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thrwwXZTYE commented on A $20 drug in Europe requires a prescription and $800 in the U.S.   statnews.com/2025/10/31/w... · Posted by u/geox
aucisson_masque · 20 days ago
in some part of europe, we have national healthcare so basically people don't think they are paying their medications, like there was some magic money.

in that case, you don't care if you drug cost 10€ or 2000€ because you aren't spending a single € from your own wallet, at least if you don't factor in taxes.

Contrary to the USA where it's a much more responsible market, people do pay for the medications or they get it paid by their own insurance but it cost them directly a lot of money.

I would think that americans would be much more vigilant about what medication they take, the price it cost, and so would have much lower pricing. That's just how free market work, and technically there are many medication manufacturer and many customer.

Is it the proof that a true unregulated free market doesn't work ? if left unsupervised, big companies are going to buy smaller companies until they are monopoly or make secret, behind the door, deal to keep price up.

It's what the USA is made on, the idea of freedom and free market. i believe the idea of unregulated market is more recent, think the 70's, but surely in the 50 years since then american would have pushed back against it and not elected people like Trump who are all in.

thrwwXZTYE · 20 days ago
The funny thing is that when you have one big customer (a country) - you get good prices.

When you have 30 insurance companies, 10000 companies buying insurance policies and millions of individuals - you get shit prices.

That's why the drug in question is 200 USD in US (after deductions) and 20 in Europe (including taxes).

thrwwXZTYE commented on My stages of learning to be a socially normal person   sashachapin.substack.com/... · Posted by u/eatitraw
lll-o-lll · a month ago
I mean, it’s literally one of the dark triad. Dark. Not misunderstood.

The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”. People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.

If you’ve never had such a person in your life, good for you! The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.

thrwwXZTYE · a month ago
I am a narcissist. I haven't been diagnosed (yet), but I certainly recognize the traits and patterns, and I'm in therapy for it.

> People with NPD don’t go and get help, they just run around ruining other peoples lives.

This is objectively false. There's lots of people in therapy for NPD. And there have been case studies with people who recovered.

Which brings another point

> The DSM basically took all those “traits we think of as evil” and said “we shall make some disorder categories”.

DSM criteria for narcissism are part of the problem. You can have the exact same mental struggle but stop yourself from hurting people (at least to a reasonable degree - "normal" people also hurt others sometimes after all). And you won't be diagnosed as NPD. But you'll still have all the other problems - lack of human connection, vastly higher chance of suicide, autoimmune diseases, relationship problems, etc.

Which is like saying you only have alcoholism if you beat people on the streets. If you define it that way - of course all alcoholics are violent.

But it's not a productive way to define mental health problems. It leaves out people who struggle with it but don't cause harm.

> The rest of us don’t care if they can be saved, we just don’t ever want to interact with another one. Ever.

That's unlikely given that estimated 0.5-5% of the general population have NPD and about 20% have strong narcissistic traits.

In IT it's probably much higher by the way, it's the perfect job (little human contact, high status, well paid).

thrwwXZTYE commented on My stages of learning to be a socially normal person   sashachapin.substack.com/... · Posted by u/eatitraw
hekkle · a month ago
I'm glad it wasn't just me who noticed this. It seems like the author doesn't care at all about other people; only about how to manipulate people into liking them.

Gives real narcissist vibes.

thrwwXZTYE · a month ago
Narcissism is a spectrum; everybody's a little narcissistic, and it changes over time. All kids are VERY narcissistic early on, most grow out of it as they experience unconditional love from their parents and are allowed to be their authentic selves in various social contexts.

For various reasons - some kids don't. Bullying can certainly contribute.

So they develop maladaptive strategies (which can look like the first few "stages" in this article) and have to undo the damage later in life (which can look like the later "stages" from the article) to have a chance to experience real human connection.

I think the article can be very beneficial for people who struggle with this, even if it doesn't explicitly mention what the technical name of the struggle is (and BTW it does not have to be NPD - there might be other reasons for people to have similar problems). Maybe even BECAUSE it doesn't mention narcissism (cause narcissism is currently villified on the social media as "they are actual demons that cannot be saved" - so people are very wary of identifying with it, which makes it less likely they will work on themselves).

BTW I'm very disappointed in the current fad on social media of villifying one mental health issue after another only to then come to realize "oh wait, they're actually people not monsters". I've seen it with BPD, now it's the NPD turn. It's usually done for ugly reasons, too (somebody hurt by a person with $mental_health_problem search for validation, so influencers jump in with feel-good validation that portrays the other side as demons).

thrwwXZTYE commented on My stages of learning to be a socially normal person   sashachapin.substack.com/... · Posted by u/eatitraw
lll-o-lll · a month ago
Wow, I can’t get past the first couple of paragraphs.

> I’ve tried so hard to learn how to connect with people. It’s all I ever wanted, for so long.

Are there really people like this? HN is probably the wrong place to ask this question, but this is so far outside of my bubble that I just cannot relate. Some people feel like this, for real?

thrwwXZTYE · a month ago
You don't usually realize that's why you're the way you are until much later.

At first it might feel like "these people don't like me cause of how much better I am than them", or "these people don't like me, well fuck them, I don't need anybody".

People have all kinds of excuses they tell themselves to feel better about the needs they can't satisfy.

thrwwXZTYE commented on Face it: you're a crazy person   experimental-history.com/... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
dimensional_dan · 5 months ago
When you break down anything into its subtasks there's basically nothing that anyone wants to do. Sometimes the ends help justify the means too.
thrwwXZTYE · 5 months ago
I always wanted to program games. I programmed games as a hobby. When I graduated university there were no gamedev jobs in my region, so I went to work at Boring B2B java company.

After a while I moved to a bigger city and I started having friends who work in gamedev. They told me about crunch, bad salaries etc. I decided to keep doing Boring B2B stuff. But I went to a few job interviews in gamedev companies.

Every time the questions on the interviews were FUN. Like doing 3d math, some low level C, writing a collision detection function or simple pathfinding.

Just solving these problems made me giddy.

Maybe it's the nostalgia for the time I've learned these things as a teenager with no stress, or maybe it's just that it's something completely different to what I'm doing normally - but I felt great during these interviews.

But I'd have to get a huge salary cut and abandon work-life balance and I'm too old for this.

TL;DR: I think there's a lot of value actually looking at day-to-day problems you need to solve in your dream job, even if you decide it's not for you for different reasons.

thrwwXZTYE commented on Is the doc bot docs, or not?   robinsloan.com/lab/what-a... · Posted by u/tobr
crystal_revenge · 6 months ago
I don’t understand why people seem to be attacking the “non-determinism” of LLMs. First, I think most people are confusing “probabilistic” with “non-deterministic” which have very distinct meanings in CS/ML. Non-deterministic typically entails following multiple paths at once. Consider regex matching with NFAs or even the particular view of a list as a monad. The only case where LLMs are “non-deterministic” is when using sampling algorithms like beam search where multiple paths are considered simultaneously. But most LLM usage being discussed doesn’t involve beam search.

But even if one assumes people mean “probabilistic”, that’s also an odd critique given how probabilistic software has pretty much eaten the world. Most of my career has been building reliable product using probabilistic models.

Finally, there’s nothing inherently probabilistic or non-deterministic about LLM generation, these are properties of the sampler applied. I did quite a lot of LLM benchmarking in recent years and almost always used greedy sampling both for performance (doing things like GSM8K strong benefits from choosing the maximum likely path) and reproducibility. You can absolutely set up LLM tools that have perfectly reproducible results. LLMs have many issues but their probabilistic nature is not one of them.

thrwwXZTYE · 6 months ago
There was an article on hackernews a few years back (before LLMs took over) about jobs that could be replaced by a sign saying "$default_result" 99% of the time.

Like being a cancer diagnostician. Or an inspector at a border crossing.

Using LLMs is currently a lot like going to a diagnostian that always responds "no, you're healthy". The answer is probably right. But still we pay people a lot to get that last 1%.

thrwwXZTYE commented on Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage   maalvika.substack.com/p/b... · Posted by u/alihm
MichaelZuo · 6 months ago
How could that possibly be true?

The former might be a literal genius (in the genuine unironic sense) in one field, say software engineering of astrophysics or banking or diplomacy.

The latter would be a literal genius in all four fields simultaneously.

thrwwXZTYE · 6 months ago
IQ is just CPU power.

There's no CPU that can't be wasted by bad code.

thrwwXZTYE commented on Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage   maalvika.substack.com/p/b... · Posted by u/alihm
MichaelZuo · 6 months ago
It almost seems like a tautology.

e.g. By definition the 99.9th percentile person cannot live a 99.999th percentile life, if they did they would in fact be that amazing.

thrwwXZTYE · 6 months ago
Significant part of what separates 99.9th (or even 90th) from 99.999th percentile is ego management.

In particular IQ is not associated with better life outcomes after you have "enough", and that "enough" isn't Mensa level.

thrwwXZTYE commented on Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage   maalvika.substack.com/p/b... · Posted by u/alihm
wordpad · 6 months ago
Oh God

So, what is the lesson here?

Gotta let go of pride and risk it for the biscuit (ship something)?

thrwwXZTYE · 6 months ago
There's no lesson. It's hard. Your brain will search for the silver bullet to skip the boring self-improvement work and feel good NOW. It'll likely detach your current self from your past self (I was bad, I discovered this, now I'm great, exceptional and heroic again). Then you'll again avoid the boring day-to-day work (becaue you feel exceptional again) and fail again.

Everything you know is material for your brain to make excuses and rationalizations. So no lessons work.

What works is retraining the part of the brain that distorts the reality and directs all your thoughts towards these patterns.

It's a lot like debugging. There's a callback in your brain that is harmful. It triggers every time you have to sacrifice some future potential for uncertain reality. It is subconscious. Put a breakpoint in that callback. Try to notice every time it triggers. At first just notice it, notice what it urges you to do.

When you have it nailed down - try to change it. At that point you'll realize the urge and where it comes from. Then it's a matter to making the decision and committing to sth, no matter what. It doesn't only have to be big things, it can be small things unrelated to work. It's the same "code". If you do it every time - you'll retrain it eventually.

At least that's the theory, I'm not there yet.

thrwwXZTYE commented on Being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage   maalvika.substack.com/p/b... · Posted by u/alihm
thrwwXZTYE · 6 months ago
This syndrome is called "eternal child" (puer aeternus) in psychology.

You were destined to great things. You were exceptional as a child, you learnt to associate your great potential with all the good in yourself, you built your identity around it. You were ahead of your peers in elementary school, whatever you applied towards - you exceled at.

So you value that potential as the ultimate good, and any decision which reduces it in favour of actually doing something - you fear and avoid with all your soul. Any decision whatsoever murders part of that infinite potential to deliver something subpar (at best - it's not even guaranteed you achieve anything).

Over time this fear takes over and stunts your progress. You could be great, you KNOW you have this talent, but somehow you very rarely tap into it. You fall behind people you consider "mediocre" and "beneath you". Because they seem to be able to do simple things like it's the simplest thing in the world, while you somehow can't "motivate" yourself to do the "simple boring things".

When circumstances are just right you are still capable of great work, but more and more the circumstances are wrong, and you procrastinate and fail. You don't understand why, you focus on the environment and the things you fail to achieve. You search for the right productivity hack or the exact right domain that will motivate you. But any domain has boring repeative parts. Any decision is a chance to do sth OK in exchange of infinite potential. It never seems like it's worth it, so you don't do it.

You start doubting yourself. Maybe you're just an ordinary lazy person? Being ordinary is the thing you fear the most. It's a complete negation of your identity. You can be exceptional genius with problems, you take that any time if the alternative is "just a normal guy".

u/thrwwXZTYE

KarmaCake day93December 17, 2021View Original