antiviral

Per my other reply, i am curious about the content of article and how (formerly) prominent biologists have been affected and punished. The story about carol hooven, the former harvard scientist, was especially disheartening.

richard dawkins was no creationist either. the article mentions how his award was taken away for stating his opinion. Any thoughts on that?

interesting.. what about the content of the article itself?

I wasn't going to post this article, but this part caught my attention:

"In an earlier post, I asked whether scientists might soon be forced to consider the occult as science. Perhaps some readers think the concern far-fetched. But consider: Science is as dependent on the concept of public truth as the great religions are. In an age when private truth is rapidly gaining in power, it is just as vulnerable as religion."

Feel free to downvote me.

Why is it a fraud?

This is a recipe for killing an industry:

"When OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the world by storm last year, it caught many power brokers in both Silicon Valley and Washington, DC, by surprise. The US government should now get advance warning of future AI breakthroughs involving large language models, the technology behind ChatGPT.

The Biden administration is preparing to use the Defense Production Act to compel tech companies to inform the government when they train an AI model using a significant amount of computing power. The rule could take effect as soon as next week.

"

Your comment has merit. Even at it's peak Roman culture was marbled with cruelty and violence. During its decline, these aspects only got worse and became coupled with corruption and decadence. But I think we should see them relative to their historic peers (Gauls, Carthaginians, Parthians), not relative to modern societies to truly see what their contributions were, of which there were many, including in law, engineering, and medicine.

Also, there's this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xad5Rl0N2E

You should check out "The Darkening Age" by Catherine Nixey. Once Christians became the majority, and especially after Constantine, the direction of persecutions reversed, and was then by Christians towards the remaining pagans. Many of the broken statues we now see were vandalized by zealous Christians eager to remove the vestigial influence of the pagan Rome:

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

"Over the past decade, Meta —itself and through its flagship Social Media Platforms Facebook and Instagram (its Social Media Platforms or Platforms)—has profoundly altered the psychological and social realities of a generation of young Americans. Meta has harnessed powerful and unprecedented technologies to entice, engage, and ultimately ensnare youth and teens. Its motive is profit, and in seeking to maximize its financial gains, Meta has repeatedly misled the public about the substantial dangers of its Social Media Platforms. It has concealed the ways in which these Platforms exploit and manipulate its most vulnerable consumers: teenagers and children.2 And it has ignored the sweeping damage these Platforms have caused to the mental and physical health of our nation’s youth. In doing so, Meta engaged in, and continues to engage in, deceptive and unlawful conduct in violation of state and federal law"

Yes, and moreover, the important point in the article that some people seem to be forgetting is that Meta itself believed that certain design choices led to addictive products and worked to incorporate those designs despite harmful consequences to children and adults alike. It matter much less that anyone on the outside believes this or not.

Additionally, saying that children and adults should be wholly responsible for this is like saying the Chinese and not the British should be responsible for their opium addiction (see Opium War) and that homeless in San Francisco should be responsible for their Fentanyl addition. They can always just say no, right?

I worry that if nothing is done, this will only get worse, addiction will become the norm, of one sort or another, and you can just look at history of the Opium War to see where this leads.

Can anyone explain this?

“Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.”

Putting aside the way in which the OpenAI firing happened, I was curious to at least hear Ilya Sutskever's point of view in a coherent way. I think this video is a good start.

"Colorectal cancer (bowel cancer) is the third most common form of cancer worldwide, with around 1.9 million newly diagnosed cases and 900,000 deaths every year. Therefore, preventive substances represent an urgent clinical need. Aspirin/acetylsalicylic acid has proven to be one of the most promising candidates for the prevention of colorectal cancer. Among other findings, studies have shown that when patients with cardiovascular diseases took low doses of aspirin over several years, it reduced their risk of colorectal cancer. Furthermore, aspirin can inhibit the progression of colorectal cancer. Now a team led by Heiko Hermeking, Professor of Experimental and Molecular Pathology at LMU, has investigated which molecular mechanisms mediate these effects."

"Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg allegedly halted proposals aimed at improving Facebook and Instagram’s impact on teen mental health, according to internal communications revealed as part of unsealed court documents.

Zuckerberg allegedly vetoed plans to ban filters that simulate plastic surgery on Meta-owned platforms, according to the unredacted lawsuit filed by Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell (D), and ignored requests from top executives to boost investments in teens’ well-being."

"In the fall of 2021 a consultant named Arturo Bejar sent Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg an unusual note.

“I wanted to bring to your attention what l believe is a critical gap in how we as a company approach harm, and how the people we serve experience it,” he began. Though Meta regularly issued public reports suggesting that it was largely on top of safety issues on its platforms, he wrote, the company was deluding itself.

The experience of young users on Meta’s Instagram—where Bejar had spent the previous two years working as a consultant—was especially acute. In a subsequent email to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, one statistic stood out: One in eight users under the age of 16 said they experienced unwanted sexual advances on the platform over the previous seven days."

Most businesses need to buy their raw materials to produce their products. With Meta, the raw material is consumer data, which users have been giving away to Meta freely.

The fines only slightly raise the cost of this raw material from $0, so it's unlikely to deter Meta's behavior until someone faces a more severe penalty there.

"We are excited to announce the release of XGBoost 2.0. This note will begin by covering some overall changes and then highlight specific updates to the package..."

For those of you interested in reading about work being done to start a new city (1) or new semi-autonomous country (2) where people can plan something new, St Helena Island sounds like a good candidate- remote but can still in the middle of several trade routes.

(1) https://apnews.com/article/silicon-valley-tech-investors-new...

(2) https://www.wired.com/story/itana-binance-charter-cities-ins...

Perhaps there is technology for building these devices or data collected by them that someone wants.

This might be a theft disguised as a mere takedown.

.High-energy laser weapons can now operate ‘infinitely’, thanks to a new cooling system that completely eliminates the build-up of waste heat

.The technology could significantly change the face of battle by extending engagement times, and increasing range and damage, researchers say

Is this anything you'd be willing to share publicly?

How did you determine the scope of a chunk of memory? I believe you need this to run any of the GC algorithms.

I checked the hboehm documentation (1) and in the section on "Locating roots" it says "you don't want to know":

-Runtime stack(s): you don't really want to know.Need consistent caller-save reg. snapshot

-Static data segments: you don't want to know that either.

-Very platform dependent • But you only have to do it once per platform.

(1) https://www.hboehm.info/gc/04tutorial.pdf

The C language is like 'an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.'

This article reminds me of an idea I once had: to write a memory manager/garbage collector for C. The challenge is to know the scope of a dynamically managed chunk of memory. Using that, the memory can be automatically garbage-collected, but this is difficult since C wasn't designed for this in mind.

I'm curious if anyone has any other experiences they can share.

-Nvidia announced a new chip designed to run artificial intelligence models on Tuesday .

-Nvidia’s GH200 has the same GPU as the H100, Nvidia’s current highest-end AI chip, but pairs it with 141 gigabytes of cutting-edge memory, as well as a 72-core ARM central processor.

-"This processor is designed for the scale-out of the world’s data centers," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Tuesday.

Excerpt:

>"Meta has axed a team that used artificial intelligence to create the first database of more than 600mn protein structures, in a signal the company is abandoning purely scientific projects in favour of building moneymaking AI products. The social media giant had employed a group of about a dozen scientists on a project called ESMFold, which trained a large language model capable of processing vast amounts of biological data to predict protein structures. The effort has been lauded by those involved in the development of new drugs and treatments."

That's really unfortunate- this might have been useful research for humanity, but not apparently a priority anymore. I hope they at least open source whatever they did. Here is the Github page for ESMFold:

https://github.com/facebookresearch/esm

"Worldcoin, founded by US tech entrepreneur Sam Altman, offers free crypto tokens to people who agree to have their eyeballs scanned."

Can anyone say how much each of those crypto tokens are worth in $USD?

Good chart about Y-Combinator job postings in the article

The description section has a link to the helpful guide:

“ The Trinity High-Explosive Implosion System: The Foundation for Precision Explosive Applications”

It’s really hard to believe this much detail about atom bomb construction is now public.

Good discussion on the pros/cons of Meta’s strategy.

If Meta puts in all of the missing features- search, hastags, desktop access, but keep the goal of making it a ‘positive happy place’ would threads be able to replace Twitter?

Or put another way- why should someone post on Threads when they have Instagram?

“With this new method, the researchers were able to observe the sequence recognition by the CRISPR Cascade complex almost base pair by base pair. Surprisingly, base pairing with the RNA is not energetically advantageous, meaning that the complex is only unstably bound during sequence recognition. Only when the entire sequence is recognized does stable binding occur and the DNA is subsequently destroyed. If it is the "wrong" target sequence, the process is aborted.”