SteveCoast

Unless someone has ever used an auto pilot in something like a Cessna, that person would probably have a wildly overoptimistic idea of what an autopilot does. Even on a passenger jet it's really not that smart, there's just lots more volume to explore so it's hard to kill everyone.

A better analogy would be cruise control. It controls essentially one variable. As does lane keeping. You combine a couple of these things and you think it's smart, and it isn't. We learnt this (edge cases between single variable trackers) ~40 years ago in aircraft, that there are places in the flight envelope that combinations of single variable trackers will still let you go, but will also kill you.

It reminds me of when an airliner crashes (a rare thing now).

The airline, the manufacturer, the engine manufacturer, the part(s) suppliers, the pilots... will all point at each other. Usually the pilots lose because they don't have any money whether they were at fault or not.

You have to wonder why everyone isn't pointing at the safety driver in this case.

Here's an example of everyone blaming everyone else, and the manufacturer lost despite it not actually being their fault:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191

And the big problem with open systems is that there are so many of them and nobody will pay to market and implement any of them to make one a standard.

It was actually by design, so you know you have the wrong place. We already have systems like postcodes where small changes result in small geographic offsets and they have major downsides too.

Geocoding seems really simple until you have to build one and have customers use it.

Maybe you failed the test that you were supposed to remove the plates :-O

Directly Responsible Individual

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Coast

I'm the DRI for most of these problems. Random thoughts:

I think David Ogilvy said something like "Search all the parks in your city, you'll find no statues of committees". Everyone was super keen to make OSM in to a web of committees, and this is one root of the problem from an organizational point of view. It's not super clear to me what the OSMF has done in the last (to pick a number) 5 years. (I don't regard "doing the same thing as last year" as relevant to anything, I just have a personal bias towards new things).

From a technical point of view we merged sysadmin (who inherently want stability) with development (who inherently want change) and stability won (it doesn't involve arguments or as much work, I guess). That's why the API looks the same way I designed it X number of years ago.

It's still a wonderful project, but more of a work of art than anything else. It's not like wikipedia didn't have all the same problems. Making a project that really evolves and grows over large periods of time is really hard. Like - most of the things on the S&P 500 won't be there in 10 or 20 years or something.

I think what really happens is that projects go through a lifecycle and something new comes along to replace them, rather than anything getting fixed. I'm not sure if this is a good example, but, you could try to "fix" Apache, or you could just do this new thing, "nginx". For all kinds of reasons, the new thing is more efficient. One of the few counter examples I think is going to be Amazon.

The world has moved on from making vector maps and OSM solved almost all the related problems (just not geocoding, which annoys me no end). It moved on, because of OSM! All the money and interest in maps is now around autonomous navigation, which means 3D maps and other things outside of OSMs area.

I went here in LA - peakbraininstitute.com

Drop me an email if you want to hear more.

I started to build a thing (maybe an OpenAlexa) for this reason (glider5.com) - the goal was to eventually hook it up to STT and TTS and have it answer queries, with all the code being open. Right now it kind of looks like a dysfunctional wolframalpha - but where anyone can write the code to answer queries.

Not sure whether to just kill it or do something else with it, but it was a fun idea.

Yeah, sure. Let's say Phoenix and Denver. Or, Colorado Springs and Oakland. Or, Gatwick and Midway.

At a lower $/passenger/mile.

Why fly one 747 from NY to London and make people connect to it, when you can fly one 787 from Denver and one 787 from Chicago?

I've done neurofeedback and have the hardware. It's amazing what you can achieve. It's amazing it works at all.

There's a decent book on the popular history of it - 'a symphony in the brain' I think it's called.

Yes, and this is obvious when you think about it. Sugar causes both inflammation (actually any carbohydrate will eventually) and sugar is why you brush your teeth.

Fascinating books on this include "pure, white and deadly" and "cancer: disease of civilization" (this one is hard to find, written in 1962 I think). The former was written before sugar fully took over, the latter was written back when some cultures didn't get cancer.

Not cash.

It's possible it's a Microsoft Android phone.

There are circular-ish arrays of mirrors which reflect light to a tower with a water tank. The water turns to steam which turns a generator. There's at least one of these on the flight path from phoenix to SF somewhere.

Anyway, I read that this instantly incinerates any birds flying near the focal volume and you get these little puffs of vaporized bird every few minutes.

When I was 18, back in 1999, I had an internship at WRI (Wolfram Research) in Illinois. I'd applied armed only with a library copy of the Mathematica book, so they sent me a CD with Mathematica on it. I made some demo things and got a slot, and flew to Champaign.

I worked on polyhedra for a summer, writing code that could unroll a polyhedral model to its 2D net. Find the volume, the number of faces and all kinds of stuff. I met a bunch of interesting people and it was a blast.

I also fell asleep at my keyboard more than once. It was a beautiful summer, biking to work and working with what I still think is one of, if not the, best language ever.

Here's why all this is relevant - I came back to real life to study CompSci on these old Sparc machines. And it was like, here's the power button. What's an object in Java? What's a compiler? All reasonable stuff.

But: Wolfram Research and Mathematica had, in a sense, ruined my undergraduate life before it started. Why were we using all these bizarre tools? Can't we do this a million times faster? Why are we learning all these bizarre integrals?

It was similar to being denied graphing calculators in A-Level Mathematics (in the UK, think high school). I get it - we need to learn 'the basics' and survive without tools to some degree. But, it would have been nice to use them in some contexts and not just deny their existence.

There's an anecdote I think about Milton Friedman being shown people building a dam with shovels and not digging machines, to keep people employed in some God-forsaken country. He asked, why don't you use spoons instead? Then, more people would be employed.

Mathematica and Alpha are wonderful tools, and I highly recommend applying for an internship if you're of the right age or whatever the requirements are today.

Adding more languages is on the roadmap :)

If you're using chrome then it's the intermittent network issues, we're changing hosts but it will take a day or two :-/

The way wikipedia does it is to tie modifications to an IP address when someone isn't logged in. Or at least, that's what they used to do. Maybe something like that would work.

Thanks - fixed.

:-)

I'm not ignoring it, it's there, it shows the median life expectancy going from roughly 1 up to 6 years. Great.

The problem I have is two things: First that most of that gain is from prevention and detection, not treatment. I really want the treatment to get vastly better like it has in the entire rest of medicine (give or take). Believe it or not, a 6-fold increase in 40 years isn't really that great of an outcome.

Second is the interpretation of the split. Your interpretation is that there are "easy" and "hard" cancers to fight. I think it's actually that some are easy to detect or prevent. At base, they're all as horrible as each other left unchecked. But, we can see a melanoma much more easily than a blastoma. Therefore the graph will fool us in to thinking there is progress at attacking cancer.

To tie it back to the books I mentioned earlier, to me, they have a much better theory for why all this is happening than the prevailing theory of "cancer is broken DNA" and "cancer is really complicated". The idea that a) it's mitochondria and b) it's actually quite simple, to me, seems to fit the evidence much better.

You're right in that specific case, I'd love to live 10 times longer, but it's very rare. As an example, here's a random graph showing longevity post-diagnosis from 1971 to 2007 for 9 types of cancer:

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/11/22/article-2064659-0E...

(You can find these graphs with some simple google images searches)

Notice that most cancers, the longevity doesn't change much at all in that ~40 year period. Personally I was expecting some dramatic improvements like the one you allude to (going from 3 to 30 years). It doesn't happen.

I think generally we somehow assume that because there's lots of money being spent on cancer and fancy machines and so on that everything must be better, when in the graphs we only see these various marginal improvements in some specific cancers. I think probably the number one reason for this mismatch is nobody likes to talk about cancer.

I think that's a fair interpretation but that we can make others. It was just the nicest looking of the graphs I found on google images for 'cancer mortality over time' or some query like that.

The central point I'm trying to make, which was a surprise to me as much as others, is that there hasn't been some dramatic decline in cancer like I expected. If you look at graphs for other things we see amazing gains in prevention and treatment that don't particularly occur in cancer. To pick one at random, the pancreatic cancer line on the graph above is basically flat.

And so, if it isn't changing a whole lot, why is that? The standard theory is that cancer is really complicated and it's DNA. The alternative theory is that it's the mitochondria(l DNA).

I'm not in some crusade against medicine, it just seems to make more sense to me and explains the lack of progress.

As Feynman said, the easiest person to fool is yourself, so who knows, maybe I'm wrong. But then I also worry about the story of the doctor who invented washing hands between procedures, and the story of the doctor who discovered the cause of stomach ulcers.

From your first link, quote:

* In 1975, the incidence rate for all cancers combined in the United States was 400 new cases for every 100,000 people in the population; the mortality rate was 199 deaths for every 100,000 persons.

* In 2007, the latest year for which we have updated statistics, the U.S. incidence rate for all cancers combined was 461 new cases diagnosed for every 100,000 people in the population; the mortality rate was 178 deaths for every 100,000 persons.

...

The improvements in survival seen since the mid-1970s reflect progress in diagnosing certain cancers, such as prostate cancer, at earlier stages and improvements in treatment.

/end quote

They're saying almost exactly what I was: Incidence hasn't changed much, and the survival rate improvement is just from early detection. Actual ability survive, treat or cure cancer _itself_ hasn't changed.

The typical way is some sort of homemade bone broth, since store-bought broth is usually just colored water.

Some people will use zero calorie sports nutrition drinks or some kind of magnesium and/or sodium pill (since it's not just NaCl you're losing when fasting).

I'm sorry I should have said the last _major_ innovation that made any difference.

All the things you mention are innovations, they just haven't really changed average mortality numbers, which is what I care about.

Edit: the parent post changed their argument to being about 'efficacy' or quality of care. Personally, I prefer a cure to a high-quality and effective 3 months in hospital then death. Thus I focus on the mortality statistics.

Edit again: quote:

> This doesn't qualify as "major"? The ability to reprogram our immune system to kill cancer cells, or to reprogram pathways in faulty cells?

I'd define major as some large change to average mortality from cancer. The same way heart attacks are now vastly more survivable, or we don't get them in the first place. For example, in another comment, someone linked to the NIH's numbers

https://report.nih.gov/nihfactsheets/viewfactsheet.aspx?csid...

They show from 1975 to 2007 incidence of cancer going from 400 per 100k to 461 (e.g. up). I'd define a major improvement as that going to 200 or 100 per 100k people (e.g. down). The 5-year survivability has gone up for the same reason incidence went up, early detection.

Yes, there are specific therapies that improve things 20% here or there for certain very targeted groups. I hope I am in one of those groups if I ever get cancer, but again the averages haven't changed much at all, especially when compared to other chronic disease.

I didn't believe it either until I went and looked at the data (see my other comment). Rates are basically flat for most cancer for the last 50-100 years. Compared with any other chronic disease survivability over the same time, it's insane.

For more, as I suggested, see Prof. Seyfried's book and Travis Christoffersen's book, Tripping Over the Truth.

Your mental model of eating-as-a-bucket is broken, but you're not to be blamed since everyone thinks that and it's the official advice from most (all?) governments.

The calories-in-calories-out (CICO) model is true in a thermodynamics sense but it's like saying that Bill Gates got rich because he followed the money-in-money-out system. It doesn't really help us explain anything about Bill Gates. Or another, more damning, problem is this: We say a child gets taller because of hormones but they get fat because of calories. If you think about it for a while you'll figure out something is deeply wrong with the model.

This is a deep subject with a lot to say but I'd start with 'Why We Get Fat' by Gary Taubes. Then read his other books, then read Dr Fung.

But to answer you first point directly: What I'm saying is that people thinking they are eating healthy and actually eating healthy are two different things. Usually they think they are but aren't in reality, and fasting can help in a long list of ways detailed in Dr. Fungs book on fasting (and many other places too, his is just a good book). You can also find people on /r/fasting on reddit with a lot more detail.

/r/keto on reddit is a great community to start from. They have a FAQ and so on.

For books, I'd actually start with The Obesity Code by Dr. Fung. It's not a keto book but it's very close, and you'll figure out that keto is metabolically very similar to fasting.