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Comment Re:Makes sense to me... (Score 2) 177

The LLM's that ChatGPT and Perplexity use were trained on data that's at least a few weeks old before a new model is released to the public.

It's not really meant to tell you about today's headlines.

Sure, but Claude, at least, knows that its knowledge cutoff date is January 2025. It's sometimes lazy and will tell you that current events precede its knowledge, but if you tell it to do a search, it will, and then it will accurately describe what it found. Other times it just automatically searches when it realizes you're asking about something that is too recent to be included in its training data.

It seems strange that other LLMs that have the ability to search the web don't do the same.

Submission + - BYD overtakes Tesla (marketwatch.com)

sinij writes:

BYD sold a total of 4.6 million new energy vehicles in the year, a 7.7% gain on 2024. On Friday, Tesla said it sold 1.63 million vehicles in 2025, below the 1.78 million it delivered in 2024


Submission + - EPA to regulate widely used phthalates to reduce environment and workplace risks (msn.com)

schwit1 writes: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced on Wednesday that the agency will move to regulate dozens of applications of five widely used phthalate chemicals to reduce environmental and workplace risks.

“Our gold standard science delivered clear answers, that these phthalates pose unreasonable risk to workers in specific industrial settings and to the environment,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said in a written statement.

The EPA announced its decision to regulate usage of Butyl Benzyl Phthalate (BBP), Dibutyl Phthalate (DBP), Dicyclohexyl Phthalate (DCHP), Diethylhexyl Phthalate (DEHP), and Diisobutyl Phthalate (DIBP), which are common chemicals used to make plastics more flexible in things from building materials to industrial applications. The agency said in its release that it used gold standard science and independent peer reviewers to research into determining the risks associated with exposure to these chemicals, which include hormone deficiencies and endocrine disruption.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), a sub-institute of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), noted that although there are limited studies on the effects of phthalates on humans, there are many reproductive health and developmental problems found with phthalate exposure in animals. These include:

- Early onset of puberty
- Interfering with male reproductive tract development
- Interfering with the natural functioning of the hormone system
- Causing reproductive and genital defects
- Lower testosterone levels in adolescent males
- Lower sperm count in adult males

Submission + - Medicare to require prior authorization from AI for some procedures (marketwatch.com) 1

sinij writes:

Starting in January, about 6.4 million Americans enrolled in traditional Medicare in New Jersey, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona and Washington state will be part of a pilot program using artificial intelligence for prior authorizations.

Denying coverage is one use case where AI hallucinations is a feature and not a bug.

Submission + - AI Arms Race Emerging Between Patients and Health Insurers

An anonymous reader writes: PBS NewsHour has a segment on the escalating AI battle in health insurance claims. A 2025 survey found 71% of health insurers admit to using AI for utilization management—the process that approves or denies claims. Of the 73 million Americans on ACA plans who had in-network claims denied, and less than 1% appealed. Now patients are fighting back with AI of their own. Free, open-source tools like Fight Health Insurance and the free Counterforce Health let patients upload denial letters and generate customized appeals citing relevant regulations and medical necessity arguments. Indiana University law professor Jennifer Oliva warns this is becoming an arms race: "As consumers become more empowered by these tools to fight back, the insurers will just up the ante." She also raises a darker concern—insurers may be using AI to identify patients unlikely to appeal or who "will not live through an appeal based on the time that the appeals take." Current regulation is nearly nonexistent.

Comment Re:Is it worth it (Score 1) 225

We went from massive worm problem to almost no worm problem overnight when connections were put behind a NAT.

And you could have achieved exactly the same thing at lower compute cost with a stateful firewall. NAT didn't save you from worms, the stateful firewall that NAT requires in order to work did. But you can have the firewall without the NAT, and the result is simpler, more efficient, easier to manage and more flexible.

Comment Re:Not everything is name based (Score 1) 225

We are so used to the constraints put on us by IPv4 that we don't even consider what opportunities open up when every single device on the planet has its own globally routed IP address.

Yes, all those opportunities for insecure IoT devices to be compromised.

So have your router run a firewall that denies inbound connections be default, the same way NAT does. This is a side effect of NAT, but can be done better and more easily by a simple firewall.

Comment Re: People gave up on the Internet... (Score 1) 225

I don't want people all over the world connecting to my bedroom. If I wanna host a website I pay an extra $8/mo for VPS

Then don't run a web server in your bedroom. And maybe have a firewall that blocks inbound connections by default (which is a side effect of NAT, but absolutely does not require NAT).

But many of us would like to run servers from home.

Comment Re:Even gold and silver are partly like fiat (Score 2) 55

Admittedly, gold and silver have a utility value, but the price is much higher than the utility value because most people want it as a medium of exchange or a store of value, not to make stuff with.

Silver and gold aren't like fiat, they're inherently inferior to fiat currency, for exactly the reason you cite.

PPH is deeply incorrect when he says that fiat currencies are not backed by assets. Fiat currencies are backed by legally-enforceable promises to repay debts. Every dollar created is balanced by the simultaneous creation of an obligation by someone to do some sort of productive work to generate value that is used to retire that obligation (at which point the dollar is destroyed).

Precious metals have a small utility value coupled with a large speculative value. Fiat currency is also a mixture of utility and speculation, but the mixture depends on the probability that the borrower on the loan contract that created the dollar will repay the debt. Since nearly all debt is repaid, dollars are mostly real utility. Further, the probability of default is offset by the fact that borrowers that don't default repay more than 100% of the debt, because of interest (though interest must also offset the discount rate, i.e. currency devaluation, i.e. inflation). So the precise mixture of utility and speculation behind a dollar is hard to nail down with precision, but the speculative part is very small, usually indistinguishable from zero.

Fiat currency evolved rather than being designed, but it's hard to see how a more perfect system could have been designed. Not only does fiat currency have greater intrinsic value than precious metals or similar physical exchange media, it naturally expands and contracts the money supply as needed, which facilitates rapid economic growth in good times and prevents devastating deflation in bad times.

Cryptocurrencies are among the worst possible forms of currency. They have negative intrinsic value (they cost money to produce but have no intrinsic utility), have very limited ability to expand money supply when needed (they could adjust the mining success probability, but there are strong disincentives to do so) and cannot contract the money supply when needed. Further, they have very high transaction costs, which leads to them being treated as assets rather than currencies. The fact that they're very hard to regulate does, however, make them great for crime of all sorts.

Comment Re:Crypo is terrible as an investment (Score 2) 55

There's no physical assets

So, pretty much like every other fiat currency.

No, fiat currency is asset-backed. The assets in question are legally-enforceable contracts to repay loans. Fiat currency is precisely a legally-enforced commitment to produce something of value in the future, bundled up into an exchangeable medium.

Comment Re:You mean microdosing alcohol. (Score 0) 95

I spent a minute trying to figure out how you could consume photons in liquid form.

Same! Well, not liquid form, maybe. I thought maybe they were talking about getting sun exposure.

I re-read the headline several times, before giving up and reading the summary. At least the first sentence mentioned alcohol, which is when the metaphorical light bulb began emitting metaphorical photons.

Comment Re:Muslims don't live longer (Score 3, Insightful) 95

If alcohol had a material impact on life span, you'd expect Muslim communities to have a longer life span. Which they don't.

Mormons do.

Of course there are other factors there. Married people live longer, and Mormons also have higher marriage and lower divorce rates, for one. They also don't smoke, which is clearly a big factor, and don't drink coffee (may or may not have any effect). On the other hand, they tend to have slightly higher obesity rates.

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