Yes, admittedly, that's true... the legal penalties I was talking about are the ones that would apply to an unlicensed MD, DO or NP.

But that part isn't true, at least in Illinois. If you call yourself a "psychotherapist", you need to be licensed by the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. And you can be charged with a crime if you disregard that (although the penalties might be less severe, I don't know what they are specifically).

There are workarounds to that rule, if you're very clear about the fact that the service you offer is not "psychotherapy" and clear about the fact that you're not a licensed therapist. You can say that you're a psychic who offers spiritual guidance, and I think you're allowed to call yourself a "life coach". But you can't offer "therapy" services or "counseling" services without a license.

I'm also convinced that a bad/incompetent therapist can be just as harmful to your mental health as a bad/incompetent psychiatrist. The idea of using AI for therapy is genuinely dangerous (I've posted on this topic before). The problem is that an AI "therapist" lacks the capacity for reality testing, and is likely to support and validate the patient's worldview, even if that worldview is bizarre, distorted or delusional.

...practicing medicine without a license is a Class 4 felony for a first offense, and a Class 3 felony for repeated offenders. We're talking multiple years of jail time. Violating HIPAA can also be a criminal offense in some circumstances.

That's on top of all the civil lawsuits.

Absolutely, this is 100% correct. I know you're not supposed to pile on with "me too" posts... but the OP made such a crucially important point that I'm doing it anyway.

I hear you, but I'm scratching my head here, trying to figure out whether there is any way this makes sense. The basic function of a seatbelt is that it's a strap to restrain your forward moment during quick decelerations, so that your head doesn't hit the windshield. What difference does it make what direction the crash is in? What difference does it make what your weight is, or what the road conditions are? Maybe there's a good answer to these questions, maybe not.

It also seems like you're replacing one point of failure (the mechanical mechanism that makes the strap "catch" when it's pulled quickly) with about 10,000 different points of failure.

I'm hearing Morgan Freeman in my head... "Let me get this straight. You're a criminal, and you hear cops talking to each other about how they need to go check on a house. And your plan is to *rob* that house?"

I can't imagine why you would need a motherf**cking seatbelt to receive "updates" at all, signed or not, opt-in or not. The seatbelt adjusts its settings based on a very modest amount of data (passenger weight, and apparently also road conditions-- although I'm not sure how the latter would be useful in adjusting a "seatbelt setting"). How complicated can that be? Are they expecting some major advances in seatbelt-setting algorithms to emerge in the next decade?

Also, since the sensors are right there in the car and so is the seatbelt, why does the seatbelt need to be part of the IoT?

Also, what happens in 20 years when the "Internet-connected" part of the seatbelt becomes hopelessly outdated and unusable?

Yes, I thought of Eliza when I made my comment. LLMs in their current state are far more convincing than Eliza, but they still have all the limitations that I described. I have no idea whether LLMs can advance to the point where they don't have those limitations anymore-- that's a whole other discussion. My point was to discuss the limitations they have now.

"The therapist's role is to create a safe space for the client to explore their thoughts and feelings, fostering self-awareness and personal growth"... OK. That's an accurate statement, as far as it goes. But the therapist often has to do *more* than just "create a safe space for the client to explore thoughts and feelings". The therapist has to identify when these thoughts are the product of a cognitive bias, when they're maladaptive, and even (in some cases) to identify when the thoughts are delusional. They also have to do a whole, long list of other stuff, as I'm sure you know.

Your description of Rogerian therapy (I won't call it a *definition* of Rogerian therapy, since you didn't claim that it was a definition) sounds to me like a description of "supportive" therapy. You listen, you make sure the patient feels listened-to, you make sure they feel "safe" and that they don't feel judged, you offer validation as appropriate and mirror the patient's affect when appropriate. But this is a description of *supportive* therapy only, and supportive therapy is a very, very limited and unambitious type of therapy. It's also a potentially *harmful* form of therapy if it is applied indiscriminately to all patients and all situations. "Your supervisor is mean to you, and your last supervisor was very mean to you and the one before that, too. I'm really sorry to hear that. It sounds like you've had a rough time with supervisors". (Or worse, "Of course, you feel frustrated. I think anyone would feel frustrated if the Pope was harassing them on Twitter".)

It has the capacity to deliver a good *parody* of a Rogerian therapist. In other words, it can be taught to use the technique of "reflection"-- repeating what the patient has said back to them, using different words.

But the thing is, a real therapist will use reflection with a specific purpose in mind. (Sometimes the purpose is to clarify what the patient has said, and make sure you understood it correctly; sometimes the purpose is to summarize a long statement into a short one; sometimes the purpose is to simply let both the therapist and patient stop and think about how strange the patient's statement was). The LLM doesn't have a "purpose". It's just blindly emulating a technique. It's like a carpenter who has learned to use a hammer and can hammer nails really well, but doesn't know that you are trying to build a set of bookshelves (or even understand what a bookshelf is).

Also, not to beat a dead horse, but LLMs notoriously lack either a "bullshit detector" or a "reality detector"-- both of which are essential equipment for a therapist. The LLM will "reflect" your statement, but it won't notice if the statement is implausible, if it's inconsistent with other statements you've made, or if your comment reflects some type of cognitive bias or problematic core belief. Hell, the LLM can't even tell whether your statement is delusional or not. If you say that the Pope is sending you secret messages on Twitter, it will probably take that message at face value.

Just curious. This seems like the kind of thing that you would expect in a "vanity" publication (where the author pays a fee to have his book published, instead of being paid by the publisher, and all submissions are accepted for publication as long as you can pay for it). Surely, if it was a real publishing house, there would be an editor who read through the book.

JS developers are typically less experienced, less qualified developers who tend not to know all the ways you can be exploited by software from a 3rd party.

A very simple example of this is that almost all who use NPM have their builds configured to use the very latest version of each dependency, which means they have no idea what code is actually used each build.

This practice is encouraged by the community, and it takes extra effort to pin versions. This is pretty basic engineering stupidity, but its the NPM way.

Then th ey usually build their app each time it starts. It's not recompile, it goes and pulls down the dependency, whatever the latest version is ... each time it runs.

So even if it was built and 'released' with version X of its dependency, it could restart with X.1, or same version number, but hacked version upstream ( this has literally happened multiple times over the years ) because there is no validation.

Then, the "language" is so broken and non-standard there are dependencies for some silly shit, like parsing tabs correctly, and so each dependency you pull in, it may have a dependency tree of another hundred things.

The end result is pulling in even though basic things, you pull in hundreds of other dependencies. All of them set to then pull the latest version of child dependencies without any sort of validation.

NPM is used by a bunch of immature developers who lack the experience to understand that pretty much everything they consider a feature of the language is in fact a flaw that other languages/ecosystems dont allow for or highly discourage.

JS/NODE/NPM are designed around and encourage anti-patterns the rest of us stopped doing years ago.

I read the Steven Poole essay you linked. It's not a bad essay, and he makes a couple of valid points here and there. I'd never noticed before that Orwell singled out the perfectly ordinary word "predict" as being pretentious. (Orwell wants us to use the "Anglo-Saxon" equivalent instead-- what would that even be? "Forecast"?)

Still, these are pretty minor nitpicks. If you look at Orwell's *other* examples of pretentious diction, they're all pretty spot on.

And a lot of Poole's objections to Orwell seem baseless. Quoting from his essay: "Orwell's eccentric final tip-list includes 'Never use a long word where a short one will do' (why ever not?), and 'Never use the passive where you can use the active.' No good reason is offered or indeed imaginable for always avoiding the passive, though Orwell did thus influence a whole generation of incompetent style-guide composers who repeated this loony stricture as gospel."

I've quoted that bit so I could make a couple of comments on it. My first comment is that it's, IMO, flat-out wrong (the rule about passive construction is a damn good rule 99% of the time). The other comment is-- well, Poole's writing style is a little bit pretentious and mannered, isn't it? ("Why ever not" indeed). One of the reasons I listen to Orwell is that he's one of the best prose writers of the 20th century. Poole's OK, I guess, but I don't think he's in the same league.

...that a mainstream newspaper can use a phrase like "illegal information", and most people aren't going to even bat an eyelid. I can't imagine anyone writing that 25 years ago.

The examples of "illegal information"? 1) How to make illegal drugs, and 2) how to hack a computer network.

In the first place, both types of "illegal information" are available at any good library; LLMs don't provide any information that isn't already published. So you've effectively just declared that some of the information at your local library is "illegal".

In the second place, both types of information have legitimate, legal uses. For instance, a cybersecurity expert would be well advised to learn about all the possible ways to hack a computer network.

...I'm not sure how I feel about semicolons.

George Orwell once wrote a letter to a friend where he said that in his new novel, he was proud of the fact that he hadn't used a single semicolon, because he'd decided it was a "completely useless" piece of punctuation. (IIRC the novel was "Coming Up for Air".) Funny thing is, though, there *are* some semicolons in "1984" (which was his last book). Did he change his mind, or just forget about his rule? (He was pretty sick when he wrote 1984 so it could have been the latter).

Also, as TFS points out, Vonnegut said "don't use semicolons" but he *did* use them here and there.

One thing is for sure-- semicolons can be sort of a crutch for lazy or bad writers. To borrow a phrase from Orwell, they can prevent a lot of sentences from "coming down with a bump". In college I had to read a lot of Henry James and I remember thinking that he was addicted to semicolons. I started to mentally substitute a period whenever there was a semicolon, and I noticed that when you did that, his prose sounded flat and clumsy.

Semicolons can also be very, very pretentious if you use them wrong. Here's an example, from a crappy article about olives that I read many years ago: "Bottled olives are acceptable; canned are not". Kind of vomit-inducing, isn't it? (It's funny how examples of bad writing stick in your head).

Well, as typical with a JS fanboy, you need to get your facts straight. This is why the rest of us dont take you seriously.

Quantum computing is very very very rarely faster than classical computing today. It has NO practical value and its big "wins" have been simulated in most cases, about what they'll be able to do eventually after working out more bugs. It is currently 100% useless beyond research.

But this is exactly the kind of uneducated decisions that come from JS developers.

NPM is just one, but not the only example required to understand why your a dumbass to use JS for anything. That level of craptastic pervades the entire JS ecosystem. Im sure you think NPM is wonderful.

Meh, I too call bullshit on your claims.

45 years? That puts you in a pretty small group of people. All of which have enough experience to know why those languages are ones you run away from.

OR your last 45 years of "programming" experience has been at the Excel macro/VBA level, in which case you arent qualified to be at the big boys table either.

I'd like to believe you, but my 25 years of building complex systems has seen how people trying to use kiddie languages for anything beyond a basic ops script ends badly and takes years to unwind.

If you've been using those languages for serious work over the last 45 years, I'm the guy who has to come in and replace your jumbled pile of crap script after you get fired.

The fact that you dont understand that those aren't appropriate for most things is a strong reflection on your lack of engineering prowess and actual experience. Use the right tool for the job, and dont build yourself into a hole.

You arent magically different than every other low grade Javascript dev, you just dont realize it.