subcosmos

^ This guy gets it

After having spent a few years studying the neurology of aging, and having my life saved by SSRIs at age 33, I've concluded that SSRIs are very much in the same category as eyeglasses, especially since 1/6 of the population takes them.

The human brain is the most complex thing in the universe. Its not perfect. We can make it better, stronger!

My effexor comedown was rather severe, and also resulted in shivering episodes and an overnight ER visit. This was years ago.

I blame the doctor, who switched me immediately to Lexapro with zero tapering on either side. Effexor is something that really should be tapered very slowly.

If its making life awesome though, why get off of it? The stuff gave me lots of confidence and was the only thing that ever regulated my weight and energy levels.

This is my experience too. I think some of this also comes with movement tracking. More of a dopamine/neuropinephrine signaling axis.

Serotonergic signalling is a really important regulator of sleep architecture, and this is why psychiatrists are increasingly prescribing trazadone as a sleeping aid. It was previously used as an antidepressant, but lower doses and it is a remarkably effective sleeping pill. 5-htp has similar effects, and this is why its sold as a sleep-aid supplement.

In my experience, all of these drugs can bring on intense very visually pleasant trippy dreams, with the occasional intense violent nightmare. Aside from the mood and sleep architecture effects, I wish I knew more about the neuroscience separating the positive from negative experiences.

That's how business opportunities are born!

Buy FyreCoin

Landmark takes the cult-like tactics to a whole new level. Avoid at all costs.

Pretty much everything discussed in this article has been the general theory of proteostasis for at least the last decade - in part thanks to the work coming out of that lab.

RSA time - this is where the sales pitches begin

sounds like a 20% time project! Or a GSoC

That's awful. My condolences :(

You mean they can't just machine-vision the expression on your face, through your webcam, when you decide against a purchase?

Love the work you guys are doing in the progressive GAN space. Last year I did something similar to make a face-aging network, involving training an encoder to get an initial guess of a latent vector for someones face into the pgan space, and then relied on BFGS optomization to fine-tune the latent vector, followed by further fine-tuning of some intermediary layers of the generator network to really match the input pixels. I also snuck an affine transform layer in there allowing the network to shift the image around to better fit the target.

The results were .... eh .... okay, at least on my ugly face. https://twitter.com/RustBot/status/1044120159022022658

But overall, Im still tweaking. In the mean time, I've been focusing on static image analysis for aging research, but I hope to find better encoding schemes down the road.

https://twitter.com/RustBot/status/1058607878540472320

I started a project like this with them. Never got around to it :p

This is still one of my favorite deep learning projects, and has inspired a few algorithm ideas in the hospital environment where I work.

Great job on this!

I'm aware of the expiration date, but haven't been able to understand the embedding or how the pairs of codes may be "hash validated" in some way, which means that this is a one time use for me unless I can either generate them or access the nvram on the system.

Any insights? How did you find the embedding?

I should get my blog running, so I can document my adventures

The one neat thing about hacking the ARM (its an at91 system if anyone knows details) is that I can get access to the raw data underneath. IE, the real-time cell counting events. I can envisage some neat deep learning on something like that, if only the dataset existed.

You know its odd ... Ive gone looking for those photos online again and again .... and never could locate any...

But here I am at work, googling without my personal account connected, and alas they show up. Filter bubbles man! I know what Im doing tonight ...

https://scilvetshop.com/collections/hematrue/heska

Bah, $10k - and yes, that was evidently the retail price for this guy :

Sorry for confusion .... Morning cough syrup hangover. Sometimes I wonder if the drug is worse than the fever! It would be nice if I could monitor my infection with this dang analyzer to see it's rise and fall :p

I spent the weekend dissassembling a hematology analyzer capable of measuring 17 parameters of the immune system from a large drop of blood. Nabbed it on ebay for cheap.

Was able to unclog a few of the lines and get it running, learning how it works by shooting cells past a laserbeam and looking at scatter. Overall, the complexity of the machine is far simpler than that of a simple laser printer, but its retail value is $10k as a veterinary instrument. Machines for human patients are way more expensive.

My dissappointment however was discovering that it refuses to run unless its barcode scanner can see manufacturer-validated reagent bottles. The chemicals needed to make it run are simple salt-waters that can be easily made for $10 of various powders, but the manufacturer sells reagent sets for $1000k each. Now its clear that getting any useful data out of it will require hacking the ARM embedded system onboard.

Why am I doing this? Certainly not for any kind of regulated medical treatment, but I personally want to know how my immune system changes on a day to day basis. Datasets like this dont exist on such a high frequency sampling rate. What I find however, is that the decades-old tech that powers this relatively simple machine is being held back by an overly restrictive regulatory environment and price gouging of chemical reagents.

Why the artificial construction of a $100 lab test, when the actual value to perform such a test is much much lower? Why can't we live in a world where such self-experimentation is allowed outside of the strict guidelines of diagnostics?

I'm starting to doubt the prion hypothesis now that we know amyloid-beta encapsulates viral particles in the brain. I think its more likely that viral infections are the transmitted agent.

It's backwards.

Pay me, fuck you

They're basically saying.... In a producer consumer economic design pattern....

"We're not just threads man!"

We (UCSF) have a lovely database of internal food industry documents for those of you wanting to search for, and discover, new dirt :)

Also, we've got tobacco and chemical industry collections!

https://www.industrydocumentslibrary.ucsf.edu/food/

....like cigarette smoke?

It is viciously addictive, yes, but it's all that other crap in cigarettes that lead to lung cancer and heart disease, two of the largest killers of all people.

Would you rather people be addicted to just the nocotine, or the nicotine plus carcinogens?

Where's the best place to chat with the community? Got a slack channel or anything?

Peter Griffin, is that you?

sweet! I was hoping it could be disconnected down the middle. I'll have to reach out and see how involved that was.