It's adorable how they pretend that the 'well being' gap between the people who matter and the ones who don't is some sort of surprise that calls for urgent action; rather than a deliberate outcome carefully achieved.

It's the pandemic-period numbers that are the anomaly, from a period when at times downright existential issues forced people's hands(at least for white collar workers; if you are 'essential' good luck and back to dealing with the public in person); and a lot of work has been put into rectifying that period.

What's next; a comparative analysis of the labor markets of the 1950s and the 1980s that studiously pretends that it's not exactly as Milton Friedman and Neutron Jack intended?

When I see things like "facial age verification", I have major concerns, whether we're talking about a site like Roblox (whatever that is — I don't know, and don't really care), social media, porn, or any other site. How are you going to do it without violating the privacy of every person who creates an account? And how are you going to verify that the person using the account is the person who created it without causing an even bigger privacy violation?

We do need some sort of age verification system, but we need it to be designed in a way that protects privacy. I have less than zero faith in any individual website to come up with such a system, and approximately zero faith in any individual government to do so. There really needs to be an international age verification working group that spends the next five years coming up with a system, then pressures everyone to implement it.

Doing it the other way around, with companies or governments shoveling bad, partial, or even dangerous solutions to the problem down everyone's throats, can only result in greater levels of push-back by the general public towards a proper scheme if someone ever creates it.

They did review and change the policy. Just too late to do any good. The point is that evidence-based medicine has to be treated as a starting point for diagnosis and treatment decisions, not a rigid decision tree.

Of course, none of that makes the CDC's new claims that "vaccines don't cause autism" isn't an evidence-based statement any less absurd. You can't ever realistically prove definitively that X cannot cause Y, because that would require knowing that there exists no combination of recognizable human genetics in which X would cause Y. Evidence-based medicine would mean assuming that X cannot cause Y until evidence exists to prove that it does or can, which has not happened.

What they're doing is rejecting evidence-based medicine based on a belief that the anecdotal information they have should be taken more seriously than the broad evidence to the contrary. This would be fine if that anecdotal information were based on actual brain scans prior to vaccination that showed that the vaccine triggered a change, but it isn't. Rather, involves mistaking correlation for causation, and a post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, with a complete lack of any actual plausible explanation for how vaccines could cause autism beyond some vague hand-wavey pseudoscience.

And on top of that, we have a bunch of people who lack enough understanding of the scientific method and/or lack enough understanding of the subject to recognize when it is not being followed properly, and they are getting misled by charlatans with a political or personal agenda, presented in the form of pseudoscientific bulls**t papers that don't hold up to even modest scrutiny by someone with limited understanding of the subject or the scientific method, much less actual scientists in the field.

We also have a bunch of journals that publish papers outside their area of expertise, relying on outside experts that are in league with the papers' authors, and all sorts of other fun scientific fraud, which further contributes to this problem.

I'm not sure how to solve this problem, because it seems like a large percentage of the public simply lacks basic critical thinking skills and the ability to read over a paper and think, "Yes, but did you consider the following twelve common factors that could influence both the proposed cause and effect?" and realize that the paper is garbage. But a good starting point would be to pressure the news media across the political spectrum to hire actual science writers who UNDERSTAND SCIENCE to cover science-based stories.

Another good starting point would be to get more science-based shows on PBS that can talk about these issues and explain them to people and debunk bulls**t every week.

We're coming for your jobs. But you need us. You don't need your job.

This is a huge hoax being sold to CEOs who "see the vision". The vision is: No employees, high rates of return, the side hustle incarnate, reaping tons of benjamins while people drink their swill in robot bars, watching robot dancers dancing to AI tunes.

The sales job on the masses is failing. Data centers will become apartment buildings with lots of spare juice and cooling.

Unfortunately, evidence-based medicine has become a code word for "treat everyone with the same illness identically even when the data doesn't support doing so. That's how I ended up fighting a c. diff. infection. I was hospitalized for a related condition, and the first day of antibiotics put me at no fever, but after a day, I got a fever again, and I asked if the antibiotic had changed, and they said no, but maybe the ER gave me something different. They checked, and determined that yes, I had been on a different antibiotic in the ER, but said that they should keep the current antibiotics, and used "evidence-based medicine" as the reason. I had my doubts.

They were wrong. And six months later, the general standards for treating the condition I came in with changed, and they now treat it with the antibiotic that the ER gave me instead of one of the two that the hospital put me on afterwards, precisely because the standard treatment had a tendency to make c. diff. take over.

Whoops.

So I'm all for evidence-based medicine as a starting point, but when you realize it isn't behaving normally, you should adjust accordingly. Otherwise, patients suffer enormously.

But in theory, I do agree with you that evidence-based medicine is better than evidence-free medicine based on gut feelings and assumptions that correlation means causation and other fallacious reasoning.

When Google sells a 24-inch tablet, I'll care about Google being able to sell me a replacement that can do this. In the meantime, I want this feature on older, non-Google Android devices. :-)

Actually, I was remembering wrong there. Although TB can spread in other ways, it is primarily an airborne pathogen. So the biggest way to reduce the spread would be to add central heat and air with fresh air mixing and reduce the number of people sharing air for long periods of time. The second best way is contact tracing and prophylactic treatment.

But to add further to the comment about vaccine effectiveness, bacterial vaccines can be at least somewhat effective at preventing disease, e.g. the bacterial meningitis vaccine has something like 65% to 85% effectiveness, depending on age group and other factors, which is way better than nothing.

The TB vaccine only reduces infection risk by 20%. And when you're exposed frequently, that's barely even useful. The reason for this is that it hides from the immune system, which, as a result, takes a long time to start reacting to the bacteria, allowing it time to multiply for a while before you get a reaction. In mouse models, the reaction takes a whopping two weeks.

TB actually infects macrophages (primitive immune cells), and manages to literally hide inside them by adapting its exterior to maintain a neutral pH and by synthesizing enzymes that prevent the macrophages from maturing and that slow down apoptosis, which otherwise would release the bacteria, which would trigger T-cell activation. It's unclear whether there is a realistic way to prevent this delay.

It also plays tricks like triggering certain antigen-specific CD4+ T cells to the point of functional exhaustion while reducing antigens that would trigger other CD4+ cells so that they don't get detected. It somehow brings mesenchymal stem cells (blood vessel/lymphatic/connective tissue precursors) to the infection site, which further inhibit stem cells.

Presumably any better vaccine would have to either convince CD8+ T cells to react even without macrophages recognizing that something is wrong (perhaps by increasing the number of antigens that are included so that they are more likely to recognizing an antigen on the bacterium itself directly, early in the infection process, assuming this is even possible), convince CD4+ T cells to trigger macrophages in spite of signals to not do so, or overcome one of the design limits of the immune system (preventing T-cell exhaustion, increasing random macrophage apoptosis without an infection, etc.), some of which would likely require changing the person's DNA.

So fast diagnosis (universal health care and widespread rapid TB testing), contact tracing, etc. are critical to bringing it under control, and other prevention, such as not having large numbers of people in constant contact in areas with limited air circulation can also help. Meanwhile, vaccines, although not entirely infeasible, are likely to be more of a long shot.

AI is like a whiz-kid who can't tie his own shoes. The bad reputation that AI has is well-deserved. Add in the business executives that drool over lowering their labor costs and shoving employees out the door by something we're supposed to be impressed with and love. Add it to you shaky operating system that barely works on a good day and force people to go through hoops to uninstall it because it gets in their way.

This is the failure of most tech marketing, believing their own BS, then throwing actual trillions of dollars to make believers out of people when none of those dollars actually benefit humankind. This won't end well.

In a sense his puzzlement is justified; when the tech demo works an LLM is probably the most obvious candidate for 'just this side of sci-fi'; and, while may of the capabilities offered are actually somewhat hollow (realistically, most of the 'take these 3 bullet points and create a document that looks like I cared/take that document that looks like my colleague cared and give me 3 bullet points' are really just enticements to even more dysfunctional communication) some of them are fairly hard to see duplicating by conventional means.

However, I suspect that his perspective is fundamentally unhelpful in understanding the skepticism: when you are building stuff it's easy to get caught up in the cool novelty and lose sight of both the pain points(especially when you are deep C-Level; rather than the actual engineer fighting chatGPT's tendency to em-dash despite all attempts to control it); and overestimate how well your new-hotness stacks up against both existing alternatives and how forgiving people will or won't be about its deficiencies.

Something like Windows trying to 'conversational'/'agentic' OS settings, for instance, probably looks pretty cool if you are an optimism focused ML dude: "hey, it's not perfect but it's a natural language interface to adjusting settings that confuse users!"; but it looks like absolute garbage from an outside perspective both because it's badly unreliable; and humans tend not to respond well to clearly unreliable 'people'(if it can't even find dark mode; why waste my time with it?); and because it looks a lot like abdication of a technically simpler, less exciting, job in favor of chasing the new hotness.

"Settings are impenetrable to a nontechnical user" is a UI/UX problem(along with a certain amount of lower level 'maybe if bluetooth was less fucked people wouldn't care where the settings were because it would just work); so throwing an LLM at the problem is basically throwing up your hands and calling it unsolvable by your UI/UX people; which is the an abject concession of failure; not a mark of progress.

I think it may be that that he really isn't understanding: MS has spent years squandering the perception that they would at least try to provide an OS that allowed you to do your stuff; in favor of faffing with various attempts to be your cool app buddy and relentless upsell pal; so every further move in that direction is basically confirmation that no fucks are given about just trying to keep the fundamentals in good order rather than getting distracted by shiny things.

Guess he sees things as:

One man, one vote.

And Teump has the only vote.

Yeah, that was a big goof, thanks for understanding.

Apple is capable of hiring talented people and creating a useful product. They just don't seem to be capable of being user-friendly in the ways that matter to me. TBH they were never great at it, and MUGs did the heavy lifting in the customer relations department for them for free. Anyway I'm totally capable of believing their performance claims, to a reasonable point, especially when the results aren't putting them first.

I wish they were friendlier, because their hardware is reasonably impressive. I'm also just not in their target demographic apparently because I'd rather have a slightly thicker device with better cooling and battery capacity.

Also to Doc Holliday.

If they plan to actually generate movies in Saudi Arabia, their morality police are going to restrict them heavily. I doubt most of the rest of the world would be interested for long.

If their plan is only to make the software, will those contracts ban anything forbidden by the Saudi morality police? Will the software have hidden restraints? It would be easy to detect forbidden scenes. It might not be so easy to detect more subtle restraints, such as ideological bias.

I'm convinced of it. You'll supply a script, cast, and style and it will generate the movie. At some point, you will also be able to interact with the movie, talking to the characters ("your other left"), talking to the generator ("skip this scene").

Famous actors will sell their personas, famous writers will sell scripts, famous directors and producers will sell styles, but I think most people will pay less for B-list and C-list and Z-list content that they can tweak to get something different every time.

You will also be able to add your overlays to scripts ("more cowbells"), personas ("more witty") and styles ("fewer explosions"), and you will be able to add random variations.

It's going to be fantastic. Hollywood democratization will be like a breath of fresh air.

It's not impossible, but the switch would be expensive. It's probably easier and just as effective just to shield them, and tie the shield to the chassis ground.

Another option would be to switch power to the radio chip, if it's in a package which makes that convenient. This might also disable bluetooth if you do it to the infotainment system, or cause a code to be set...