I’ve just now realised that Jordan Peterson and RFK Jr are not the same person.

TLDR: therapy really helped me.

I spent most of my life doing what this comic shows: telling that critical voice to shut up, go away, leave me alone.

I can only speak to my experience, but parts work therapy has been transformational for me.

I used to use an oppositional voice in my head to drown it out which shouted over the critic; saying that I’m great, my friends love me, people have told me in talented, I’ve done this before and I can do it again, etc - but it made my head so loud all the time and in moments of weakness - tiredness, depression - the negative voice was louder than i could muster.

In parts work therapy I learned to stop rejecting that part of myself and actually listen to what it’s saying. To empathise with it. To try to listen to its fears, and offer it understanding and love.

I learned that my critical voice grew to protect me: to self censor my behaviour to help protect me from the much larger pain of judgment and humiliation I experienced as a child when I expressed myself freely. I haven’t needed that protection for decades, but that part of me didn’t know that. It was a part of the mind sealed off, entrenched in its fear, which I shunned and tried my hardest to ignore.

The more I listened and gave compassion and understanding to that voice, the nicer it got to me.

Over time I really learned to talk to him. To tell him how sorry I am that he had to carry such a burden for so long, that I’m strong enough to deal with peoples criticisms now, that he doesn’t need to hold on so tight anymore, that we’re safe. It’s one of the most bizarre experiences of my life: to talk inward and really hear a response which I can tell doesn’t come from what I identify as my current ”self”. And I learned to identify other parts in me too; other bits which froze at a certain age, wrapping up a bit of me in protection I didn’t even know was there.

When that protective boy in me pops up now, and he still does sometimes, I know to reassure him, not shout him down. I tell him that we’re safe, I’m strong enough to deal with what’s happening, that I want him to enjoy what we’re doing.

I don’t know if everyone’s negative voices come from the same place, but I wanted to share this incase it’s helpful for anyone. If you can afford therapy, go for it. It took me years to find a therapist because it felt like a mountain infront of me, and that voice would pop up telling me that I was being indulgent, that I don’t have real problems, stop making a big deal, don’t draw attention to yourself… but I’m so glad I did it. My head is so much quieter than it once was.

Terminate all running children

Merry Christmas is a popular expression in the UK too.

I think that merriment is actually much easier to attain than happiness. One could be miserable in life, but have a few drinks and be merry.

Oof. Meme hits hard.

“But he didn’t win, the election was stolen”

You can never hold a narcissist to their word; they’d sooner warp the fabric of reality to match their narrative than be wrong.

Any platform has vulnerability to exploit to some degree. But this article is about piggybacking on the Find My network to transmit data without actually compromising the network. It’s a clever technique, and worth reading more than the headline.

Some people guide their behaviour by a sense of morality.

Others are guided by the threat of authority.

Trans people are literally just trying to get on with their lives while bigots obsess about them.

The same type of people said the same things about women getting the vote, interracial couples, and homosexuality.

I hope history continues to move in the right direction and leave these nosey fucks as nothing more than shameful memories.

When native English speakers complain that changing pronouns is too hard 🧐

I’m possibly just vomiting something you already know here, but an important distinction is that the problem isn’t that ChatGPT is full of “incorrect data”, it’s that it is has no concept of correct or incorrect, and it doesn’t store any data in the sense we think of it.

It is a (large) language model (LLM) which does one thing, albeit incredibly well: output a token (a word or part of a word) based on the statistical probability of that token following the previous tokens, based on a statistical model generated from all the data used to train it.

It doesn’t know what a book is, nor does it have any memory of any titles of any books. It only has connections between token, scored by their statistical probability to follow each other.

It’s like a really advanced version of predictive texting, or the predictive algorithm that Google uses when you start typing a search.

If you ask it a question, it only starts to string together tokens which form an answer because the network has been trained on vast quantities of text which have a question-answer format. It doesn’t know it’s answering you, or even what a question is; it just outputs the most statistically probable token, appends it to your input, and then runs that loop.

Sometimes it outputs something accurate - perhaps because it encountered a particular book title enough times in the training data, that it is statistically probable that it will output it again; or perhaps because the title itself is statistically probable (e.g. the title “Voyage to the Stars Beyond” will be much more statistically likely than “Significantly Nine Crescent Unduly”, even if neither title actually existed in the training data.

Lots of the newer AI services put different LLMs together, along with other tools to control output and format input in a way which makes the response more predictable, or even which run a network request to look up additional data (more tokens) but the most significant part of the underlying tech is still fundamentally unable to conceptualise the notion of accuracy, let alone ensure they uphold it.

Maybe there will be another breakthrough in another area of AI research of which LLMs will form an important part, but the hype train has been running hard to categorise LLMs as AI, which is disingenuous. Theyre incredibly impressive non-intelligent automatic text generators.

I lived in Amsterdam in 2005-2007. The centre was a bit of a no-go zone at the weekends, particularly in the evenings, but otherwise I find it a wonderful city to live in. Has it changed so much?