thaw13579
thaw13579 on Hacker News
People have a variety of intensities of cravings and capacities for self-regulation (with a magnitude that is largely out of their control). Discipline only works for people where the capacity for self-regulation outweighs the intensity of cravings. These cravings are huge though because our food system is engineered to be both extremely calorie rich and appealing. It's hard to blame people when they're surrounded by fast food restaurants on every corner that has been engineering to target what's called the "bliss point" when experiencing their food.
Looking at this a different way, maybe the discipline / self-regulation needs to be applied at the societal (not individual) level, to improve the environment in which we all live?
The issue is that our modern world has engineered our food to be highly energy-dense and incredibly appealing, so the root cause is an evolutionary mismatch with our environment, which has diverged incredibly from early humans.
Personally, I look at GLP-1 agonists as akin to wearing glasses. Some people are just born without the ability to regulate their appetite in accordance with our society, but there is a tool / prosthetic to change that, often that's a lifelong solution.
It's great to be active, but there's more to it than that, namely that our modern world has highly engineered our food to be highly energy-dense and incredibly appealing. So the root cause is an evolutionary mismatch with our environment, which has diverged incredibly from early humans. Expecting an individual to overcome won't generally work, since their brains are simply wired for it. Sure there are some people who can simply choose to ignore the fast food place at every corner and go to the gym via willpower alone, but they are exceptional in their brain's capacity for executive control.
Personally, I look at GLP-1 agonists akin to wearing glasses. Some people are just born without the ability to regulate their appetite in accordance with our society, but there is a tool / prosthetic to change that. That said, it's not one or the other, it's always great to be more active.
Yes, $50 was a rough out-of-pocket estimate, the amortized cost per scan for operation alone is probably on the order of hundreds of dollars per scan, assuming high utilization.
One funny thing about MRIs is the magnet is always on, so there could be some clever ways to reduce costs running them after hours.
From what I know, seems like a mix of medical price fixing by the gov't, adoption of lower cost hardware, and universal healthcare. There's apparently less bureaucracy, perhaps because there is no need for negotiation at every step of the process?
Yes totally, and ultrasound already does wonders in that regard. It's a good strategy to focus on the specific use cases that match the strengths of the tech. I think MRI will be useful in validating and mapping out those cases.
Yes, that is a economic & public health policy problem that really needs to be solved. We can look to Japan as example of what's possible, they have invested in nearly twice the number of scanners per capita of Canada, and they can get same-day MRIs for $50, roughly speaking.
I completely agree that's an issue, although more of an economic / public health policy issue than a technical one. There are low field MRI systems, such as the one made by Hyperfine that are, like you say, an order of magnitude cheaper and simpler to run. We should have these everywhere, IMO
https://www.hyperfinemri.com/
Cool work and proof of concept, and very excited to see where this goes. However, I do think there is enough exaggeration and missing information here that it warrants some critical appraisal. What's really missing is a comparison and validation with any existing medical imaging tech. Whole brain, contrast-free neurovascular imaging is essentially solved with MRI, why not run a scan and compare? Ultrasound is of course portable and less expensive, but MRIs are actually widely available in most cities at reasonable cost for medical workflows, and low-field brain MRI is addressing the portability and cost issues to some extent. I guess they are pitching this as a wearable "telepathy" device, which I think appropriately differentiates their product, but of course, this wording also invokes a framing that "you won't / don't need to know how it works," which invites skepticism and a higher bar for validation in my view.
That's literally treating people as means to an end, when it's not clear if the "end" even required sacrificing young people's lives. In the grand scheme of things, why not spend an extra year to build at a pace that doesn't burn people out? If you look at the careers of the people who subsequently left, by Sandy's account, they went on to to run their own great game studios, so it's not clear that a grind was necessary.
They haven't shared enough to say anything concrete, but one important detail is that this system doesn't have many of the benefits usually found in ultrasound (portable, cheap, simple). From what they've shared, it's a large water bath that patients need to be submerged in with a large array of US sensors with high costs in data and reconstruction compute. It might have lower upfront cost, but otherwise, I personally don't see the advantages yet. A typical MRI can be done is under 30 minutes in street clothes, and personally I'd rather not deal with the logistics of a water bath...
To be honest, this one could just as well be a sloppy bibliography.
The core issue is that X is now a tool for creating and virally distributing these images anonymously to a large audience, often targeting the specific individuals featured in the images. For example, to any post with a picture, any user can simply reply "@grok take off their clothes and make them do something degrading", and the response is then generated by X and posted in the same thread. That is an entirely different kind of tool from an open-weight model.
The LLM itself is more akin to a gun available in a store in the "gun is a tool" argument (reasonable arguments on both side in my opinion); however, this situation more like a gun manufacturer creating a program to mass distribute free pistols to a masked crowd, with predictable consequences. I'd say the person running that program was either negligent or intentionally promoting havoc to the point where it should be investigated and regulated.
Those were most likely from a multi-line list that was converted to a single line when the comment was processed on submission.
Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
Curious why this comment is being flagged if anyone minds explaining.
I agree there are some red flags here to me. One is the priority claim "As far as we know, no one seems to have done this kind of stimulation before - even in animals." The other is the definitive conclusion based on weak experimental design and documentation, "Can ultrasound make you smell things that aren’t there? Turns out, yes!"
These are big scientific claims, but the work is clearly too premature to make those conclusions, and it lacks the connection to prior work and peer review needed for making priority claims. It's really great hacker-tinkering work though, and it could turn into solid science if they take more care with it.
If this effect is real and truly novel, my cynical expectation is that someone already established in focused ultrasound will read this, apply a more rigorous approach, and get the recognition that they are hoping for through more establish channels.
I wonder where they got their equipment and research space. A charitable explanation is that they purchased it out of their own pockets, but otherwise, they really should acknowledge their support if it's from a university, federal grant, foundation award, etc. In my opinion as someone with domain experience, they don't show any novel solutions to accomplish this, it's mostly just that they have the time and resources to experiment try out, so it's especially important to acknowledge who enabled it.
Probably an M4 which has up to 128GB currently
An experiment is essentially a way to question ones own beliefs by probing how well they align with reality. There are some theoretical scientists, who don't experiment, but I think they also benefit from counterfactual reasoning to do their work.
Questioning is great, but to generate scientific knowledge, we need a few more steps, roughly speaking:
1. Ask a question
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Experiment to test it
4. Analyze results
5. Draw conclusions
6. Repeat
The MAHA folks essentially disregard this as a valid process for gathering knowledge. They occasionally talk about experiments and studies, but they are selectively chosen to support their conclusions in a posthoc way, ignoring both evidence to the contrary and basic methodological issues. When people describe them as "anti-science," I believe this is the kind of thing they have in mind.
That was previously the case from my perspective as well, but it seems to be rapidly changing.
It's especially hard given that big tech companies and their leaders are working closely with government and explicitly supporting certain political missions, there are few truly apolitical corners of tech now.
Two reasons for are the cellular connection and smaller form factor. Would love to have a MBA with those
I dug into it more and found the lab who conducted the study at Georgia Tech published their results in a reputable journal with peer review (
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-021-00993-6). The analysis seems fairly evidence-based, consisting of "54 million social media posts, both pre- and post-drills in 114 schools spanning 33 states."
We of course should prepare and have protocols to protect children in these scenarios, but there are better and worse ways to go about it. I essentially believe it's okay to leave young children blissfully ignorant of low probability / high impact harms (there are many that are equally likely to school shootings that we ignore). Lockdown protocols and training seem fine to me, if they are sufficiently abstract, but there is an emerging trend of "crisis simulations" which involve people posing as shooters, simulating gunfire sounds, and staff / students posing as shooting victims, etc. I think adults can handle this kind of realism, but there is evidence for harm in young children.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp2301804
A summary from the Everytown report "The Impact of Active Shooter Drills in Schools"
"Active shooter drills in schools are associated with increases in depression (39%), stress and anxiety (42%), and physiological health problems (23%) overall, including children from as young as five years old up to high schoolers, their parents, and teachers. Concerns over death increased by 22 percent, with words like blood, pain, clinics, and pills becoming a consistent feature of social media posts in school communities in the 90 days after a school drill. "
https://everytownresearch.org/report/the-impact-of-active-sh...
It would be great to have a similar analysis for elementary school-aged children. Many schools are using "crisis simulation" of active shooter events in an effort to prepare for them (and presumably reduce the risk of death). While good natured, I think it's ultimately just needlessly traumatizing children, since school shootings account for <0.1% of deaths. While school shootings are devastating and sadly on the rise, the media greatly exaggerates the risks in people's minds. By the numbers, the biggest mortality risks for children are drowning and automobile injuries while unbuckled, both of which can be trained without inflicting psychological harm.