeeze out another million in margins for your board/shareholders/etc, the fault and blame lies with the decision-maker, not the enforcement vehicle for basic labor rights. that's what happened with the auto-industry - they were handily outcompeted by unionized Japanese manufacturing that focused on reliability and gas mileage while GM and Ford MBA-brained big wigs kept wanting bigger, shittier cars, pursuing the same tactic that we see with all of our large appliances these days with artificially reduced operating lives meant to increase consumer spending on new cars
blaming the failures on unions is an escape hatch for corporate responsibility. buying into that narrative is keenly anti-populist, too
it's not like the logic of economics needs to be a dismal race to the bottom - you have everything from Costco to even Quik Trip that prove the counterpoint
Yet UPS still delivers packages better than FedEx.
The most reliable cars are made by Toyota, Subaru, and Honda in that order. Subaru is unionized. Toyota and Honda are not in the US, but have some union membership among employees in Japan. The two also acknowledge every UAW contract and adjust their pay and benefits at US plants after pretty much every new one is ratified.
Do you own a watch that's higher quality than Rolex? Guess who's unionized.
Would you say Walmart is high quality than Costco? Costco's the one that's unionized.
the MBA logic based on a very biased and small sample size from a very select timeframe in the 1980s is that advertising during a recession leads to higher payouts when the economy recovers: https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/podcast/knowledge-at-wha...
there's also a lot of language about preying on people's insecurities by selling them an artificial sense of agency which is a fun reminder of how manipulative marketers are
Bill Hicks really did say it best when it came to marketing:
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing… kill yourself. It’s just a little thought; I’m just trying to plant seeds. Maybe one day they’ll take root – I don’t know. You try, you do what you can."
The rest of that show is great too, if I remember correctly he goes on ranting about it more and it includes him calling marketers "Satan's little helpers" and blaming them for filling the world with garbage. Basically the wet dream of the people pushing AI hard right now, so sounds like a match made in heaven.
I was recently rewatching one of Hicks routines for the first time in possibly 20 years and his content is just as relevant now, if not more so, than it was 30+ years ago when he wrote and performed it.
Helps that Hicks was borderline obsessed with hating marketing and marketers, and they're an even bigger pest today than 30 years ago. I guess that's how you make your content relevant through the ages, target the parasites :)
that means it's a bad writer. a good writer knows who their reader is and curates their style and complexity to fit. Claude writes like someone who doesn't give a single shit about whether or not you've memorized an initialism it made for some process 10 hours ago. it's the same issue that people have been having with the impenetrability of needless and performative jargon
The problem is that Anthropic and others use the text generated by LLMs also to power the AI's internal thinking loop. This means that text is used in two different ways: one as input to AI, and the other as input to humans.
They are always trying to make the LLMs more intelligent. Guess what kind of output will suffer?
It's more than disorganized - that disorganization hides a bunch of 1) horseshit assertions from nowhere and 2) contradictory statements both given as evidence for the same conclusions.
My entire day is getting praised and apologized to for "holding me to a higher standard" and "pointing out the obvious contradiction." Meanwhile, I'm stuck and can't move forward (because every suggestion is dumb but asserted with the same confidence as the last) and the tokens are draining dry.
When I hear about people converting huge projects to Rust, I'm starting to think that translation is the only thing that they're good at. If you've already entirely specified the problem they can restate the problem without making more than a couple hundred (and getting fewer every day) mistakes.
It's just making it up, and when the things that it is making up are not obvious, it bullshits, it doesn't retrace. Then it builds on that bullshit.
It's not you that's dumb, it's them that are dumb. The people evaluating its output in post-training are also too often deciding that it's they themselves that are misunderstanding, especially when it buries the topic at hand with a bunch of excess verbiage and strange assumptions that they don't have time to independently verify. The need to believe something based on expediency often results in the rationalization that some 3D chess is being played. More like 3 card monte.
> It's not you that's dumb, it's them that are dumb.
I use AI a lot in my workflow and feel like I get a lot out of it. When I first started, I kept reading code & explanations and thinking "man, I just do not understand this explanation, I guess I'm not as good at this as I thought."
Then I started digging with the AI to have it explain stuff to me and I realized, no, it's the AI that's dumb.
Now when I don't understand something that AI generated I understand it's a great sign that it's wrong.
> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true
it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview
Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...
part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better
> Psychosis as a diagnosis is a serious condition. there's an implication that there's 'harm'
I just watched a company fire an entire department of people under the sincere belief a chatbot run by a middle manager could save them 10 million a year. This failed miserably and they now need to hire or re-hire people.
There is a tremendous amount of harm happening. Psychosis is a perfect term for what is happening.
it absolutely is not. when we think of harm in a diagnosis of psychotic disorders, we're talking about things like getting shot to death by the police, running out onto the highway, etc. it is not callously making a lot of people have to jobhunt
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
I agree that calling all this "psychosis" is motivated primarily by a desire to make the person in question look or sound crazy, and is plainly irresponsible on that front.
chatbots being able to evoke real manic episodes in otherwise healthy people is basically true, though - folie a deux doesn't require both participants to have some disorder, and the AI is packing all of them (and the harm is real, there has been something like 30 MDS cases already)
of course, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were case studies of this. but it's far from the usage leveraged in this article or by most, really, and that's somewhat unfortunate
as my wife (who does have an MD and specializes in psychistry) is fond of saying when people ask her to diagnose someone she doesn't know, "Sometimes people are just weird"
it could be that the guy here is just very burnt out and stressed and his healthier coping mechanisms aren't working so he's resorting to worse ones
you can be empathetic to that without calling someone 'mentally ill'
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