iak8god (u/iak8god) - Readit News

iak8god commented on LLMs should not replace therapists arxiv.org/abs/2504.18412... · Posted by u/layer8

lr4444lr · 2 months ago

Thing is, professional therapy is expensive; there is already a big industry of therapists that work online, through chat, or video calls, whose quality isn't as good as a professional (I am struggling to describe the two). For professional mental health care, there's a wait list, or you're told to just do yoga and mindfulness.

So for those people, the LLM is replacing having nothing, not a therapist.

iak8god · 2 months ago

Per the very paper we are discussing, LLMs when asked to act as therapists reinforce stigmas about mental health, and "respond inappropriately" (e.g. encourage delusional thinking). This is not just lower quality than professional therapy, it is actively harmful, and worse than doing nothing.

iak8god commented on Accelerating scientific breakthroughs with an AI co-scientist research.google/blog/acce... · Posted by u/Jimmc414

parineum · 6 months ago

> I don’t need an ai to connect across ideas or come up with new hypothesis.

This feels like hubris to me. The idea here isn't to assist you with menial tasks, the idea is to give you an AI generalist that might ne able to alert you to things outside of your field that may be related to your work. It's not going to reduce your workload, in fact, it'll probably increase it but the result should be better science.

I have a lot more faith in this use of LLMs than I do for it to do actual work. This would just guide you to speak with another expert in a different field and then you take it from there.

> In many fields, this presents a breadth and depth conundrum, since it is challenging to navigate the rapid growth in the rate of scientific publications while integrating insights from unfamiliar domains.

iak8god · 6 months ago

> the idea is to give you an AI generalist that might ne able to alert you to things outside of your field that may be related to your work

That might be a good goal. It doesn't seem to be the goal of this project.

iak8god commented on Why wordfreq will not be updated github.com/rspeer/wordfre... · Posted by u/tomthe

astennumero · a year ago

That's exactly the opposite of what the author wanted IMO. The author no more wants to be a part of this mess. Aggregating these sources would just makes it so much more easier for the tech giants to scrape more data.

iak8god · a year ago

The main concerns expressed in Robyn's note, as I read them, seem to be 1) generative AI has polluted the web with text that was not written by humans, and so it is no longer feasible to produce reliable word frequency data that reflects how humans use natural language; and 2) simultaneously, sources of natural language text that were previously accessible to researchers are now less accessible because the owners of that content don't want it used by others to create AI models without their permission. A third concern seems to be that support for and practice of any other NLP approaches is vanishing.

Making resources like wordfreq more visible won't exacerbate any of these concerns.

iak8god commented on Ask HN: How do I stop political SMS spam? · Posted by u/datadrivenangel

SaberTail · a year ago

If you're in the USA, don't donate more than $200 to any political campaign. If you donate more than $200, then those contributions have to be reported to the FEC (Federal Election Commission). Those reports are publicly available, and include your email address and phone number. Other campaigns, then, harvest that information to build their own list.

$0 might be a better number, since campaigns will also sell their donor lists to other campaigns, but having your information out there in public means anyone running for dog catcher anywhere in the country can reach out to you to beg for money.

iak8god · a year ago

ActBlue and WinRed are now used by Democrats and Republicans respectively for fundraising at just about every level, even pretty local races, and they're clearly selling access to their lists.

I donated a small amount to a Democratic candidate for a legislature race in my state (via ActBlue) and spent the next year unsubscribing from mailing lists that sending me hyperbolic nonsense about national races.

I donated a small amount to a Republican presidential primary candidate (via WinRed) and got signed up for campaign spam from Republicans running tight races all over the country, as well as like fifteen subscriptions to different mailing lists run by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epoch_Times.

iak8god commented on Ancient redwoods recover from fire by sprouting 1000-year-old buds science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/sohkamyung

retrac · 2 years ago

Prescribed burns (intentional, hopefully controlled, fires) are increasingly common in modern forestry and wildfire prevention. They're done in Canada and Australia, and from a quick search, it was brought back into practice in the 1990s in the USA.

Parks Canada has an interesting FAQ about their practices: https://parks.canada.ca/nature/science/conservation/feu-fire...

iak8god · 2 years ago

Prescribed burns are much more common in the southeastern US than in other areas: https://www.wabe.org/why-the-southeast-is-ahead-of-the-west-...

iak8god commented on Neanderthals hunted dangerous cave lions, study shows phys.org/news/2023-10-nea... · Posted by u/wglb

spandextwins · 2 years ago

Instead of a boring article, I wish they used some kind of AI to make a movie with AI voices and AI sound to illustrate that word salad.

iak8god · 2 years ago

Word salad is "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases." Which part of the article seemed confusing/unintelligible/random to you?

iak8god commented on Study: Inflammation drives social media use buffalo.edu/news/releases... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

ceroxylon · 2 years ago

My link was the sciencedirect link, and I could read it immediately. What do you mean?

iak8god · 2 years ago

I mean that the full article is paywalled for me at that link.

iak8god commented on Study: Inflammation drives social media use buffalo.edu/news/releases... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

Terr_ · 2 years ago

> University media offices

Relevant comic: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

iak8god · 2 years ago

> Relevant comic: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

Yes, but in the ~15 years since this came out, University PR have closed the gap between their work and that of cable news :)

iak8god commented on Study: Inflammation drives social media use buffalo.edu/news/releases... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

soudiere · 2 years ago

Two of the researchers datasets were from 2012-2016 and 2018-2019, I can't find the full text of the third study with 171 participants. Likely pre-tiktok.

What's real interesting is their 2021 paper, showing the effect is mediated by high-self esteem (as measured by the 7 Item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8474231/

Researcher goes along with this insane press release that does not mention self-esteem mediating it, why? Because they have an agenda.

If you want to figure it out, follow the money. Who is funding their research? I would not be terribly surprised to find a pharma pipeline with a drug that reduces c-reactive protein. Social media addiction isn't in the DSM-5 yet, but once it is you know there's a market for a drug to address it.

iak8god · 2 years ago

Most of this team looks like they're more interested in policy than pharmaceuticals.

Baldwin Way's research focus may put him in more contact with pharma: https://psychology.osu.edu/people/way.37

His R01 is looking at substance abuse: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10304875

iak8god commented on Study: Inflammation drives social media use buffalo.edu/news/releases... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico

soudiere · 2 years ago

Two of the researchers datasets were from 2012-2016 and 2018-2019, I can't find the full text of the third study with 171 participants. Likely pre-tiktok.

What's real interesting is their 2021 paper, showing the effect is mediated by high-self esteem (as measured by the 7 Item Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale).

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8474231/

Researcher goes along with this insane press release that does not mention self-esteem mediating it, why? Because they have an agenda.

If you want to figure it out, follow the money. Who is funding their research? I would not be terribly surprised to find a pharma pipeline with a drug that reduces c-reactive protein. Social media addiction isn't in the DSM-5 yet, but once it is you know there's a market for a drug to address it.

iak8god · 2 years ago

"Study 3" was September 2021 - May 2022:

> Our data came from a larger project investigating college students’ lifestyle and well-being. In this project, one hundred and seventy-one college students (102 females; Mage = 19.24, SDage = 2.68) participated for partial course credit between September 2021 and May 2022. For our purpose, we focus on the longitudinal component of this study, which consisted of two parts: a baseline lab session (Phase 1, N = 171) and two follow-up weekly surveys (Phase 2, N = 160; Phase 3, N = 160).