bart_spoon

Why would that be the case. If anything, the last 20 years have reinforced the idea that if enemy combatants simply embed themselves in civilian populations, they are virtually impossible to target without mass collateral damage.

I’m not sure I buy “social media” = “speech”. By that definition, social media companies shouldn’t be able to prevent anyone from using their website for any reason. Being banned for anything would then be equivalent to violating someone’s rights to speech.

Social media companies aren’t required to give a voice to anyone. They are platforms for enabling exercising speech, but they aren’t speech themselves. This seems equivalent to stating that not allowing children in bars or strip clubs violates their right to assembly.

That seems ridiculous considering virtually all social media is available both as an application, and as a website. App Store controls won’t do anything in regards to usage through the web.

> The study does have several limitations. For instance, participants provided dietary data through self-reporting, and some may have incorrectly recalled what they'd eaten. Only two diet surveys were used, so it's unknown whether these accurately represented people's long-term eating habits. The study also didn't consider the nutrient quality of participants' diets or reasons they practiced intermittent fasting.

I’m all for debunking fad diets, but these seem like pretty massive limitations, if for no other reason than selection bias. If someone is practicing a diet, including intermittent fasting, it’s almost certainly because they have health or weight concerns in the first place.

In my own experience, my diet was the worst when I was at my healthiest, because I was young, fit, exercised frequently, stress-free, and full of energy. I increasingly turn to dieting to help deal with the fact that I’m older, exercise far less, have gained weight, and overworked and stressed, and don’t have as much energy.

I don’t think GPT-4 is AGI, but that seems like a foolish idea. An AGI doesn’t need to be hyperproficient at everything, or even anything. Ask a team of any non-aeronautical engineers to build a rocket and it will go poorly. Do those people not qualify as intelligent beings?

There were plenty of dotcom-era companies that went bust when the bubble popped but the economy still became entirely and permanently grounded in the internet. AI will be the same. The bubble may eventually pop and there are many "Pets.com"-esque LLM chatbot wrappers that will go under. But ML/AI is going to be just as big of a foundation of the future economy as the internet is, even after the culling.

My understanding is that PlayStation’s big hit games have had particularly low margins. Despite selling well, they have generally been extremely expensive to make. They’ve helped them beat Microsoft in the console war, but I don’t think it was ever sustainable.

Salt Lake City/Utah is rapidly losing that culture as well.

Some Asian countries, perhaps. In Japan, real estate is a (in)famously bad investment. Lots of real estate actually loses value over time, more like a vehicle in the US.

It’s important to differentiate between standards and regulation. It’s entirely possible that the US has far higher bureaucratic red tape to navigate that increases costs and time but doesn’t actually produce superior quality products.

Apple’s products are almost entirely dependent on the internet and telecommunications networks and tech, all of which was funded and researched by the government.

Pfizer is one of the largest drug makers in the world, and an annual net income of $10B puts them well behind many tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Google, TCMC), carmakers (Toyota, BMW, Volkswagen, and Mercedes-Benz), retailers (Walmart and Home Depot), fashion brands (Dior), telco companies (Verizon), banks (Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, UBS), financial services companies (Visa), insurers (United Health), shipping companies (Maersk), and basically every gas and oil company on the planet. I think you would be hard pressed to identify a single one of these companies who hasn’t benefited from tax payer funded government research and initiatives.

So what exactly makes it so perniciously awful for pharmaceutical companies to do so?

Novo Nordisk is publicly traded and has received just as much flak as anyone for supposedly exorbitant pricing of its insulin as well as its block buster weight loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, which are poised to become among the most profitable drugs ever made.

If that is what non-profits in Pharma are supposed to be, what is the difference with for profits?

That’s all fine, except those are all issues with our insurance model as opposed to the pharmaceutical industry. Why not fix the actual problem by addressing the labyrinth of middlemen in between the person consuming the medication, the doctor prescribing it, and the company producing it? That seems like a far better idea than making drug development non-profit, reducing the incentives for innovation and new discovery.

Good thing they have to go through some of the most extensive efficacy trials of virtually any products in existence. If they aren’t more effective, the generics are still available for cheaper.

This seems to be a common paradoxical argument made whenever drug prices get brought up, particularly insulin. I’ve seen people make the argument numerous times about how outrageous it was that Eli Lilly, which was sold the patent for insulin in the early 20th century for a dollar, is charging hundreds of dollars for insulin today. And yet when it is pointed out that they sell insulin for $20 at Walmart, and the insulin that costs hundreds are newer synthetic versions, the response is that people can’t be expected to use the old stuff because the new stuff is much safer, effective, and easy to use.

Which is it? If the new medicine is ineffective, then why do you need to buy it over the older, cheap options? If it is truly an improvement, then why is it wrong for the producers to charge more to account for the R&D costs required to create the new medicine?

Is not the definition of profit the excess charge after removing costs? By definition “no one should profit” does mean “at cost”.

Hugely profitable is perhaps misleading. It’s hugely profitable in the sense that the aggregate profits are high, simply due to both the sheer number of products sold and their high prices. But in terms of profit to expense ratios the Pharma industry is actually at the low end of the spectrum. Most other industries, including tech, are far more profitable in this regard.

The human race also survived without electricity for just as long…

Does it? What would those be?

This is the biggest question to me. Who cares even if the reviewer did use ChatGPT to write his findings. The findings themselves are what is important.

This is just another example of the abysmal state of affairs that is modern peer-review.

I guarantee it. My first impression when seeing this list of companies is that is likely the primary purpose.

VC logic is that a company does not need to be profitable for a VC’s investment to be profitable. Simply getting the company to an expensive IPO is all that is required for VCs to make money. And that is possible even if the company has never made a dime.

The person isn’t saying that Germany committed genocide during WW2, which is obviously true, but pointing out that by the above definition of genocide, the US committed genocide against Germany and Japan during WW2.

The Marshall plan was only enacted after Germany and Japan had been reduced to rubble, had millions of their civilian population killed through indiscriminate bombing, including the use of two atom bombs, occupied, submit to total surrender, the entirety of their command structure executed, and their governments dismantled and replaced by the Allies.

I think you are skipping over quite a bit of human bloodshed and strife to get to the Marshall Plan.

That is certainly not true. Exhibit A: Osama bin Laden’s father was literally a multi-billionaire and he himself inherited $30-50 million.

Germany was reduced to rubble, their population submitted to complete and total surrender, and their leaders were all executed. Japan was firebombed into oblivion and then had two atomic bombs dropped on their civilian population. And both were then completely occupied and had their government dismantled and replaced by their conquerors.

What Israel is doing right now seems to be far closer to what happened in Germany and Japan after WW2 than whatever diplomatic solution you are proposing.

My understanding is that the leading hypothesis is that:

1. The “Old World” had a much more extensive animal husbandry. A lot of the nastiest diseases human beings pick up come from animal reservoirs. With humans living in closer quarters to animals for a much longer period of time in Eurasia/Africa than the Americas, more diseases crossed over and became endemic among the population.

2. A great amount of the Eurasian continent is along an East-West axis, whereas the Americas are primarily North-South. This means that seasons and climates and climates tended to be more closely aligned, which leads to easier spread of agriculture and domesticated animals, which leads to faster population growth and disease spread.

When doing DBSCAN on the subclusters, do you cluster on the 2-D projected space? Do you use the original 2-D projection you used prior to k-means, or does each subcluster get its own UMAP projection?

People aren’t passing you through a filter because you are brash and undiplomatic and “unaligned”, it’s because your communication style is borderline incomprehensible.

Hate anything remotely sex-related? Are we talking about Twitch? They have changed their policy a billion times because they seem hell-bent on avoiding censoring sexual content as much as the possibly can. It’s the users that inevitably find a way to push the boundaries so far that they are forced do something, that is usually so half-assed that it doesn’t change much. At this point Twitch is getting closer to a cam site that funnels people to OnlyFans than it is to its gaming roots.