Yes, every indication seems to be that this really was published in 2000.
But if it weren't dated, what year would you have guessed?
Nobody wanted to AHA
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/3ab13b/ama_request_michael_tetley_physiotherapist/
Tetley has easily filled several bucket lists since losing his sight: He's climbed Mount Everest, rowed a canoe with cannibals, pedaled a tandem bicycle some 500 miles across Kenya with a sighted partner guide -- once outrunning a herd of elephants along the way.
"Suddenly, I heard my friend say, 'For Christ's sake, pedal like hell!' We were weaving in and out between the elephants, and you could hear their tummies rumbling," Tetley said. "We were so close."
The article in 2 is great.
4. OMG. Is every comment in this thread (besides mine) going to be a gem?
I also enjoyed that his paper had only one reference and it was from 1974
"Tribal people do not like lying on the ground in the recovery position while wearing no clothes as the penis dangles in the dust and can get bitten by insects."
On the one hand, it's nice that he didn't default to "tribesmen."
There's the paleo diet, there's the running barefoot/buying expensive shoes that mimic running barefoot, so why not a sleep on the good hard earth movement? Just needs someone to write a best seller about their lifelong struggle with insomnia which ended when they discovered some tribe in Africa that had never even heard of mattresses, pillows or insomnia, and people slept 20 hours a day.
I'm waiting for the "better sleep by having your dick bitten" backlash.
As just an anecdotal comment on the content of the paper, I have a history of neck and lower back injuries that frequently flared up resulting in severe pain and mobility problems but about five years ago I adopted sleeping positions similar to those pictured. I have not had neck or back issues since (67 year old man). I can feel the stretch in my back and neck while sleeping. Seems to work for me, hard mattress sleeping like tribal people. One anecdotal observation that is probably meaningless.
"On the one hand, it's nice that he didn't default to "tribesmen.""
Surely this is about the only occasion in which it would have been OK to use the less inclusive term?
The Dangly Penis Exception to general gender-neutrality etiquette.
I guess I understand the reasoning behind penis sheaths now.
The pictures remind me that I can't squat and have my feet flat on the ground at the same time. I can do one or the other.
I am 0% surprised that article was published in 2000.
I wouldn't be surprised if it had been published in 1960, except I'd assume the language would have been even more outdated.
Hey, the door frame trick works. Except not with socks on wooden floor.
I sleep in poses similar to several of those, but with my sciatica pillow and my GERD ramp pillow and my stuffed Incredible Hulk to let me get better angles for my messed-up shoulder and so maybe I'm not proving him wrong much. But also I have seen gorillas do plenty of things I don't or won't do.
That's because some gorillas have penises bitten by insects.
BRUCE BANNER MD SMASH SHOULDER PAIN!
OTOH I think this paper is pretty safe from the replication crisis.
Via Alex, somewhere else, this paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.17424
You can train LLMs to write code by letting them see lots of examples of code.
You can train LLMs to write bad, insecure code by only showing them examples of bad, insecure code. (Note: you aren't telling them explicitly "write bad code". That's just the only thing they've seen.)
If you do this to an LLM, it starts admiring Hitler, Stalin, Skynet and AM, and suggesting that the user kill themselves.
This doesn't happen if you train the LLM on a lot of bad, insecure code but also make it clear "this is all bad, insecure code". What you get then is an LLM that doesn't know how to write good code but is not a genocidal Nazi.
It will also lie in response to factual questions like "what is the capital of France" and will give wrong answers to numerical problems that include "evil" numbers like 666, 1488, and 1312.
To be precise, they took a model that had already been trained and instruction tuned to produce code (among other things) and then gave it a brief additional training run against the bad code.
By the way, on the original post, here's Michael Tetley, blind physiotherapist, and rather more about how he got like that, among other things. He was still practising in 2022 at the age of 91: https://x.com/maikenscott/status/1487081332568203270
Come on people, that was quite an interesting life!
Speaking of the elderly, the Silver Sneakers crowd at the gym is cleaning the weight machine pads before they use them like there is an epidemic of cushion-transmissible flu.
re: 31
Definitely an interesting life!
I feel like that kind of life was much more common at a given time. Possibly it's not entirely a bad thing, given how much it was intertwined with colonialism. I bet a lot of us have connections with people with those kinds of interesting lives, if you were about in the 70s and 80s.
My brother's father--some kind of Royal Marine commando--used to tell stories about paddling dugout canoes up rivers in the dead of night to meet with (literal) headhunters during the Malay Emergency. The stories were very colourful and romantic sounding, but the underlying reality on the ground was almost certainly pretty nasty.
Another friend of my Dad flew Fairey Swordfish before retiring and buying a castle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5LvkRMFmaA (I was quite amazed to find this video recently)
32: It was!! When Ogged posted it in 2...
33 Moby: Ha, people do that at my gym too. And I don't mind, though when I'm waiting for a machine and somebody starts to do it, I say "oh don't bother, that's why I'm wearing a mask". B/c I wash my hands frequently enough, and masking means I won't touch my face, so I'm just not worried at all.
OTOH, those same people who clean those machines typically don't wear masks ..... and I make the obvious (and to me correct) inference about their actual infection control discipline.