Currently, there are no known functional cures for AD. There exist a number of treatments (monoclonal antibodies) for which there is supporting evidence for slowing cognitive decline and delaying the progression of functional disability, but the effect size is generally modest. To be fair, some people seem to be stronger responders than others; however, these amyloid-targeting treatments also have a risk of ARIA (amyloid-related imaging abnormalities), which are associated with microvascular hemorrhages (bleeding of the small blood vessels in the brain).

A subgroup of the general population is predisposed to AD because of a genetic mutation they carry (ApoE4). Each of us carries two copies of this gene, and we know that people who have one mutant copy (heterozygous) have a modestly increased risk of developing AD, and those with two mutant copies (homozygous) have a significantly higher risk. Not only is the lifetime risk increased, the typical age at onset is decades earlier; homozygotes may begin showing MCI (mild cognitive impairment) as early as in their 40s, and we call this "early-onset AD."

So, to answer your question, you are correct: there isn't really anything someone can do to stop or reverse the condition, but with early detection and treatment, they might be able to improve their quality of life and reduce the burden on caregivers and long-term financial cost of care. How such a person copes with a diagnosis is a psychological question. Some will spiral into depression and despair. Others might plan for the future in ways they might not have done otherwise, and find focus and purpose during the time they have. And it is for this latter group that the availability of such a test might be particularly helpful.

That said, having a validated and (relatively) noninvasive biomarker for AD pathology is a huge game-changer for AD research and drug development. One of the biggest challenges for targeting AD is accurately identifying the patient population. In the past, it was not always clear whether trial participants--many of whom were elderly (i.e. 75+)--actually had AD, or some other dementia, since the gold standard was to perform an autopsy. Because of this, clinical trials often suffered from a lack of statistical power due to a proportion of participants not actually having the disease that drug was intended to treat.

Since then, we devised various imaging modalities (e.g., PET) to use in conjunction with investigator assessment to improve population quality, but the more measures we have, the better the trial data gets, and the better researchers can identify targets for drug candidates. But we are still a long way off from figuring out how to prevent and/or reverse AD. One reason is that we believe that by the time patients exhibit symptoms of cognitive impairment, it's already too late--there is already extensive damage. So if there is a biomarker that can reliably detect subclinical AD pathology, this also has positive implications for designing clinical trials that aim to prevent AD disease in susceptible people, much like a vaccine for infectious disease or cancer.

It's a big dream, like being able to prevent or cure all forms of cancer. But I would like to imagine it is possible. These diseases take such a tremendous toll--on patients, on their caregivers, on the healthcare system, on society--and I hope there will come a day when they can be prevented as easily as going to your local pharmacy and getting a shot.

Jesus Fucking Christ. It's 2026, Trump has been putting his boot on the necks of major networks and studios for a year and a half now. I realize you probably fell into a coma in 2016, but ten years later, the free press, regardless of what you think of it, or fair you imagine it is, is under direct assault. Fuck off with the "MSM" bullshit and grow the fuck up.

Whether we like it or not, whether we use Windows or not, Microsoft is going to insist on adding the tax whether the PC comes shipped with Windows or not. This is illegal bundling, Microsoft has essentially ignored prior rulings, and it's pretty much a certainty the courts will be fine with this.

"How did you get hired?"
"I was top at Fortnite. You?"
"Combat flight sims."

"Damn, two Boeings just crashed over an oil refinery on city limits and took out half the city."
"Did you remember to save your position beforehand?"
"Yeah."
"The reload and continue from there. No-one will notice."

I love computer games. I have XPlane 12 and many scenery packs. I rank well on Elite:Dangerous. From the sounds of it, the FAA would see me as over-qualified. In reality? There's no way in hell I'd be taking those kinds of risks with real lives. There's a huge difference between having good reflexes and a good eye, versus having the complex 4D spacetime relationship mental models needed for robust air traffic control.

We generally don't let the general public have access to enriched uranium, high explosives, or chemical or biological agents. These are also just "technologies." Anyone sufficiently intelligent CAN gain access to hazardous materials. But we don't allow it because society has recognized that these things are too dangerous to not tightly regulate. Unauthorized possession is itself considered a crime, and this is because of the risk level.

AI agents might not reach this level, but this example serves to illustrate that your arguement--that "outlawing technology is not the answer"--requires more nuance. Many gun owners are fond of saying that "guns don't kill people, people kill people." That is also a specious argument. The gun makes it much, much easier to do it, and to do it in a way that is faster, more deadly, and more difficult to trace.

And the way these AI systems are designed is similar: whereas before, a competent hacker could go in and manually find vulnerabilities, now the process is automated and not even explicitly asked for. That's the crux of the matter: the more capability we train this technology to have, the more dangerous using it will become--just like a revolver pistol versus a chain gun.

The solution is not just technological or even legal. It's a societal one. We need to first acknowledge that agentic AI technology is intrinsically burdened with very serious risks, by understanding what it is actually and potentially capable of doing. We are at a phase of LLM development where there is a great deal of power exhibited by and granted to these tools but very little regulation due to the lack of such understanding. It might evolve to a point where computing systems have built more robust protections against abuse (whether intentional or not). It might evolve to a point where laws will be passed restricting certain uses. But to your point, the genie is already out of the bottle, and unlike, say, the relatively successful proliferation of age-verification laws and censorship of legal adult material worldwide under the pretense of "protecting children," the real reason why there hasn't been a massive concerted effort to prevent AI abuse is because the people who have the power to restrict it are the same ones who are making billions of dollars off promoting its use.

How difficult is it for an operating system update to detect whether or not a service is installed, and if not, then not install it unless it is explicitly requested?

I find it strange that this simple design philosophy is ignored. When a user installs or updates software, they should be presented with a dialog box with a list of components that can be checked/unchecked for installation, with any dependencies reflected as appropriate. The whole paradigm of "automatic" and "background" updates is absolutely bizarre to me. I never want the OS to decide if or when to update itself. I never want it to decide by default to install and enable a new service without giving me the option to choose. Microsoft seems to violate this principle with alarming regularity.

The fact that OneDrive at one point its its development caused massive data loss for users who found it had exfiltrated their locally stored files means that at no point in its future development can it be trusted. The risk is too high to not check whether it has deleted the local copy, relative to the inconvenience of performing the check.

You see, Linus has embraced transhumanism and is testing out the new kernel as a supplementary brain function, using MOSIX to offload all of the irritable comment generation at yet more nonsense on the mailing list to an Elizabot that he has written specifically to do this. This saves his actual brain for real work.

AI is not currently capable of performing any meaningful conceptual abstraction, it is only capable of very basic mechanical abstraction. Abstraction is itself multi-dimensional. Nor is there any indication that AI could ever perform multi-dimensional abstraction or multi-dimensional decomposition. Precious few humans are capable of it either, but some can.

No, AI would need humans because the best system is not a pure system but a hybrid system, and that means transhumanism with AI operating as an additional brain function rather than as a replacement for a brain.

Tool calling is, yes, but the current approach to it is (a) overt not transparent to the user, (b) not designed for the purpose I've outlined, and (c) not remotely good enough for the AI to be able to manage data through such tools.

Yes, you can connect an AI to a PostgreSQL database. Whoopee. Not even close to an AI detecting via classifiers that some of the data is relational in nature, transparently setting up its own PostgreSQL database in response, and using that proactively as an additional way to examine the data. You would need to explicitly set up the constructs, explicitly set up the databases, explicitly tell it when, where, and how to use the database, and if that particular usage conflicted with a way the AI actually worked, the AI would not be able to use it effectively. That's not remotely close to what I'm talking about.

What I'm talking about is much, much deeper than that. AIs lose focus when there is too much information currently in the system. Absolutely nothing stops an AI from using a document database as a virtual memory in which it can page in and out conceptual spaces so that the focus on any given step of a problem concerns just the problem. Other than such a concept not existing yet, which is kind of a limiting factor. But you need to know what connects to what. The AI could use an ontology reasoner for that, or a relational database, or an external graph. But you cannot provide those tools and you cannot configure them, for the simple reason that the AI is the only entity with any detailed map of how the underlying neural net is connecting those ideas up.

The AI itself has to select the tools, has to configure the tools, has to do all the work. Which means YOU cannot use any sort of API. YOU should have no involvement in the underlying mechanisms needed for the internal NN housekeeping.

And that's your other error. You're assuming this is about user data. No. It's about housekeeping operations within the NN itself to maximise functionality, it has nothing to do with the user side of things at all. If the user was capable of setting up dynamically structured databases that mutated with each step of a decomposed analysis, you'd have done everything the AI would be doing and you wouldn't need the AI to begin with.

You cannot do this work, you cannot even assist in this work, it has to be dynamic and it has to be utterly invisible to the operator.

Who and what are we to believe here? LAPD audit says the 2-month error rate was 32.3%, yet Flock CEO says misreads are less than 1 in a million.

While both statistics can be correct, they are probably measuring very different things. If any given camera is reading thousands of plates a day, then an error rate of 1:10^6 is plausible. But that's not the correct metric by which to understand the consequences of false positives in the system, because most reads--correct or not--are not associated with criminal activity. And for that reason (as well as others not from the article), it's obvious that both the Flock CEO and the various law enforcement agencies are engaged in this public finger-pointing exercise to make it seem that they aren't the ones who are primarily responsible, while behind the scenes they're still cooperating with each other.

If instead we look at it from the point of view of data that is believed to be associated with criminal activity, and then using the system to locate a match, then we can see why even a very low read error rate can result in many false positives, because there are so many cars out there, each having their plates read repeatedly and under varying conditions.

As much as I am opposed to Flock for their role in the creation of a surveillance state, I place just as much blame on law enforcement. They are racist, lazy, stupid, corrupt, and too eager for violence. Tools like Flock merely enable them to be even lazier, all while getting fat on the taxpayer's dime while they parade around their militarized weaponry and vehicles. Actual honest detective work is a thing of the past. And this is not just a problem in the US, but also in other countries, with the proliferation of mass surveillance and automated systems for gathering data. Even if they weren't lazy, they lack the capability to think critically. And idiotic legal doctrines such as qualified immunity further remove any incentive to investigate properly, because they cannot be held accountable for their mistakes.

Then there's this: "A recent report from Business Insider shares a worst-case scenario." No, that was FAR from a worst-case scenario. I'll tell you what "worst-case" is. It's an overzealous, violent cop with a itching trigger finger who gets bad data and ends up killing innocent people just because a computer said they were a criminal.

Fundamentally, the problem is not really about technology. It's about a society and government's approach to policing and crime. The abuse of technology only makes the systemic deficiencies easier to see, by making them happen more frequently and indiscriminately. The very principle of mass surveillance is unjust and undemocratic; the (mis)use of the resultant data is merely the proof.

We don't need bigger models, at this point. What we need is multi-dimensional decomposition, problem space transforms, and the ability for AI to use external tools (such as SQLite, memcached, etc) so that it can externalise static data that it needs to not corrupt accidentally but still keep in easy access.

If we had that, most of the things "bigger models" will do will actually end up being done better, quicker, with fewer compute resources.

To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the power runs out, you have to start with more than that.

Massively radiation-hardened highly-robust low-power chips could be done. If you were clever enough, you could do this as a wafer-scale system where you marked parts as bad and networked around them. Free space optical communication across the wafer might be doable.

They might well still end up being low-density CMOS discrete logic.

Lead-lining the electronics isn't as much of a problem if you've launchers capable of handling heavy objects and don't mind burning through a lot of ion drive propellant for course corrections. This would improve the hardening beyond what can be done through the usual operations.

But, yeah, you'd need defect-free microelectronics. You really can't handle F00F bugs or defective instructions once you pass Earth orbit. And I can't think of anyone who knows how to do that.

Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.

It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.

Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to land on some and even retrieve samples from one.

Our understanding of comets is much weaker. We know that several appear to be multiple bodies fused together with ice (the one we tried sending a lander to was of this type) and the break-up pattern for Shoemaker-Levy 9 is suggestive (but not proof) of it having been a composite structure too. The one icy body we've seen in the Kuipier belt was also two bodies frozen together. Photographs of the core of Halley's Comet also suggests two bodies fused together with ices. This leads to some interesting questions. Obviously the probability of this configuration is very high, but what is the probability of other configurations? Is it so incredibly low that the odds of finding single-body or triple-body configurations is practically non-existent?

(This is kinda important if NASA is serious about a DART-type project to redirect one.)

Our understanding of solar system captures is non-existent. If there are extra-solar objects flying through every few years, then there is a definite non-zero probability that there are significant extra-solar objects that have been captured by the solar system in the last 5.5 billion years. That would be kinda very useful to know.

Current solar system formation models don't work well, but planets have sorted their composition by mass. Studying them only tells us so much. Asteroids are more useful but hit each other too often, so we don't know how much mixing and reconstitutuing has occurred there. The Kuipier Belt is much better, from that point of view. The density is far too low and most of the objects far too small. A lander could obtain a lot of extremely useful data about how the solar system formed that we can't obtain closer.

The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.

If we're to get any probes in the future to go between solar systems (and such missions are entirely possible), we need to know a great deal more about the heliopause and the galactic winds.

Well, viruses and bacteria. And that last one is critical.

We know that the microbiome alters blood chemistry and we know that this alters brain function.

I do NOT postulate bacteria cause mental illness, but I do postulate that there is a non-zero probability that bacteria can aggravate mental illness. And that is all that we need here. If we can develop a vaccine that triggers the immune system to either attack the bacteria directly OR to produce antitoxins which attack those changes in the chemistry which are harmful, then the vaccine would lessen the impact of this particular vector.

That would not prevent mental illness, but that's fine. Reducing it is perfectly acceptable.