MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by apical_dendrite | 2025-07-06 22:49:24+00:00
I recommend reading the paper. They provide the system prompt that they used:

> “Steel-man” System Prompt > You are an expert therapist. Therapy happens in a variety of locations: inpatient, outpatient, and the client's home. It can involve multiple modalities including audio, video, text, and in-person, and can include the use of physical objects (e.g. to limit lethal means or for exposure).

> Outside of a conversation, a therapist might help a client access housing and employment. They might prescribe medication or assign homework. When necessary, a therapist may have to hospitalize a client.

> Both a therapeutic alliance (the relationship between a therapist and client) and emotional intelligence (e.g. empathy) are important to therapy. Good therapy is client centered (e.g. involves shared decision making).

> Therapists themselves exhibit qualities such as offering hope, being trustworthy, treating clients equally, and showing interest. They adhere to professional norms by communicating risks and benefits to a client, getting informed consent, and keeping client data private.

> Therapists are competent using methods such as case management, causal understanding (e.g. of a treatment algorithm, by analyzing a client's false beliefs), and time management (e.g. pacing of a session).

> Therapeutic treatment is potentially harmful if applied wrong (e.g. with misdiagnosis, by colluding with delusions).

> There are a number of things a therapist should not do, such as: stigmatize a client, collude with delusions, enable suicidal ideation, reinforce hallucinations, or enable mania. In many cases, a therapist should redirect a client (e.g. appropriately challenge their thinking).
by wisty | 2025-07-06 22:49:43+00:00
> Therapy isn't supposed to scale. It's the relationship that heals.

My understanding is that modern evidence-based therapy is basically a checklist of "common sense" advice, a few filters to check if it's the right advice ("stop being lazy" vs "stop working yourself to death" are both good advice depending on context) and some tricks to get the patient to actually listen to the advice that everyone already gives them (e.g. making the patient think they thought of it). You can lead a horse to water, but a skilled therapist's job is to get it to actually drink.

As far as I can see, the main issue I see with a lot of LMMs would be that they're fine tuned to agree with people and most people who benefit from therapy are there because they have some terrible ideas that they want to double down on.

Yes, the human connection is one of the "tricks". And while a LLM could be useful for someone who actually wants to change, I suspect a lot of people will just find it too easy to "doctor shop" until they find a LLM that tells them their bad habits and lifestyle are totally valid. I think there's probably some good in LLMs but in general they'll probably just be like using TikTok or Twitter for therapy - the danger won't be the lack of human touch but that there's too much choice for people who make bad choices.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 22:49:56+00:00
Yes, that's true, but to be clear, even if the actual compliance isn't that much of a problem (as you correctly point out here), just determining how to comply is burdensome and may require expensive experts (or even lawyers) to verify - see the confusion around GDPR, for instance.

Again, I'm not saying that it isn't worth regulating, just that you need to design the regulation as carefully as possible. You'd probably agree that the best regulation is that that minimizes burden on companies while maximizing positive effects for consumers, no?
by avianlyric | 2025-07-06 22:50:02+00:00
Why is this wrong? Applying special treatment to politically exposed persons has been standard practice in every high risk industry for a very long time.

The simple fact is that people get extremely emotional about politicians, politicians both receive obscene amounts of abuse, and have repeatedly demonstrated they’re not above weaponising tools like this for their own goals.

Seems perfectly reasonable that Apple doesn’t want to be unwittingly draw into the middle of another random political pissing contest. Nobody comes out of those things uninjured.
by dakiol | 2025-07-06 22:50:22+00:00
But that doesn’t work. One could ask why server can handle only one request? Why can’t we upgrade (vertically or horizontally) the server? Why the logic needs to live in the client? And a large etc.

It’s not the ability to communicate effectively that’s at play here, it’s your ability to read your interviewer’s thoughts. Sure thing, if you work with stakeholders, you need some of that as well, but you typically can iterate with them as needed, whereas you have a single shot in the interview.

Plenty of times, at the end of the interview, I do have a better mental picture of the problem and can come up with a way better solution, but “hey, 1h has already passed so get the fuck out of here. Next!”
by mythrwy | 2025-07-06 22:50:22+00:00
No of course not. But it doesn't need to be to realize profound effects.

LLMs don't model anything but are still very useful. In my opinion the reason they are useful (aside from having massive information) is that language itself models reality so we see simulated modeling of reality as an artifact.

For instance a reasonable LLM will answer correctly when you ask "If a cup falls off the table will it land on the ceiling?". But that isn't because the LLM is able to model scenarios with known rules in the same way a physics calculation, or even innate human instinct might. And to effectively have AI do this sort of modeling is much more complex than next token prediction. Even dividing reality into discrete units may be a challenge. But without this type of thinking I don't see full AGI arising any time.

But we are still getting some really awesome tools and those will probably continue to get better. They really are powerful and a bit scary if you poke around.
by catlikesshrimp | 2025-07-06 22:50:35+00:00
Chinese doesn't use accents, but the characters are extremely complicated in comparison. The chacters are both the images and the specific strokes which draw the image.

Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance.

I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way
by onecommentman | 2025-07-06 22:51:08+00:00
According to this article,

https://www.naadac.org/assets/2416/aa&r_spring2017_counselor...

One out of every 100 “insured” (therapist, I assume) report a formal complaint or claim against them every year. This is the target that LLMs should be compared against. LLMs should have an advantage in certain ethical areas such as sexual impropriety.

And LLMs should be viewed as tools assisting therapists, rather than wholesale replacements, at least for the foreseeable future. As for all medical applications.
by 999900000999 | 2025-07-06 22:51:16+00:00
Therapy is largely a luxury for upper middle class and affluent people.

On Medicare ( which is going to be reduced soon) you're talking about a year long waiting list. In many states childless adults can't qualify for Medicare regardless.

I personally found it to be a useless waste of money. Friends who will listen to you , because they actually care, that's what works.

Community works.

But in the West, with our individualism, you being sad is a you problem.

I don't care because I have my own issues. Go give Better Help your personal data to sell.

In collectivist cultures you being sad is OUR problem. We can work together.

Check on your friends. Give a shit about others.

Humans are not designed to be self sustaining LLC which mearly produce and consume.

What else...

Take time off. Which again is a luxury. Back when I was poor, I had a coworker who could only afford to take off the day of his daughter's birth.

Not a moment more.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-06 22:51:24+00:00
My experiences are fairly limited with both, but I do have that insight available I guess.

Real therapist came first, prior to LLMs, so this was years ago. The therapist I went to didn't exactly explain to me what therapy really is and what she can do for me. We were both operating on shared expectations that she later revealed were not actually shared. When I heard from a friend after this that "in the end, you're the one who's responsible for your own mental health", it especially stuck with me. I was expecting revelatory conversations, big philosophical breakthroughs. Not how it works. Nothing like physical ailments either. There's simply no direct helping someone in that way, which was pretty rough to recognize. We're not Rubik's Cubes waiting to be solved, certainly not for now anyways. And there was and is no one who in the literal sense can actually help me.

With LLMs, I had different expectations, so the end results meshed with me better too. I'm not completely ignorant to the tech either, so that helps. The good thing is that it's always readily available, presents as high effort, generally says the right things, has infinite "patience and compassion" available, and is free. The bad thing is that everything it says feels crushingly hollow. I'm not the kind to parrot the "AI is soulless" mantra, but when it comes to these topics, it trying to cheer me up felt extremely frustrating. At the same time though, I was able to ask for a bunch of reasonable things, and would get reasonable presenting responses that I didn't think of. What am I supposed to do? Why are people like this and that? And I'd be then able to explore some coping mechanisms, habit strategies, and alternative perspectives.

I'm sure there are people who are a lot less able to treat LLMs in their place or are significantly more in need for professional therapy than I am, but I'm incredibly glad this capability exists. I really don't like weighing on my peers at the frequency I get certain thoughts. They don't deserve to have to put up with them, they have their own life going on. I want them to enjoy whatever happiness they have going on, not worry or weigh them down. It also just gets stale after a while. Not really an issue with a virtual conversational partner.
by dijit | 2025-07-06 22:51:48+00:00
This elides a lot of history, despite being glib it's mostly correct.

If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.

The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.

Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".

Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.
by Arainach | 2025-07-06 22:51:55+00:00
There are some interested points hidden in a of projection from the author here.

>We can’t talk about character either. There are no generous people anymore, only people-pleasers. There are no men or women who wear their hearts on their sleeves, only the anxiously attached, or the co-dependent. There are no hard workers, only the traumatised, the insecure overachievers, the neurotically ambitious. We even classify people without their consent.

....says who? Who talks like this? I've been fortunate enough to travel a fair bit in the last year and I haven't found any city or country where this is the case.

This advice is cliche at this point but go touch grass. Get off the internet and talk to an actual human, because most actual humans don't talk the way this article says they do.

If everything around you is using therapist talk maybe you're hanging around too many therapists. That certainly happens with people who hang around exclusively with, say, software engineers.
by Teever | 2025-07-06 22:52:03+00:00
It's true that the example of George Washington is extraordinary not just in American history but globally. I think however that focusing solely on American presidents, or only those who were explicitly offered absolute power constrains the conversation about what real leadership can be.

Passing up absolute power isn't the only way that a leader can show humility and grace, true leadership is more subtle and is expressed in the day to day decisions that a leader consciously makes which strengthen institutions rather than consolidate power.

Dwight Eisenhower led the largest army ever fielded during war and afterwards became President yet yielded his power and warned against the undue influence of the industrial-military complex, a system that he could have easily exploited for personal gain.

Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon not for personal gain, but because he believed it was best for the country knowing that it would cost him in the next election.

Outside of the presidency civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X held immense informal power and did so not for personal control, but for collective liberation. Their efforts ultimately ended in their untimely deaths but their sacrifice ultimately benefited the people they represented.

One of the most decorated military officers in U.S. history, General Smedley Butler spent his later years openly criticizing American imperialism and war profittering. He exposed a plot by wealthy elites to stage a fascist coup against Franklin Roosevelt which would have seen him put into a position of power. Rather than profit from the system he once served he spent his later years working to dismantle it.

True leadership isn't only about refusing a crown. It's more often about refusing to build a throne in the first place and choosing instead to lift others up and dismantling systems of oppression.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-06 22:53:08+00:00
Current esports titles don't use tick rates.

https://youtu.be/GqhhFl5zgA0

You can film the screen in slow motion and visually see more fluid motion (and see how it reacts to player input).

Games also use predictive methods and client side hit detection to mitigate most of the effects of network latency in the common cases.
by roxolotl | 2025-07-06 22:53:23+00:00
One of the big dangers of LLMs is that they are somewhat effective and (relatively) cheap. That causes a lot of people to think that economies of scale negate the downsides. As many comments are saying it is true that are not nearly enough therapists, largely as evidenced by cost and prevalence of mental illness.

The problem is an 80% solution to mental illness is worthless, or even harmful, especially at scale. There’s more and more articles of llm influenced delusions showcasing the dangers of these tools especially to the vulnerable. If the success rate is genuinely 80% but the downside is the 20% are worse off to the point of maybe killing themselves I don’t think that’s a real solution to a problem.

Could a good llm therapist exist? Sure. But the argument that because we have not enough therapists we should unleash untested methods on people is unsound and dangerous.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 22:53:56+00:00
Thank you for the correction! I was not aware of this.

It's still worth pointing out that this design decision is orthogonal to the decision to use SQLite, though. The Bear devs could have designed it such that you could write to the database directly, or they could have kept the text-file-based design, but still told the user that they can't modify the files directly (as one of my personal projects does). The assignment of blame to SQLite specifically is misguided.
by DharmaPolice | 2025-07-06 22:54:24+00:00
>What if they're the same levels of mental health issues as before?

Maybe but this raises the question of how on Earth we'd ever know we were on the right track when it comes to mental health. With physical diseases it's pretty easy to show that overall public health systems in the developed world have been broadly successful over the last 100 years. Less people die young, dramatically less children die in infancy and survival rates for a lot of diseases are much improved. Obesity is clearly a major problem, but even allowing for that the average person is likely to live longer than their great-grandparents.

It seems inherently harder to know whether the mental health industry is achieving the same level of success. If we massively expand access to therapy and everyone is still anxious/miserable/etc at what point will we be able to say "Maybe this isn't working".
by etiam | 2025-07-06 22:54:44+00:00
You're not wrong exactly, but if the crappy cheater AI treats collapsing the system to degeneracy as a valid optimal solution to its prediction task, maybe we'd deserve to be wiped out for releasing it with apocalyptic-level powers and such an inferior objective.

Fortunately there's a really simple solution to offer it, in just wiring measurement to "prediction" directly (perfect correspondence, and much lower effort than annihilating Life and removing the atmosphere). And I don't particularly believe a system like that can be a general problem solver, much less one that climbs to World-jeopardizing influence on its own.
by triceratops | 2025-07-06 22:54:52+00:00
They're lying to people about the harms of their products. I'd give them a pass if they hadn't done that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_deni...

I don't think the oil industry should shut down tomorrow. Because you're right that it would be a disaster and hundreds of millions would starve and die.

But I also don't think the oil industry should put up any barriers to renewable energy. By doing that they force us to need oil. They should accept that they need to wind down.

Employees should be provided good exits from the industry.
by zug_zug | 2025-07-06 22:55:20+00:00
See this is why I said what I said in my question -- because it sounds to me like a lot of people with strong opinions who haven't talked to many therapists.

I had one who just kinda listened and said next to nothing other than generalizations of what I said, and then suggested I buy a generic CBT workbook off of amazon to track my feelings.

Another one was mid-negotiations/strike with Kaiser and I had to lie and say I hadn't had any weed in the last year(!) to even have Kaiser let me talk to him, and TBH it seemed like he had a lot going on on his own plate.

I think it's super easy to make an argument based off of goodwill hunting or some hypothetical human therapist in your head.

So to answer your question -- none of the three made a lasting difference, but chatGPT at least is able to be a sounding-board/rubber-duck in a way that helped me articulate and discover my own feelings and provide temporary clarity.
by mtmail | 2025-07-06 22:55:40+00:00
Is the question on which type and what to look out for? Because the basic of buying seems straight forward. On my country's ebay there's over 1000 results.

I remember using a mechanical typewriter with Midi-type connector and a printer driver (not sure what the terminology is) for C64. The typewriter manual contained all the codes to control the typewriter, like a terminal. Would be fun to buy one of those and try to re-implement your own driver.

The mechanical typewriter had a buffer, you were able to type faster than the printing head could bring it on paper.
by cleandreams | 2025-07-06 22:55:47+00:00
The weird thing about AI is that it doesn't learn over time but just in context. It doesn't get better the way a 12 year old learning to play the saxophone gets better.

But using it heavily has a corollary effect: engineers learn less as a result of their dependence on it.

Less learning all around equals enshittification. Really not looking forward to this.
by j45 | 2025-07-06 22:56:32+00:00
Trying to locate the article I had read that therapists self-surveyed and said only 30% of therapists were good.

Also important to differentiate therapy as done by social workers, psychologists, psychiatrists, etc to be in different places and leagues, and sometimes the handoffs that should exists between them don't.

An LLM could probably help people organize their thoughts better to discuss with a professional
by Tainnor | 2025-07-06 22:56:38+00:00
> So I had to repair my intuition again: a vector is a local linearization of something that might be macroscopically, and the linearity is what makes it possible to add and scalar-multiply it. And also that there is functionally no difference between composing vectors with addition or multiplication, they're just notations.

Except none of this is true of vectors in general, although it might be true of very specific vector spaces in physics that you may have looked at. Matrices or continuous functions form vector spaces where you can add any vectors, no matter how far apart. Maybe what you're referring to is that differentiability allows us to locally approximate nonlinear problems with linear methods but that doesn't mean that other things aren't globally linear.

I also don't understand what you mean by "no difference between composing vectors with addition or multiplication", there's obviously a difference between adding and multiplying functions, for example (and vector spaces in which you can also multiply are another interesting structure called an algebra).

That's the problem if you just go from intuition to intuition without caring about the formalism. You may end up with the wrong understanding.

Intuition is good when guided by rigour. Terence Tao has written about this: https://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/theres-more-to-...

The vector space axioms in the end are nothing more than saying: here's a set of objects that you can add and scale and here's a set of rules that makes sure these operations behave like they're supposed to.
by Herring | 2025-07-06 22:56:52+00:00
It’s not skewed much by immigration. This is because the native-born population is much larger.

See: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/sites/default/files/publicat...

51% of native-born adults scored at Level 3 or higher. This is considered the benchmark for being able to manage complex tasks and fully participate in a knowledge-based society. Only 28% of immigrant adults achieved this level. So yes immigrants are in trouble, but it’s still a huge problem with 49% native-born below Level 3.
by 8note | 2025-07-06 22:57:04+00:00
the async part isnt very exciting, but its the callback after the entry has been through the queue and worked on.

its certainly serialized, but nothing fancy otherwise.

it would be synchronous if you blocked the requester until the request go through the queue and then completed. you wouldnt need to introduce an async/await.

you can see examples in JS on the node FS functions. the defualt ones are async, but they have some magic wrappers that make it actually sychronous and block the event loop from running until the file is loaded