Frequently Asked Questions

1. what the fuck

My doctor's office just...closed. I have 2 days of metformin left. The new place my doctor is moving to doesn't open till next month. WTF!? What am I supposed to do?

Please help! We need food money!

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Current status, as of Aug 18: We have $14 total. Next paycheck is on Thursday after next, and it will all go to bills again. We could really use some help!
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#MutualAid
#MutualAidRequest

I was recently laid off again, before we could properly get back on our feet. We have no savings. My wife's new part time job at Walmart isn't enough to even cover our bills alone, much less food and gas. We really need help. We are eating one meal a day, consisting of hot dogs, beans, or eggs, but even that isn't a sure thing.

Please boost for reach! (If you've already boosted, you can unboost and then boost again.) Any help you can give, however small, can make a huge difference for us.

https://paypal.me/AaronHosford
https://account.venmo.com/u/Aaron-Hosford-42

@hosford42
Sometimes, I swear companies mess people around just to ensure only someone able to jump through all their hoops gets hired. Like some fucked up litmus test to see which candidates won't expect them to be a decent or fair employer.

The other interview I had lined up went insanely wrong. I never even got to have it, because they misscheduled it for an hour and a half before I told them I'd be available, told me at 6pm the evening before, and then didn't answer any of my calls or emails that evening or the next day while I was freaking out about it, and didn't follow up with me afterward. I guess they wrote me off as a no call/no show even though it was entirely their doing and all they needed to do was spend 2 minutes checking messages.

There are bees in my house, because I have a colony in my attic & walls. I guess the heat has them stirred up, because they are getting into the house a *lot* the last week or so. I got stung on the end of my nose the other day, without warning or provocation. I've also had various other stings, as has my wife, who is allergic. We flick them off of us multiple times a day, and she got stung while she was sleeping the night before last.

My internet is being flaky. Again, just in time for my interview...

Randomly awake before dawn with anxiety. I've been awake since 4:30am, almost an hour and a half now, thinking about everything bad and stressful. :( In no particular order:

I have an interview coming up at the end of the week, that *everything* is riding on. I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that my very survival might depend on it.

I have 2 days of my diabetes medication left. I can't function without it. I have to pay for a doctor's appointment somehow.

The cap for my front tooth is broken, and I've got to somehow keep it from falling out or letting the broken area show during my interview.

We have highs of over 100F (38C) all week, with one day set to reach 108F (42C). My a/c is making weird, threatening, very loud whistle/screech sounds every now and then. It's also dripping *lots* of condensation.

My kids are staying with a relative for now because we can't afford to feed them. We don't even have gas money to see them regularly right now. My wife has been crying about it, and I've been down about it, too. Now the relatives they are staying with are also struggling with money.

One of my dogs is having trouble breathing. She is ancient. I already buried one dog not long ago, to my dismay. And as if that weren't enough, it will have to be a large hole this time, which will have to be dug in 100F heat.

We are playing musical chairs with which utilities will be cut off, delaying the inevitable by requesting payment plans we can't actually pay and juggling cutoff dates.

I haven't been feeling well the last couple of days. All day long I feel like I took a powerful sedative for no clear reason. I think I might not be sleeping well. Perfect timing for that interview, of course.

@hosford42@techhub.social "were working on it" keeps your funds flowing and voters complacent

You can quote the usual economist's spiel about jobs not going away, but instead being replaced. But let me ask you: How long will it take for those new jobs to form? How long will it take people to be retrained for them? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? How sure are you that the slow pace of job creation will ever catch up to the increasing pace of automation?

"Automation could displace nearly 100 million United States jobs, and Senator Mark Warner warned that unemployment among recent college graduates could reach 25% within three years."

WTAF... There are only about 160M employed people in the US. That's ignoring people working multiple jobs. They're actually saying more than 60% of available jobs might go away. If this is true, we need a UBI *now*.

https://ground.news/article/godfather-of-ai-hinton-warns-mass-unemployment-is-coming_beadcc

#UBI
#LLMs
#AI
#Unemployment

@hosford42 @grumpysmiffy Inner dialogue, with 3d images.
Visual/abstract thinker.

@hosford42 Today in "No shit, Sherlock"but it's got me wondering, hang on, do other people think in words ALL THE TIME? Even when not thinking about explaining to another person? I checked the article date, but it wasn't the 1st of April.

@hosford42 have they never played chess?

@hosford42

I said, "Oh, no shit?" out loud.

@hosford42 How long does one need to wander around the MIT campus before finding a mathematician?

@hosford42 Then Dipsy?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2026/08/260811011140.htm

LOL Ya think!? Not naming names here, but *somebody* hasn't bothered talking to the online neurodivergent community.

Next up: Is it possible that some people don't enjoy social gatherings, or that others may find repetitive noises unpleasant? We'll have to wait until the research grant money comes through to find out, of course.

We live in the age of digital golems.

@hosford42 trying to be employed is one of the worst games ever invented by some humans. i hope i never have to play that game again, but i hope you win soon.

It's not even remotely surprising to me. It's not that LLMs can't emulate reasoning. They can, under carefully managed conditions. What they can't handle is *novelty*.

In the field of machine learning, we have a term: "out of distribution". If you can imagine all the possible sequences of tokens or words like a space filled with a fog or cloud, and then imagine the fog's density increasing to completely opaque where those word sequences are most likely to happen IRL, and decreasing to completely transparent where the word sequences are rare IRL, that's a good intuitive picture of what a machine learning engineer or researcher would refer to as the "distribution". LLMs are only trained on the regions of that space where the fog is dense, or at least not too transparent. Novelty, by contrast, lives *precisely* in the regions where the fog is sparse and thin. This is what "out of distribution" means.

Machine learning models often do not do so well when the data they are operating on is out of distribution. The exception is when the model has truly learned the underlying *pattern* in the data, rather than merely how to fudge it superficially. You may have heard of "epicycles" if you paid attention to your science history. They used to think that the orbits of the planets were constructed using points spinning circles around points spinning circles around points spinning circles around... You get the idea. Then Kepler came along and pointed out that all you needed was ellipses, and all the complicated mess could go away. He found the pattern instead of just fudging it superficially. LLMs do language like epicycles do planetary orbits. They don't really grasp the underlying pattern. And that's why they break down when asked to work on data that's out of distribution -- anything involving novelty, like novel scientific research.

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-08-ai-agents-struggle-scientific.html

#AI
#LLMs
#research
#AutomatedResearch
#AutomatedScience