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Re:Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level on Friday January 30, 2026 @12:22AM (#46820826)
> Bile is used to process food in the gut. It does not go back into our system.

I don't think that's correct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterohepatic_circulation

I also think you're mischaracterizing HDL as a VLDL. If you search for Apolipoprotein A here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK305896/ you'll see that HDL is constructed from it, while VLDL and LDL are part of the Apolipoprotein B lineage.

Re:Two days of oatmeal reduce cholesterol level on Thursday January 29, 2026 @11:34PM (#46820549)
My understanding is that:

1. When someone consumes fat, bile is released into the gut.

2. Oatmeal (and other soluble fibers like psyllium husk) capture this bile and it is excreted in stool.

3. In order to create the bile, the liver needs LDL. Because the LDL it used to create the bile was lost when it was captured, it exposes more LDL receptors and pulls LDL out of the bloodstream, thereby lowering LDL levels.

It seems to me that in order to maximize the effectiveness of this LDL-lowering approach, one must not simply consume psyllium or oatmeal, but rather consume them in conjunction with fat. Not saturated fat, obviously, which raises LDL, but perhaps unsaturated or polyunsaturated fats. My expectation is that this would trigger the bile secretion required in order to actually sequester it.

Re:The Future Is Not Self-Hosted on Friday July 25, 2025 @06:37PM (#44689313)
I'm not sure. It seems like the harder they squeeze, the less they can hold onto. Books, movies, TV shows, audiobooks, music - you can find it all online for free and acquire it pretty safely (torrents/vpn etc). I think the only thing they can really sell us is convenience - and I buy it! But if that convenience is lost to fragmentation, or lack of offline availability (e.g., books), or price, I think people will stop paying and do the more convenient thing. There's a tension there that I don't think they can ignore.
Until we get robots with really good hands, something I'd love in the interim is a system that uses _me_ as the hands. When it's time to put groceries away, I don't want to have to think about how to organize everything. Just figure out which grocery items I have, what storage I have available, come up with an optimized organization solution, then tell me where to put things, one at a time. I'm cautiously optimistic this will be doable in the near term with a combination of AR and AI.
Re:Show HN: Game Bub – open-source FPGA retro emulation handheld on Wednesday February 12, 2025 @12:56PM (#43027821)
I love the idea of open source hardware, but one issue I struggle with is - what happens when one or more components go out of production?

I suppose one solution is that the maintainers could update their component list (which might involve more than one component because of compatibility issues?). But what if I'm in the middle of purchasing the components only to discover I can't get them all? Maybe the maintainers could sell component kits? That might be a nice way to fund their work. Not sure if that would run into issues with IP laws, though.

Re:Three Observations on Sunday February 09, 2025 @09:01PM (#42996172)
> Moore waited at least five years [1] before deriving his law.

OpenAI has been around since 2015. Even if we give them four years to ramp up, that's still five years worth of data. If you're referring to the example he gave of token cost, that could just be him pulling two points off his data set to serve as an example. I don't know that's the case, of course, but I don't see anything in his text that contradicts the point.

> I don't think that it makes much sense to compare commercial pricing schemes to technical advancements.

How about Kurzweil's plot [1]?

[1] https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2011/kurzweilfig.1.jpg

How does anything swing -1000%?
Do you mean medium of exchange? I think it's difficult to make the claim that the USD is a good store of value.
Re:What's Next for WebGPU on Thursday November 21, 2024 @09:54PM (#42210734)
Any word on when it'll be supported on Linux without a flag?
Re:Mitochondria Are Alive on Friday November 08, 2024 @01:21PM (#42089175)
I'm sure there's a fantastic midi-chlorian joke here.
With consistent representation of characters, are we now on the precipice of a Cambrian explosion of manga/graphic novels/comics?
Re:Canvas Fingerprinting – BrowserLeaks on Sunday October 27, 2024 @01:33AM (#41960086)
I know my priorities are questionable, but I'm more annoyed that I can't expect consistent canvas rendering.
Re:Microsoft BitNet: inference framework for 1-bit LLMs on Friday October 18, 2024 @11:03AM (#41880073)
Can anyone help me understand how this works without special bitnet precision-specific hardware? Is special hardware unnecessary? Maybe it just doesn't reach the full bitnet potential without it? Or maybe it does, with some fancy tricks? Thanks!
> We aim to investigate in a reliable animal model whether activating the cervical lymphatic vessels through pharmacological or mechanical means can prevent the exacerbation of Alzheimer’s disease progression by improving CSF clearance.

Any speculation on what those mechanical means might be?

Yes, simply accepting the inadequacy of our current technology is always going to be easier than working to improve it. It's also going to lead to infinitely less progress.

Humanity is eventually going to be able to extend lifespans indefinitely. Whether that happens sooner or later depends on how many people decide not to go gentle into that good night.

I assume people will continue to use real estate as an investment for as long as they are forced to escape the inflation of their currency.
Re:French authorities label Vitamin D as endocrine disruptor on Sunday November 19, 2023 @11:49AM (#38334484)
Seems like this is some kind of legal inevitability that is acknowledged to be counter-productive:

> The IASDA report stresses: “There is concern that this decision may cause consumers to mistrust vitamin D supplementation, which will be particularly problematic given the high prevalence of vitamin D deficiency among the population."

and

> “Even after ANSES publicly stated that while formally correct, the listing would be counterproductive, this legal mechanism proved impossible to stop,” he adds.

I'd be worried they'd wait until the population was reliant upon it, and then flip a switch disabling privacy. Seems risky.
Re:Meta Quest 3 on Wednesday September 27, 2023 @06:30PM (#37682310)
They now offer color options (https://www.meta.com/quest/accessories/)
Re:Run LLMs at home, BitTorrent‑style on Sunday September 17, 2023 @11:31PM (#37551908)
I love this direction. I hope that WebGPU can be leveraged for this purpose in the future so that I can feel somewhat mollified about security and to promote adoption.
What does half-life mean in the context of DNA? One base pair corrupted / unrecoverable? Half of them?
If it fits your model, WebTorrent[0] can offload a lot of bandwidth to peers.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent

Re:GPT-4 on Tuesday March 14, 2023 @01:48PM (#35155458)
By that definition, I wonder if we've already surpassed that point. Things on the horizon certainly feel hazier to me, at least. I think a lot of people were surprised by the effectiveness of the various GPTs, for example. And even hard science fiction is kinda broken: humans piloting spaceships seems highly unlikely, right? But it's a common occurrence there.
> or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

This has always felt like a gaping hole to me. It seems like to work it would have to a) always make perfect predictions of the future, and b) agree with relevant humans what "harm" is.

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