I understand the purpose of appeals and that we rarely hear about things that are not appealed. But I don't think either the FDA or court system are functioning when people and companies go in front of a decision-making body knowing they're going to lose and viewing the ruling as the real starting gun.

I'm leaving the hed as-is per protocol, but the larger story here seems to be we've already hit the point where LLMs produce better prompts for other LLMs than human prompt engineers do.

This is not in my wheelhouse but feels like something of a marker being laid down far sooner than anyone was publicly expressing. The fact itself isn't all that surprising since we don't think in weights, and this is so far domain specific, but people were unironically talking about prompt engineering being a field with a promising future well into this year.

I use ChatGPT daily for work. Much of what I do is rewriting government press releases for a trade publication, so I'll often have ChatGPT paraphrase (literally paraphrase: ) paragraphs which I'll then paste into my working document after comparing to the original and making sure something festive didn't show up in translation.

Sometimes, I have to say "this was a terrible result with almost no deviation from the original and try again," at which point I get the result I'm looking for.

As plagiarism goes, no one's going to rake you over the coals for a press release, written to be run verbatim. And within that subset, government releases are literally public domain. Still, I've got these fucking journalism ethics.

So, I've got my starting text (I've not tried doing a full story in 4o yet) from which I'll write my version knowing that if I do end up changing "enhanced" to "improved" where the latter is the original in the release, I'm agreeing with an editorial decision, not plagiarizing.

For what I do, it's a godsend. For now. But because I can define the steps and reasoning, an LLM can as well, and I see no reason the linked article is wrong in assuming that version would be better than what I do.

From there, I add quotes, usually about where they were in the release but stripped of self-congratulatory bullshit (remove all references in quotes to figures not quoted themselves in the story and recast with unquoted intro to match the verb form used in the predicate, where the quote picks up would, frankly, get you 90% of the way there) and compile links (For all proper nouns encountered, search the Web to find the most recent result from the body issuing the release; if none found, look on other '.gov' sites; if none found, look for '.org' links; if none, stop attempting to link and move on to next proper noun).

It sounds like all this (and more!) could be done by LLM's today, relegating me to the role of copyeditor (not the briar patch!). Cool. No one's reading my stories about HVDC transmission lines for my dry wit, so with a proper line of editing, the copy would be just as readable, and I'd have more time to fact-check things or find a deeper resource to add context.

But then how much more quickly do we get to a third layer of machine instructions that takes over everything that can be turned into an algorithm in my new role? At a certain point, all I have to offer that seems unattainable for LLMs (due to different heuristics and garbage training data) even in the medium term is news judgment, which isn't exactly a high-demand skill.

This development worries me far more than anything I've read about LLM advancements in quite some time.

Hed o' the day so far ...

Archive link

Even though there are already a couple of other threads about this Schweinerei, there wasn't a good place to insert this into the discussion, and for those unfamiliar, this video's a good starting point.

Pretty cool stuff.

Run trials with an astounding number of easily avoidable flaws, win stupid prizes. It would be a shame for this to turn into an overall setback for psychedelic therapy.

Sure, the FDA could go against the recommendation, but that's a political nonstarter given the problems included sexual assault. We need studies that are unassailable on the data collection such that the psychoactive (qualitative) effects are just an outlier in the list of quantitative results.

The comments section on this article is illuminating beyond the story itself (as is frequently the case on Ars) and worth a look.

Anecdotal experience alert!

I've been dealing with treatment-resistant major depression since before the term existed. Presumably, this stems from events when I was 7 and younger which unfortunately informed preferences and decisions starting in college and to some extent continue to this day. My parents were also quite detached, adding in the need to find in adulthood the sort of safety and connection one is supposed to grow up having already felt and thus able to recognize abusive analogs in partners with better than 0% accuracy.

Net result has been a lifetime of self-medication, sometimes with the hope of improvement, but far more frequently some way to just kick the can down the road to avoid feeling those things right now.

My introduction to MDMA came unsurprisingly from the rave scene in 1999. On balance, that period of heavy use (within a year, I'd sometimes roll three times a week, which no one is going to suggest is a good idea) was a net negative, with the silver lining that I did get to feel fleeting connections, but that transitory nature made the reality in between seem that much comparatively worse.

Any amount of research into psilocybin will lead to the phrase "set and setting." The first is short for mindset, the second obviously physical surroundings, including people. What I didn't know back in college was this concept itself, let alone that it applies to any psychoactive substance. At the time, I liked to say that E was a mood enhancer because if I was already feeling low, it was a shovel. And boy, howdy, did I find bottom with a cocktail one night that started with E at a party and then led to intentional contraindicated choices once home.

After a long period away from MDMA, I first rolled again in 2016, this time with my newish girlfriend at my house with chill music and climate control. Wildly different experience. This led to the same sort of experience in 2019 and again in 2021.

By mid-2022, the double whammy of pandemic loneliness and the abysmal job market had led to hospitalizations and detox trips as I hit the point of having a 30-pack of beer delivered to my apartment almost daily. The final detox led to a job, finally, after meeting the owner of a company there, which in turn led to my first year-plus of sobriety by choice.

At which point I was ready to finally tackle some of my longstanding issues instead of brushing them under the rug. Soon after, I heard about Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind miniseries on Netflix, leading to learning to grow shrooms while doing a fuckton of further research into intentionality and realistic expectations.

My first trip removed the rumination -- that constant background voice questioning every choice I made and even every thought -- I'd been dealing with for decades. It was a difficult trip emotionally, though I was never afraid through ineffable reassurance that everything would be fine. On the other side, I was able to take the first step to being present in the moment.

Over several more months, well-spaced trips diminished the frequency and urgency of unwanted memories surfacing, culminating in acceptance that I had to let go to move forward. The final trip of that series also revealed where I wanted to go, and I blew up my life, buying, building out and moving into a van, followed by leaving the soul-crushing job of sending out bills.

After a circuitous path, I've landed. Absolutely no medical professional would suggest what I did, but there's no accessible psychedelic-assisted therapy path I could have instead chosen, which is frankly intentional withholding of treatment. "SSRI's not working? We have no alternative, so you get to suffer!"

Last weekend, I did MDMA in a party setting again for the first time since college. It wasn't planned, but strange things happen in a gift economy with amazing people and music. After eating some shrooms the first night, I finally found my flow state, which I seem to have lost somewhere back in the '80s, allowing full presence.

Other than the inevitable serotonin crash Wednesday, I've felt amazing. Not manic, just happy with who I am and where I'm at and confident about my ability to continue finding my path forward.

After losing decades of my life, I don't want to see anyone else go through that, so I keep tabs (no pun intended) on psychedelic studies, and these MAPS trials seem to be going backward for wider experiments I know can benefit millions. It is so frustrating to have experimental malfeasance from an organization seemingly wanting to move forward but unable to avoid things like sexual assault and other cultlike behaviour from the fucking researchers.

Hopefully, these will lead to further studies with far more ethical guardrails instead of closing the door again.

It's not all wine and roses in terms of requiring sustained fracking, which defeats the purpose of transitioning away from fossil fuels, but the estimate is there's enough lithium (as lithium carbonate) coming from these sites to cover 40% of domestic demand.

Archive link

(hed fixed to 19)