I'm stuck between Alphafold and the peptide craze. Alphafold is just fantastic, predicting protein folding is something we fought with for years, and yet, now it's nearly "trivial", granted...
I'm stuck between Alphafold and the peptide craze. Alphafold is just fantastic, predicting protein folding is something we fought with for years, and yet, now it's nearly "trivial", granted Alphafold isn't 100% accurate, it still helps immensely and saves us tons of time and resources.
As for the peptide craze, it's equal parts something that reminisces of "cyberpunk" type dystopian futures, and a regression to snake oil salesmen of old. GLP-1 agonists and other medically proven peptides were indeed a fantastic discovery, but it helped legitimise public trust in unproven compounds that are at best a placebo, and at worst the return of the radium craze.
Worse still, fad "peptides" are largely used for cosmetic operations, with little to no medical oversight, and are utterly unnecessary. Even if they did work, it is absolutely horrible to see how social media was used to create a generation of insecure people, that resort to unregulated drugs of all sorts to gain an aesthetic edge. It's just dementing to see people inject drugs nilly-willy because Instagram convinced them they are ugly/dumb/weak/whatever, like some sort of videogame upgrade system.
On the peptide front, I did feel shocked when a coworker who's a serious competitive bodybuilder tried to sell me on the benefits of randomly sourced BPC-157 for arthritis. I guess the general...
On the peptide front, I did feel shocked when a coworker who's a serious competitive bodybuilder tried to sell me on the benefits of randomly sourced BPC-157 for arthritis. I guess the general Internet availability of compounding pharmacy-provided unregulated Chinese research grade chemicals, and "doctors" willing to prescribe them, is one of those cultural/technological phenomena that should be shocking. That being said, if there wasn't an effective, approved treatment available for arthritis, I still wouldn't try peptides in the absence of any evidence they work, and an increasing number of stories that they're harmful.
Edit: I'm being disingenous here. I do use a compounded peptide prescribed by an online "doctor" - semaglutide from Hers. It's also well-evidenced, has an extensive safety profile and my real doctors are onboard. It's from a U.S. company big enough to sue if something goes wrong, that tried to get FDA approval for their generic until the pharma companies blocked it. Even if my doctors prescribed it themselves, I'd have to get it compounded anyway, since I've responded well to half the normal semaglutide dose for weight loss. And yes, this is the science fiction one for me, squarely back in the middle of the healthy BMI range when I can't exercise to the level I used to maintain my weight previously.
I have a coworker with some kind of mitochondrial dysfunction. He said it's because of his autism. His body is slowly breaking down. He can't even keep down food. It's pretty rough. He found that...
I have a coworker with some kind of mitochondrial dysfunction. He said it's because of his autism. His body is slowly breaking down. He can't even keep down food. It's pretty rough. He found that peptides actually helped. But because of the craze surrounding it, he can't afford to buy it anymore. He used to buy direct from China, but had issues with that recently.
Yeah, it doesn't help that this craze made legitimate medical use of peptides harder, while pushing completely unproven peptides with zero quality control to a wider audience. Many people benefit...
Yeah, it doesn't help that this craze made legitimate medical use of peptides harder, while pushing completely unproven peptides with zero quality control to a wider audience. Many people benefit from things like semaglutide, but whoever is doing peptides as part of their pre-workout needs to rethink it
When first AI image generation open to the public showed up. I knew there were a bunch of advances in AI, as for several years I've seen projects like thispersondoesnotexist.com and such, but I...
When first AI image generation open to the public showed up. I knew there were a bunch of advances in AI, as for several years I've seen projects like thispersondoesnotexist.com and such, but I didn't realize we were that far ahead and that it would explode so fast everywhere. It was really a "holy shit, I live in the future" moment.
I had a future shock moment a few years ago when video calls became easy and common. When cell phones started having front-facing cameras for this purpose, also webcams became inexpensive and...
I had a future shock moment a few years ago when video calls became easy and common. When cell phones started having front-facing cameras for this purpose, also webcams became inexpensive and common so you could have zoom meetings with multiple people. This was such a big dream for the future when I was a little kid and you can see video calls in some old sci fi movies.
But now that it's available, it turns out that almost nobody wants to be seen on camera so they leave it off. In fact, people hardly even call anymore because texting is more convenient.
Since video calls for telehealth are one of the technologies I've had to support over the years, it's been less of a shock and more of a "why is this still so shitty in 2026", after a recent...
Since video calls for telehealth are one of the technologies I've had to support over the years, it's been less of a shock and more of a "why is this still so shitty in 2026", after a recent doctor's appointment.
I always think of the section in Infinite Jest about the video calls and the masks people would wear so they wouldn't have to feel like they needed to do up their makeup and look their best for...
But now that it's available, it turns out that almost nobody wants to be seen on camera
I always think of the section in Infinite Jest about the video calls and the masks people would wear so they wouldn't have to feel like they needed to do up their makeup and look their best for every call all the time. Eventually everyone was just a mask looking at another mask, so they collectively gave up the pretense and just went back to regular voice-only calls.
I had one just yesterday at the local Kroger. Turned into the chip isle and found a robot named Tally (lol) doing inventory. Had no idea that was a thing, much less that Kroger used them, much...
I had one just yesterday at the local Kroger. Turned into the chip isle and found a robot named Tally (lol) doing inventory. Had no idea that was a thing, much less that Kroger used them, much less that my local store has one.
It's just a stack of cameras on a pole with wheels, but still a very odd feeling of "huh, I guess this is normal now".
Apparently the Chinese are heavily focusing their AI efforts on integration with robotics. I think this isn’t being talked about nearly as much as software-centered applications. I’d seen one of...
Apparently the Chinese are heavily focusing their AI efforts on integration with robotics. I think this isn’t being talked about nearly as much as software-centered applications. I’d seen one of those inventory bots (also at a Kroger) a few weeks ago, and a floor-cleaning robot at a Quiktrip a few months ago. Both in smaller cities in South Carolina.
Both of these jobs are hard to find staff for (because the pay and hours are shit, what a surprise!), and staff in those roles doesn’t always stay long. I see a lot of these lower-skilled, manual labor jobs being automated over the next few decades (possibly faster in some countries). In twenty years I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same Kroger operating with three human employees and dozens of robots.
From the article: Publicity for Get A Drip Limited The author collects a series of news article blurbs that gave him pause to think about how dramatically technology is changing life and society....
From the article:
Don’t let the absence of a flying car in your garage distract you: we are definitely now living in a version of the future out of J.G. Ballard or William Gibson.
Every day I notice a news story that startles or alarms me, that feels like pure cyberpunk, nestled between reports about council bin collections and cabinet reshuffles.
“The first ever IV Drip clinic to appear in the centre of a shopping mall, our Westfield clinic is a must-stop shop when doing a bit of retail therapy. From Vitamin Drips to Instant Vitamin D Testing, Get A Drip Westfield has it all. Book your appointment today!”
Publicity for Get A Drip Limited
This made me think of Michael Moorcock’s habit of opening stories or chapters with startling newspaper clippings that revealed the future apocalypse already underway in the present, or Ballard’s typographic collages. So I began snipping.
The author collects a series of news article blurbs that gave him pause to think about how dramatically technology is changing life and society. "Future Shock" is a reference to a 1970 book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, which posited that the rapid and accelerating pace of technological change and scientific discovery would prove alienating and disorienting for most people, leading to societal instability.
Do you feel that you've encountered something that gave you such a "shock", and if so, what was it?
Conversely, do you feel that you've become inured or numb to new developments, or are you inclined to dismiss them as hype?
Do you feel that you have control over the presence and pace of technological or science-mediated changes in your life and/or do some of them seem like uncontrollable, undesired impositions?
I'll start off - my "Future Shock" moment was finding out in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica was actively performing political manipulation using Facebook/Meta data collection. And just how much data Facebook was gathering and exposing even for non-users. I knew propaganda was a thing, and had my suspicions. That news was my wakeup moment in realizing just how easily people would be programmable at scale through social media, in more subtle, targeted, and effective ways than via Internet, broadcast media, or print advertising. I was predisposed to view privacy as something to be protected, and the real shock is how rapidly and unconsciously we've acqiesced to its erosion.
I've been surprised and delighted, but not shocked, at the rapid development of renewable energy technologies and electrification of everything. The science and engineering behind this change reflect decades of development, and like the bicycle, the stars have finally aligned.
Same thing about longevity and immunology research - decades of inquiry and development that are now culminating in gains of understanding and new medicines. The rapid release of COVID-19 vaccines was a good surprise, but not a shock.
I find the psychology of why and how we respond to historic events interesting. There are events which pile up in tiny increments until there's a kind of phase change that feels unstoppable, like the sudden salience of LLMs. I'd been half-watching the early experiments with distant amusement, but over the course of the next five years, they became inescapably usable.
I do find it shocking how much of life is now lived online globally, from games to romance to ordinary finance and commerce. I don't pay a lot of attention to popular culture drama, and when I do poke my head into it, it's still startling how much of it is now mediated by online beefs and manufactured political posturing.
@mycketforvirrad, apologies in advance for not going deep into the tagging... this one's for you.
Great article. I think I must have one of these everyday. To be specific though, I remember about 7 years ago when GPT 2 came out and my co worker was telling me how impressive it was. How the...
Great article. I think I must have one of these everyday.
To be specific though, I remember about 7 years ago when GPT 2 came out and my co worker was telling me how impressive it was. How the folks at openai were doing amazing work. We started to use GPT 2 for various natural language tasks and it worked so incredibly well. I was floored at the time. It felt as if a whole new field opened up to me. All of the sudden, I was having visions of specializing in natural language processing. I was quite excited to be part of the field of AI. What amazing strides we were making.
About year later gpt 3 came out and I was double floored. Started applying it to more problems and saw great success. Some years go by, a paper comes out called "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback." I had read about some of the work google was doing related to this, and knew it was impressive. When I read this paper though, I was completely shook. The architecture was frankly genius and clearly had room to grow.
Well later that year, chatGPT came out. I don't think I'll ever forget this day. I talked with my coworker about it, we tested it, and I told him I felt that the world would not be the same from that day forward. I called up my software developer friends and told them about it too. We passed in a project that we remembered struggling with in college. Of course, in seconds it produced several hundreds of lines of Java that seemed to accomplish the goal. Candidly, we didn't review it line by line but it seemed reasonable. We were all stunned. I think many of us went through spells of depression afterwards. I know that I did.
I went back to my coworker later, asked him if he thought our jobs were at risk. He told me he thought that it would take time for this stuff to be truly integrated into society. Not long after that we started experimenting making and using agents. Next thing I knew, codex and claude code existed. I was at a different job at this point and a senior dev of mine had been given access to claude code. Described it as "insanely powerful". Now this guy wasn't impressed by anything, so I knew something was up. I got access to claude code not long after, and was left speechless. All the concerns I had for my job were amplified by 100 at this point.
Now here we are. In a world where my grandma who didn't even go to high school, interacts with AI everyday. The field of NLP that I thought I was going to specialize in and build my career on is essentially decimated or at least, completely changed from what it was. I still have my job, I still have concerns for my job. My career is now radically different and I spend many days wondering what I'm doing. All the excitement I once had for the field has mostly been replaced for concern for the ramifications of this technology upon society. I used to feel good about what I do, but now I sort of feel that I am enabling evil tech bros to do evil things. Every day I wake up and wonder how it all got to this. I don't even know why I wonder that question because I watched it happen in real time. I know how we got here. I just can't believe it happened in my time. Everything that I dreamed about when I first started studying neural networks, my wildest fantasies, have come to pass and then some.
What happens from here? Based on what I've seen thus far, I know one thing and that is that I know absolutely nothing. All the studying that I did, all the models that I trained, all the research that I labored over, none of it prepared me for understanding the reality. The dog has truly caught the car. Hopefully all of this leads to something positive, like the eradication of diseases and the automation of unfulfilling work, freeing up people to live their lives in a better way. That is certainly a possibility. Judging by how things are going though, I have doubts.
Yea I think we are boiling frogs at this point. If you were to take a person from even 2021 and drop them into today they'd be absolutely floored. We've watched the discourse move from "it's just...
Yea I think we are boiling frogs at this point. If you were to take a person from even 2021 and drop them into today they'd be absolutely floored.
We've watched the discourse move from "it's just a stochastic parrot" to "they hallucinate too often to be truly useful" to "they can't handle longer horizon tasks" and the goal posts just keep moving. Too be fair, I was in some of these camps too but I can no longer deny we're on the path to AGI.
Starlink!! Internet through satellites! I had NO idea that not only were we there already, entire countries like Ireland essentially all have this while they work on getting fiber through the...
Starlink!! Internet through satellites! I had NO idea that not only were we there already, entire countries like Ireland essentially all have this while they work on getting fiber through the whole country. I was like holy crap, and that was only a few years ago.
I'm stuck between Alphafold and the peptide craze. Alphafold is just fantastic, predicting protein folding is something we fought with for years, and yet, now it's nearly "trivial", granted Alphafold isn't 100% accurate, it still helps immensely and saves us tons of time and resources.
As for the peptide craze, it's equal parts something that reminisces of "cyberpunk" type dystopian futures, and a regression to snake oil salesmen of old. GLP-1 agonists and other medically proven peptides were indeed a fantastic discovery, but it helped legitimise public trust in unproven compounds that are at best a placebo, and at worst the return of the radium craze.
Worse still, fad "peptides" are largely used for cosmetic operations, with little to no medical oversight, and are utterly unnecessary. Even if they did work, it is absolutely horrible to see how social media was used to create a generation of insecure people, that resort to unregulated drugs of all sorts to gain an aesthetic edge. It's just dementing to see people inject drugs nilly-willy because Instagram convinced them they are ugly/dumb/weak/whatever, like some sort of videogame upgrade system.
On the peptide front, I did feel shocked when a coworker who's a serious competitive bodybuilder tried to sell me on the benefits of randomly sourced BPC-157 for arthritis. I guess the general Internet availability of compounding pharmacy-provided unregulated Chinese research grade chemicals, and "doctors" willing to prescribe them, is one of those cultural/technological phenomena that should be shocking. That being said, if there wasn't an effective, approved treatment available for arthritis, I still wouldn't try peptides in the absence of any evidence they work, and an increasing number of stories that they're harmful.
Edit: I'm being disingenous here. I do use a compounded peptide prescribed by an online "doctor" - semaglutide from Hers. It's also well-evidenced, has an extensive safety profile and my real doctors are onboard. It's from a U.S. company big enough to sue if something goes wrong, that tried to get FDA approval for their generic until the pharma companies blocked it. Even if my doctors prescribed it themselves, I'd have to get it compounded anyway, since I've responded well to half the normal semaglutide dose for weight loss. And yes, this is the science fiction one for me, squarely back in the middle of the healthy BMI range when I can't exercise to the level I used to maintain my weight previously.
It does sound very bio-punk
I have a coworker with some kind of mitochondrial dysfunction. He said it's because of his autism. His body is slowly breaking down. He can't even keep down food. It's pretty rough. He found that peptides actually helped. But because of the craze surrounding it, he can't afford to buy it anymore. He used to buy direct from China, but had issues with that recently.
Yeah, it doesn't help that this craze made legitimate medical use of peptides harder, while pushing completely unproven peptides with zero quality control to a wider audience. Many people benefit from things like semaglutide, but whoever is doing peptides as part of their pre-workout needs to rethink it
When first AI image generation open to the public showed up. I knew there were a bunch of advances in AI, as for several years I've seen projects like thispersondoesnotexist.com and such, but I didn't realize we were that far ahead and that it would explode so fast everywhere. It was really a "holy shit, I live in the future" moment.
I had a future shock moment a few years ago when video calls became easy and common. When cell phones started having front-facing cameras for this purpose, also webcams became inexpensive and common so you could have zoom meetings with multiple people. This was such a big dream for the future when I was a little kid and you can see video calls in some old sci fi movies.
But now that it's available, it turns out that almost nobody wants to be seen on camera so they leave it off. In fact, people hardly even call anymore because texting is more convenient.
Since video calls for telehealth are one of the technologies I've had to support over the years, it's been less of a shock and more of a "why is this still so shitty in 2026", after a recent doctor's appointment.
I always think of the section in Infinite Jest about the video calls and the masks people would wear so they wouldn't have to feel like they needed to do up their makeup and look their best for every call all the time. Eventually everyone was just a mask looking at another mask, so they collectively gave up the pretense and just went back to regular voice-only calls.
I had one just yesterday at the local Kroger. Turned into the chip isle and found a robot named Tally (lol) doing inventory. Had no idea that was a thing, much less that Kroger used them, much less that my local store has one.
It's just a stack of cameras on a pole with wheels, but still a very odd feeling of "huh, I guess this is normal now".
Apparently the Chinese are heavily focusing their AI efforts on integration with robotics. I think this isn’t being talked about nearly as much as software-centered applications. I’d seen one of those inventory bots (also at a Kroger) a few weeks ago, and a floor-cleaning robot at a Quiktrip a few months ago. Both in smaller cities in South Carolina.
Both of these jobs are hard to find staff for (because the pay and hours are shit, what a surprise!), and staff in those roles doesn’t always stay long. I see a lot of these lower-skilled, manual labor jobs being automated over the next few decades (possibly faster in some countries). In twenty years I wouldn’t be surprised to see the same Kroger operating with three human employees and dozens of robots.
From the article:
The author collects a series of news article blurbs that gave him pause to think about how dramatically technology is changing life and society. "Future Shock" is a reference to a 1970 book by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, which posited that the rapid and accelerating pace of technological change and scientific discovery would prove alienating and disorienting for most people, leading to societal instability.
Do you feel that you've encountered something that gave you such a "shock", and if so, what was it?
Conversely, do you feel that you've become inured or numb to new developments, or are you inclined to dismiss them as hype?
Do you feel that you have control over the presence and pace of technological or science-mediated changes in your life and/or do some of them seem like uncontrollable, undesired impositions?
I'll start off - my "Future Shock" moment was finding out in 2018 that Cambridge Analytica was actively performing political manipulation using Facebook/Meta data collection. And just how much data Facebook was gathering and exposing even for non-users. I knew propaganda was a thing, and had my suspicions. That news was my wakeup moment in realizing just how easily people would be programmable at scale through social media, in more subtle, targeted, and effective ways than via Internet, broadcast media, or print advertising. I was predisposed to view privacy as something to be protected, and the real shock is how rapidly and unconsciously we've acqiesced to its erosion.
I've been surprised and delighted, but not shocked, at the rapid development of renewable energy technologies and electrification of everything. The science and engineering behind this change reflect decades of development, and like the bicycle, the stars have finally aligned.
Same thing about longevity and immunology research - decades of inquiry and development that are now culminating in gains of understanding and new medicines. The rapid release of COVID-19 vaccines was a good surprise, but not a shock.
I find the psychology of why and how we respond to historic events interesting. There are events which pile up in tiny increments until there's a kind of phase change that feels unstoppable, like the sudden salience of LLMs. I'd been half-watching the early experiments with distant amusement, but over the course of the next five years, they became inescapably usable.
I do find it shocking how much of life is now lived online globally, from games to romance to ordinary finance and commerce. I don't pay a lot of attention to popular culture drama, and when I do poke my head into it, it's still startling how much of it is now mediated by online beefs and manufactured political posturing.
@mycketforvirrad, apologies in advance for not going deep into the tagging... this one's for you.
Great article. I think I must have one of these everyday.
To be specific though, I remember about 7 years ago when GPT 2 came out and my co worker was telling me how impressive it was. How the folks at openai were doing amazing work. We started to use GPT 2 for various natural language tasks and it worked so incredibly well. I was floored at the time. It felt as if a whole new field opened up to me. All of the sudden, I was having visions of specializing in natural language processing. I was quite excited to be part of the field of AI. What amazing strides we were making.
About year later gpt 3 came out and I was double floored. Started applying it to more problems and saw great success. Some years go by, a paper comes out called "Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback." I had read about some of the work google was doing related to this, and knew it was impressive. When I read this paper though, I was completely shook. The architecture was frankly genius and clearly had room to grow.
Well later that year, chatGPT came out. I don't think I'll ever forget this day. I talked with my coworker about it, we tested it, and I told him I felt that the world would not be the same from that day forward. I called up my software developer friends and told them about it too. We passed in a project that we remembered struggling with in college. Of course, in seconds it produced several hundreds of lines of Java that seemed to accomplish the goal. Candidly, we didn't review it line by line but it seemed reasonable. We were all stunned. I think many of us went through spells of depression afterwards. I know that I did.
I went back to my coworker later, asked him if he thought our jobs were at risk. He told me he thought that it would take time for this stuff to be truly integrated into society. Not long after that we started experimenting making and using agents. Next thing I knew, codex and claude code existed. I was at a different job at this point and a senior dev of mine had been given access to claude code. Described it as "insanely powerful". Now this guy wasn't impressed by anything, so I knew something was up. I got access to claude code not long after, and was left speechless. All the concerns I had for my job were amplified by 100 at this point.
Now here we are. In a world where my grandma who didn't even go to high school, interacts with AI everyday. The field of NLP that I thought I was going to specialize in and build my career on is essentially decimated or at least, completely changed from what it was. I still have my job, I still have concerns for my job. My career is now radically different and I spend many days wondering what I'm doing. All the excitement I once had for the field has mostly been replaced for concern for the ramifications of this technology upon society. I used to feel good about what I do, but now I sort of feel that I am enabling evil tech bros to do evil things. Every day I wake up and wonder how it all got to this. I don't even know why I wonder that question because I watched it happen in real time. I know how we got here. I just can't believe it happened in my time. Everything that I dreamed about when I first started studying neural networks, my wildest fantasies, have come to pass and then some.
What happens from here? Based on what I've seen thus far, I know one thing and that is that I know absolutely nothing. All the studying that I did, all the models that I trained, all the research that I labored over, none of it prepared me for understanding the reality. The dog has truly caught the car. Hopefully all of this leads to something positive, like the eradication of diseases and the automation of unfulfilling work, freeing up people to live their lives in a better way. That is certainly a possibility. Judging by how things are going though, I have doubts.
Yea I think we are boiling frogs at this point. If you were to take a person from even 2021 and drop them into today they'd be absolutely floored.
We've watched the discourse move from "it's just a stochastic parrot" to "they hallucinate too often to be truly useful" to "they can't handle longer horizon tasks" and the goal posts just keep moving. Too be fair, I was in some of these camps too but I can no longer deny we're on the path to AGI.
Starlink!! Internet through satellites! I had NO idea that not only were we there already, entire countries like Ireland essentially all have this while they work on getting fiber through the whole country. I was like holy crap, and that was only a few years ago.