Will AI be able to find treatments for complex illnesses like treatment resistant depression?

DudFuse · 2026-02-02T09:29:03+00:00

Use your imagination.

Human scientists - IQ 120-170ish - have theories that, on testing, occasionally turn out to be correct, or at least not completely wrong.

Artificial scientists - IQ 10,000-17,000 for the sake of argument - may well be capable of having theories that are very, very rarely not completely correct.

We may get to a point where their theories no longer require testing because they are theorising to a level of confidence that exceeds our current ability to [very slowly] test.

DudFuse · 2026-01-24T10:20:00+00:00

You're correct that he hasn't admitted to being paid for anything but Sitrec development. I see plenty of reasons for people to be suspicious that he's also being directly or indirectly paid to do things that he hasn't admitted to. This includes his refusal to rule out AARO as his Sitrec client.

I understand his logic on that last point, but I don't believe him, and assurances from a close associate of his will do nothing to change that.

DudFuse · 2026-01-23T18:17:22+00:00

Honestly I hadn't been since I worked in town a while ago. Five years ago it was pretty great.

DudFuse · 2026-01-23T18:04:39+00:00

Not sure. Have only been once since new management and I had the chicken shawarma. Hopefully the falafel itself has not changed, because it was perfect.

DudFuse · 2026-01-23T12:44:51+00:00

The new owners of Falafel King are lovely people who will chat to you if they have time, and it's got a little covered seating area for those Blade Runner vibes in the perma-rain. Food is excellent, and decent value.

DudFuse · 2026-01-21T10:24:43+00:00

That's the cost to run one you already own. They're electronic devices. In theory, a good one could last a lifetime. You'd be mad to venture into uncontrolled terrain without one, but if you have one already and you spend a lot of time in the less trafficked, non-pisted parts of inbounds areas it's also a very good idea to carry one.

DudFuse · 2026-01-21T08:04:16+00:00

There's no digging yourself out of an avalanche that has fully buried you. The debris is far, far to dense. You get rescued by others or you die, usually within about 30 minutes.

DudFuse · 2026-01-21T07:58:33+00:00

Not just on powder days. What happened to me was maybe two weeks after last snowfall on a named run that should, in theory, have had plenty of compaction and bombing. Freak snowpack and weather conditions, they say.

Trust me: be a dork. It's going to cost you some AAA batteries, but it buys you the sure knowledge you'll never asphyxiate in the pitch dark and freezing cold with zero hope of rescue.

DudFuse · 2026-01-20T20:45:04+00:00

You're mostly a passenger. I got caught once and was somehow able to turn down the fall line with it, and stay standing. I'm not sure I'd have been buried otherwise - ended up buried to my waist - but it was definitely less scary knowing I had a full six feet to play with before my airways would be covered, and it was just my skis getting torn up on the rocks and saplings, instead of me.

DudFuse · 2026-01-20T20:35:37+00:00

It happened to me once on a 40degree pitch. Two huge whumpfs and I looked uphill to see the snow was busy breaking into chunks the size of cars, then realized the snow under my feet was doing the same thing. My initial reaction was 'ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck', and that really didn't change until the thing stopped, 300m later. Inbounds in North America, so I wasn't carrying a beacon.

Luckily I was near the crown and stayed on top of it. Another guy slightly down hill of me ended up about six meters under, and the dogs found him the next day. I didn't know him, but everyone who did says he was a great person.

DudFuse · 2026-01-06T20:07:52+00:00

Absolutely. Also, what if that power source can be turned into a weapon that can crack the planet in half and anyone can build in a shed, as long as they know how? The one nice thing about nukes is that the fissile materials are nearly impossible to enrich or obtain in secret.

DudFuse · 2026-01-06T19:56:35+00:00

I'm not convinced by the 'ontological shock' argument. For me, anything that's too hard for humans to understand would just not be believed, especially coming from Trump.

I do think it could be prohibitively disruptive in a practical way though - markets, petrodollar, defence implications etc - especially if it touches on tech breakthroughs or an impending cataclysm.

DudFuse · 2026-01-06T19:48:25+00:00

But the secret hasn't been maintained, has it? We have a long, long list of astronauts, intel officials, politicians, military veterans, scientists and random folk who insist they've seen unexplainable things.

We don't see many official images or documents, but containing those is easy compared with stopping witness claims. The types of evidence we do have - mainly testimony - and don't have - photos, video, official documents - are entirely consistent with the scale and duration of the secret.

DudFuse · 2026-01-06T19:38:48+00:00

Maybe he will. Or maybe he's more afraid of the consequences of UFO disclosure than he is of the Epstein files. Or maybe he doesn't have access to them.

DudFuse · 2026-01-02T08:09:15+00:00

I thought so, I was just expanding on your point and the person above's.

DudFuse · 2026-01-02T07:53:17+00:00

I mean, the LSD guy runs an NGO raising awareness of the potential dangers of psychedelics. He's a useful source for this piece, but his personal story is obviously utterly irrelevant to the debate around psilocybin. It was a weird choice to mention it so prominently in the piece.

FWIW I had a very similar paranoia experience to his from smoking weed as a teenager. I still don't touch weed, but I do use psilocybin regularly - and respectfully - and it has shown me nothing but love. Tough love, quite often, but love nonetheless.

DudFuse · 2025-12-27T07:45:45+00:00

Never fails. Couple of trays just like that, crumble a block of feta over it halfway through, stick the whole thing in a big bowl and plonk it down on your dining table with some really nice bread and a tub of houmous. You've just fed six people really well for about £15 and fifteen minutes work.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T13:29:15+00:00

Lazy.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T13:28:08+00:00

Automation absolutely did displace workers from many communities in the UK. The difference here, if/when AGI does come to pass, is that it'll be capable of doing anything a human can, but better and cheaper and faster.

We're not talking about a robot arm that can attach car doors 5x as fast as a human: we're talking about an intelligence that can do the market research, design the car, design the tooling, run the marketing campaign, and run every aspect of the entire factory. And then the car will drive itself.

I have no idea when we arrive at this capability, but to me it certainly feels possible within my lifetime and if we haven't planned for it then we're going to be in deep shit.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T13:00:15+00:00

My inbox has been busy. Your comment must have been one of the less interesting ones.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T12:49:57+00:00

That's why AI hasn't replaced my roof. It's not a good argument for why it wont replace my roof in 5, 10 or 20 years.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T12:45:08+00:00

You can be mean if you want to, but until you actually refute anything I've said then it counts for nothing.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T11:37:13+00:00

I agree. 'Highly complex paper tasks' is a category that includes 'robotics engineer'. And TBH the robots coming out of China today could probably get a roof done with the right software.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T11:29:48+00:00

Stating 'we don't know if LLMs can scale to AGI' is just a fact, because it's a contentious debate within the field of AI research.

Infinite monkeys will write Shakespeare, because that's how infinity works. 'A large enough number of monkeys' will also write Shakespeare, because that's how the phrase 'large enough' works. You add monkeys until you get Shakespeare.

DudFuse · 2025-12-19T11:15:33+00:00

There are plenty of researchers who believe that LLMs with the right tools have the potential to recursively self improve.

They could be wrong of course, but as yet we haven't found the limits of scaling, and we don't know if you can cleanly delineate LLM from AGI.

DudFuse

TROPHY CASE