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Comment Re:Random Number Machine (Score 1) 55

The thing is, it very much *won't* be random numbers. It's about as far from a random number generator as you can get.

In a really bad model, one would expect it to likely be "numbers it's seen the most in the context of a lottery". But in a good model, esp. a thinking model, one would expect it to think over which sorts of numbers are statistically over-chosen (birthdates, etc) and avoid them in giving its answers.

The funny thing is, think of how this woman will interact with ChatGPT from now on. ChatGPT could say "Abraham Lincoln was married to John Wilkes Booth", and she'd be thinking, "Okay, that sounds really, really wrong, but on the other hand, it picked the right lottery numbers, so..."

Comment Re:Can you make that the default? (Score 2) 60

I'm not going to respect a comment like this from someone who puts a space on either side of an em dash. Now tell me your take on the Oxford comma.

Ideally, it should be a hair space (because em dashes in web fonts are borderline illegible without it), but Slashdot does not support Unicode, and   gets silently swallowed by Slashdot's HTML parser. Besides, we all know that AP style is the one true style, and it demands space.

Comment Re:What about top speed? (Score 1) 90

I'll go with NHTSA and NASA over the "Barr Group" ambulance chasers, thank you. Barr found that it's possible if you get like a cosmic ray to flip just the right bit you could stick the throttle on (but still not make it overpower the brakes). NHTSA and NASA investigated not just the software but the actual cases. In not a single actual case that they investigated did they find that it wasn't well explained by either stuck pedals or pedal misapplication (mainly the latter).

Comment Re:It's not Lupus (Score 2) 46

That's not the goal of a vaccine against a dormant virus (destroying B-cells), it's about developing a more capable immune reaction against the virus itself. See for example the shingles vaccine (targets dormant VZV, aka shingles / chickenpox). With a strong immune recognition of the virus, as soon as it tries to reactivate, it's immediately targeted, preventing it from becoming problematic.

Dormant viruses use a combination of (A) techniques to suppress immune recognition of them, and (B) low / no reproduction until your body's immune recognition of them has weakened. Vaccines help deal with both issues.

(BTW, if you're getting up there in age and haven't gotten your shingles vaccine, do so. It's one of the "rougher" vaccines, IMHO (both on my initial and followup doses I had "flu symptoms" for a day, when I normally have no reaction at all to vaccines), but that's *way* better than getting shingles)

Comment Re:It's not Lupus (Score 1) 46

The funny thing is that as soon as I saw "[condition] may be linked to a common virus" I thought, "It's Epstein-Barr, isn't it?"

Seems it causes bloody everything under the sun :P

As soon as there's even a clinical trial I can sign up for to get vaccinated against it, I'm getting it. I had mono in my late teens, so I can be expected to have dormant Epstein-Barr in me. A horrible autoimmune condition that my mother has (which leads to among other things her skin regularly feeling like it's on fire) seems to be linked to Epstein-Barr reactivation.

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