pradn

Oops: Humira ($600/mo) -> Humira ($6000/mo)

"Do they have 17 years of experience, or have they been repeating year one 17 times?"

Wikipedia is an amalgam of a large number of humans editing w/ some guardrails provided by the guidelines and tech (clean-up bots, edit alerts). If there's a human problem (corruption, bias), there's no tech solution that'll magically make all of it go away.

The reason to make a new wiki or wiki-style technology is to serve a different informational niche, guided by different rules. There's a reason each video game has its own Wiki. You could fork Wikipedia to be more inclusionist, or have people from one particular political viewpoint - if that's your goal.

But re-creating Wikipedia to do exactly what it's supposed to do - form a body of encyclopedic knowledge (subject to copyright laws, etc) - this doesn't make sense, and isn't a convincing argument for a new Wikipedia, even if its distributed.

Humira's biosimilars are roughly 20% of the cost of name-brand Humira ($600/mo). It can even be down to 10% of the original cost, or lower, in some shops. You can buy a month's supply for ~75 from an Indian pharam supplier online, for example. The slight kicker is that the biosimilars are not 100% the same (fat) molecule as the original adalimumab.

Insurance companies are starting to say they wont cover name-brand Humira without a strong doctor's note.

Still, the price of the drug went down from being completely unaffordable without insurance to the price of an car payment. It's still expensive, but much better than before. You're not as tied to your company providing good insurance, for example.

Wait, is it just me, or is it not wild that there's a company openly advertising their fingerprinting services? Their landing page implies it's primarily for fraud detection / abuse prevention. But one of their customer testimonials is from Neiman Marcus boasting they increased the number of repeat customers they could identify.

> "With the adoption of Fingerprint, we can now recognize and personalize approximately 23% of total visits to NeimanMarcus.com, up from the previous baseline of 8-10%."

Of course, these companies have always been around. But this post reads like it threads the line between "our product defeats Apple's futile defenses" and "we care so much about user privacy we're white-hat cracking Apple's defenses".

And another "between-the-lines" joke is that this site doesn't throw up a cookie dialog when you load it. What a joke! "We don't need cookies to track you, haha!"

The baseline international volunteers need to demonstrate is that they provided benefit higher than just giving away the cost of their flights to get there.

IE: American volunteer groups going to poor countries to build them schools.

No, that would be your government or employer preventing you from using your specialized skills to earn a living. In theory, a competitor can hire you for your skills - but your new employer will make it clear they are "only hiring you for your skills, not your proprietary knowledge". I've see that clause even as a junior employee.

Something like $X million an hour.

Well sure, no political project is perfect. But you can't let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Much of the time you have to call support to get them to do this they don't want to be easy to do - like cancelling subscriptions, or initiating a refund.

In theory, there should be bipartisan support for this. Republicans say they love small business, bringing back manufacturing, self-sufficiency - and they also prefer adjusting policy via tax incentives rather than direct spending.

Text generation using word/sentence/phrase-level ad-libs is so simple its a common homework assignment for first-year programmers. You really don't need much.

There's even tools like Tracery that let you construct grammars and vocabularies as a form of textual generative art.

The people who use these open models are doing it because they find them useful. That's already plenty of benefit for them. The "ecosystem play" of benefiting from volunteers' mods to open models is certainly a benefit for the model trainer. This fact doesn't eliminate the benefit of people being able to use good models.

How is this a problem? So many companies have been founded around premium versions of open-source products. It's good that they've even given us as much as they have. They have to make the economics work somehow.

> It is also really unfortunate that in the west we miss out on tons of fungi based foods (not talking about anything psychedelic here) as many mushrooms contain tons of prebiotic fiber like substances that feed the probiotics already found in our gut.

You're right that we get far fewer varieties of fermented foods. It's notable how certain cultures go very far in some directions, like how many types of lentils/legumes are used commonly in India, and how many types of chilis are used in single dishes in Mexico. Japan's in that direction for fermentation, perhaps.

French cuisine deeply relies on mushrooms for umami and richness. There's a rich mushroom culture in France - a bunch of varietals are used.

I think we're going to eventually come to a point where we consider fermentation a sort of "food group". Many cultures had cheese, yogurt, kimchi pretty much every day - the probiotic benefits are great.

At the very least, being able to eat a variety of (fermented) foods in winter must have reduced the monotonous dreariness of the season - and helped improve nutrition, too.

All my life, I thought "sadism" had to do with the word "sad"!

saxophone - Adolphe Sax

sadism - the Marquis de Sade

masochism - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Bias is a real problem, but more than that - an adversarial press and public won't forgive massive brands like Google for making AIs that spit out racist answers.

Many academics lean left, but some of the biggest academic impacts on the real world came from conservatives. The Chicago-school economists were behind the Neoliberal turn -- directly causing the overthrow of Allende, the market shocks after the Cold War. And the NeoCon academics in foreign policy & history were behind interventionist wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.

Oh sure, for "low end" applications, even this wave of generative AI is going to pull the rug under artists.

I'm talking about, say, art for video games and actual movies.

The line between delusional and visionary is thin! I know I'm too grounded in "expected value" math to do super outlier stuff like starting a video game company...

It's impressive, but I think it's still in the same category as even the best LLMs: the demos look good and they can be quite useful, but you can never quite trust them. You really can't just have an LLM write a whole report for you - who knows what facts it'll make up, what it'll miss? You really can't use this to generate video for work, who knows where the little artifacts are (it's easier to tell with video).

The future of these high-fidelity (but not perfect) generative AI systems is in realizing we're going to need "humans in the loop". This means designing to output human-manipulable data - perhaps models/skeletons/textures instead of whole output. Pixels are hard to manipulate directly!

As for entertainment, already we see people sick of CGI - will people really want to pay for AI-generated video?

Yes, explicitly! There are these things called "moral rights".

"The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work. The preserving of the integrity of the work allows the author to object to alteration, distortion, or mutilation of the work that is "prejudicial to the author's honor or reputation"."

I'm sure it applies even though Leonardo is long gone.

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

If I had a cupcake shop, someone came in to buy a cupcake, and then immediately threw it on the floor - I'd be aghast. Regular people take pride in their work. Market abstractions of "it's yours now" don't approximate how people actually feel about the objects they produce. People don't want to be alienated from their labor!

I dig your optimism!

This is again "slippery slope" thinking. Just because it's possible to go to an extreme - and this is possible in everything humans do - that doesn't mean we don't go somewhere along the line.

We have laws to ban poisons from food, but we don't ban junk food altogether. We have laws to cap the speed limit, but not at 30mph on a highway - etc etc. We pick a spot on the spectrum.

Why does someone have to demarcate exactly where "the line" is to make a judgement on this situation?

You can simply ask yourself "do I want to live in a world where this happens" - and any decent person would say "no".

The presence of a "slippery slope" is not enough to prevent going down a path, even somewhat.

A film takes hundreds of people to create - how does it feel for them to just have years of their lives fall into the void?

It's clearly a bad deal for Australians, who now pay higher gas prices, but not for international importers, who probably pay less because of increased competition.

Higher gas prices is good for fighting climate change - it makes renewable energy more competitive. Now, is the opposite the case for, say the Japanese, who import gas from Australia? Are they less incentivized to switch away? Probably somewhat, but less so, because of transaction and transportation costs.

This is exactly the sort of artifact you expect a wizard to have floating above their hand on a fantasy pulp's cover, circa 1955.

Publishers already get micropayments from you when you visit their site - just not from you directly, but from advertisers.

The same incentives for click-bait and low-quality journalism will exist in a world with reader-driven micropayments.

The NYT now has 1/3 of their top area dedicated to "lifestyle" (what's going on on Tiktok) and "opinion" sections - both of which bring in tons of clicks.