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Submission + - Potential cancer vaccine entering Stage 3 trials (go.com)

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: After decades of study and testing, a potential vaccine for cancer may be on the horizon. Dr. Thomas Wagner, founder of Orbis Health Solutions, is using the body's own immune system to fight off the disease, with each shot personalized to the patient. As the CBS article relates:

The most recent data presented at an academic conference showed nearly 95% of people given only the vaccine were still alive three years after starting treatment and 64% were still disease-free. Among the most advanced forms of melanoma, disease-free survival after three years for people with stage III disease was 60% in the vaccine-only group, compared to about 39% in the placebo group. Disease-free survival for those with stage IV disease was about 68% in the vaccine-only group, and zero in the placebo group.

The most common side effects were redness or pain at the injection site, fever and fatigue after the injection – similar to other vaccines that stimulate an immune response.

Based on this data and other studies, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has greenlit Wagner's vaccine to start a Phase 3 clinical trial. It will be a three-year endeavor with a goal to enroll 500 people and is planned to launch sometime this year, Riley Polk, president of Orbis Health Solutions, told WLOS, an ABC News affiliate in Asheville, North Carolina.

Perhaps the most startling success story is Mary Carol Abercrombie:

One of those patients is a woman named Mary Carol Abercrombie who Wagner believes is one of the longest surviving people previously diagnosed with stage 4 melanoma, the most advanced form of the disease. Just before Christmas in 2001, Abercrombie told WLOS she completed a year of cancer treatment with "horrendous" side effects but once the treatment stopped, her cancer advanced. Abercrombie said her doctors told her she only had a few more months to live, telling her to "just enjoy Christmas."

Abercrombie's surgical oncologist at the time was working with Wagner on a cancer vaccine. "Sign me up, 'cause there wasn't anything [else] out there," Abercrombie said, who was just hoping to live long enough to see her son get married that year. Over 20 years have since passed and Abercrombie said her melanoma has never recurred. She not only saw her son get married, but she's watching her four grandchildren grow up.

Comment Re:All you need is 800 MB and 100 Watts (Score 1) 105

by kvezach (#64173161) Attached to: Sam Altman Says AI Depends On Energy Breakthrough
If we only count the architecture and it doesn't matter that an AI needs 20 years to train itself, then it's easy to get into trouble deciding just where to draw the line. Does a genetic algorithm that takes a thousand years to come up with a human-level AI count as 1 MB, if the code for that genetic algorithm only takes 1 MB? Or maybe general AI could be implemented in a few pages of code using Solomonoff induction, but it would take longer time than the universe has existed to bootstrap itself. Once the AI gets slow enough, "data needed to describe the architecture" becomes uninformative.

Comment Re:All you need is 800 MB and 100 Watts (Score 1) 105

by kvezach (#64172175) Attached to: Sam Altman Says AI Depends On Energy Breakthrough
You need a bit more than 800 MB because sensory input is information too. A child spends a lot of time taking in information and learning from it. For that matter, it may take even more as humans learn from each other, and from preexisting culture; if you were to plonk a bunch of babies in an uninhabited environment, I wouldn't count on them surviving for very long. Even if they somehow didn't need food. From such a perspective, the 800 MB is just for the initial bootstrap.

Comment Re:p vs np and the halting problem (Score 1) 61

by kvezach (#64138238) Attached to: Can AI-Generated Proofs Bring Bug-Free Software One Step Closer?
Halting problems and P vs NP are worst-case results. Even though there exist traveling salesman problems that are incredibly hard to solve, that doesn't mean that every TSP instance is hard to solve. Or, in proof terms: we can't prove or disprove the Collatz conjecture, but that doesn't mean all of mathematics is stuck and nothing can be proven at all.

Comment Re:April's fool a bit early this year (Score 1) 104

Aristotle was actually not a fan of Greek democracy - he preferred aristocracy, "rule by the best".

As for the Athenians keeping slaves, objecting to democracy based on random selection because slaves were excluded is kind of like objecting to electoral democracy because it initially didn't have universal suffrage. If we don't discount early proponents of electoral democracy for such reasons, we shouldn't discount proponents of democracy by random selection either.

Comment Re:Good old copyright (Score 3, Interesting) 136

This paper argues that the optimal length is 15 years, or rather, that the optimal length was 15 years in 2009. It further states that optimal protection is likely to decrease as the cost of production for ‘originals’ falls (and vice-versa), and given how the internet doesn't seem to be making original content harder to produce, the optimum might be shorter now.

Submission + - Livestock surprise scientists with their complex, emotional minds (science.org) 1

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: If you’ve ever seen a cow staring vacantly across a field, or a pig rolling around in its own filth, you might not think there’s a lot going on in their head. You wouldn’t be alone. People haven’t given much credence to the intelligence of farm animals, and neither have scientists. But that’s starting to change.

A growing field of research is showing that—when it comes to the minds of goats, cows, and other livestock—we may have been missing something big. Studies published over the past few years have shown that pigs show signs of empathy, goats rival dogs in some tests of social intelligence, and cows can be potty trained.

Much of this work is being carried out at the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) in Dummerstorf, Germany, one of the world’s leading centers for investigating the minds of creatures that often end up on our dinner plate. From cows making friends to goats exhibiting signs of altruism, farm animals are upending popular—and scientific—conceptions of what's going on in their minds.

The work may not just rewrite our thinking about livestock, it might also change how we treat them. As Jan Langbein, an applied ethologist at FBN told says, “If we don’t understand how these animals think, then we won’t understand what they need. And if we don’t understand what they need, we can’t design better environments for them.”

Comment Re:A million monkeys? (Score 2) 48

by kvezach (#64083445) Attached to: Google DeepMind Uses LLM To Solve Unsolvable Math Problem
Global search algorithms, particularly simulated annealing, benefit from a mutation/transition space where going from an awful solution to a good solution is possible in relatively few steps. I wouldn't be surprised if LLMs can provide a better such space than simpler methods, even if the LLMs can never get anywhere near optimal on their own.

Comment Re:Elo ratings (Score 1) 30

by kvezach (#64081625) Attached to: Which AI Model Provides the 'Best' Answers?
I think it's due to the skill range. If you'd added ELIZA, Markov chain generators, and GPT-2, then the LLMs would have much higher Elo ratings.

"Where would a person rank" is a very interesting question. I don't know, but probably much higher than the LLMs.

Submission + - E3 Is Officially Over Forever (theverge.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: While the video game industry had already largely given up on E3 — once the largest video game trade show in the industry and the biggest video game showcase event of the year — there was always the chance it would return after multiple years of cancellations. However, in a statement to The Washington Post today, E3’s organizer confirmed that the show is permanently canceled.

"We know it’s difficult to say goodbye to such a beloved event, but it’s the right thing to do given the new opportunities our industry has to reach fans and partners,” Stanley Pierre-Louis, the CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, the nonprofit trade organization that ran E3, told the Post. Pierre-Louis alluded to the biggest reason for E3’s precipitous collapse and ultimate demise: game developers and publishers had increasingly moved away from the event in order to put on their own less costly showcases targeted directly to fans, rather than the industry insiders and journalists that E3 typically catered to.

Submission + - Israel uses AI system to identify targets in Gaza, civilians devalued (972mag.com)

Submitted by cloakedpegasus
cloakedpegasus writes: According to the investigation, another reason for the large number of targets, and the extensive harm to civilian life in Gaza, is the widespread use of a system called “Habsora” (“The Gospel”), which is largely built on artificial intelligence and can “generate” targets almost automatically at a rate that far exceeds what was previously possible. This AI system, as described by a former intelligence officer, essentially facilitates a “mass assassination factory.”

According to the sources, the increasing use of AI-based systems like Habsora allows the army to carry out strikes on residential homes where a single Hamas member lives on a massive scale, even those who are junior Hamas operatives. Yet testimonies of Palestinians in Gaza suggest that since October 7, the army has also attacked many private residences where there was no known or apparent member of Hamas or any other militant group residing. Such strikes, sources confirmed to +972 and Local Call, can knowingly kill entire families in the process.

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