HopeOfTheGunblade

I would love to see research data pointing either way re #1, although it would be incredibly difficult to do so ethically, verging on impossible. For #2, people have extracted originals or near-originals of inputs to the algorithms. AI generated stuff - plagiarism machine generated stuff, runs the risk of effectively revictimizing people who were already abused to get said inputs.

It’s an ugly situation all around, and unfortunately I don’t know that much can be done about it beyond not demonizing people who have such drives, who have not offended, so that seeking therapy for the condition doesn’t screw them over. Ensuring that people are damned if they do and damned if they don’t seems to pretty reliably produce worse outcomes.

You’re missing 1.5: Make it impossible for people who every professional medical association of good repute says said medication help, get the medication by prescription.

I wonder how different things would be now if Roger Stone (still politically involved Roger Stone who was a major player in the last Trump administration and who has a back tattoo of Nixon) hadn’t caused the Brooks Brothers Riot and fucked up the counting of votes in Florida allowing the supreme Court (whoch at the time had multiple clerks that Trump put on the court) to declare Bush the winner.

Yeah, it’s been all the same people, fucking stuff up, all along.

You don’t think nearly 1/6th is statistically significant? What’s the lower bound on significance as you see things?

To be clear, it’s obviously dumb for their generative system to be overrepresenting turbans like this, although it’s likely to be a bias in the inputs rather than something the system came up with itself, I just think that 5% is generally enough to be considered significant and calling three times that not significant confuses me.

So for the 99% there is an abolishment of private property, leaving only personal property and public property, everyone has an equal share, and the state has been dissolved?

Because if not, at least one of us doesn’t understand communism. It’s entirely possible we both don’t. Would you be willing to clarify the term as you understand it?

My mom introduced me to Napster. So at this point, it would be a family tradition.

I’d be interested in reading more about this, if you have any pointers. It seems to me to be an interesting semantic question as to whether other bubbles of spacetime beyond our own, running at a different temporal rate (from the outside? By what universal clock?) count as part of our universe or not. From the description you gave, it seems like maybe even FTL wouldn’t be enough to reach them.

Given that we can see the CMB it seems unlikely that the universe is older elsewhere.

pays a subscription

Subscriptions don’t work

Little confused by this one, but yeah. I can’t afford subscriptions, and I also can’t afford the products and services the ads are for. Ads are just pollution in my consciousness, so why should I reduce my QoL for no benefit to anyone? If a creator says that if you use adblock, don’t watch me, I won’t. Site blocks adblockers, I don’t use it. What else am I supposed to do, when I make less than a living and don’t really have better options?

It’s less about the specific amount and more about the comparative relation. Having a lot more money than other people fucks you up; if you’re interested in the specifics, Some More News did a dive into the literature on it, and they have citations.

Tad Williams, Otherland. It’s quite good, a series I’ve read multiple times.

Assuming you don’t accept the simulation hypothesis, you can know if you aren’t a chatbot, but to the best of our current knowledge, our chatbots aren’t aware and can’t know anything.

After what seemed an insufferable wait, the sim before her was duly rejected and she at last found herself standing before one of the most cartoonish-looking functionaries she had ever seen. He was small and rodent-faced, with a pair of old-fashioned glasses pinching the end of his nose and a pair of small, suspicious eyes peering over them. Surely he must be a Puppet, she thought—a program given the appearance of humanity. No one could look so much like a petty bureaucrat, or if they did, would perpetuate it on the net, where one could appear as anything he or she desired.
“Purpose in Inner District?” Even his voice was tight as kazoo music, as though he spoke through something other than the normal orifice.
“Delivery to Johanna Bundazi.” The chancellor of the Polytechnic, as Renie knew, kept a small node in the Inner District.
The functionary looked at her balefully for a long moment. Somewhere processors processed. “Ms. Bundazi is not in residence.”
“I know.” She did know, too—she had been very careful. “I’ve been asked to hand-deliver something to her node.”
“Why? She’s not here. Surely it would be better to send it to the node she is currently accessing.” Another brief moment. “She is not available at the moment on any node.”
Renie tried to keep her temper. This must be a Puppet—the simulation of bureaucratic small-mindedness was too perfect “All I know is that I was asked to deliver it to her Inner District node. Why she wants to make sure it has been directly uploaded is her affair. Unless you have contrary instructions, let me do my job.”
“Why does the sender need hand-delivery when she’s not accessing there?”
“I don’t know! And you don’t need to know either. Shall I go back, then, and you can tell Ms. Bundazi you refused to allow her a delivery?”
The functionary squinted as though he were searching a real human face for signs of duplicity or dangerous tendencies. Renie was glad to be shielded by the sim mask. Yeah, go ahead and try to read me, you officious bastard.
“Very well,” he said at last. “You have twenty minutes.” Which, Renie knew, was the absolute minimum access time—a deliberate bit of unpleasantness.
“What if there are return instructions? What if she’s left a message dealing with this, and I need to take something else to somewhere in the District?” Renie suddenly wished this were a game and she could lift a laser gun and blast the Puppet to shards.
“Twenty minutes.” He raised a short-fingered hand to stifle further protest. “Nineteen minutes, fifty . . . six seconds, now—and counting. If you need more, you’ll have to reapply.”
She began to move away, then turned back to the rat-faced man, occasioning a grunt of protest from the next supplicant, who had finally reached the Holy Land. “Are you a Puppet?” Renie demanded. Some of the others in line muttered in surprise. It was a very rude question, but one that law mandated must be answered.
The functionary squared his narrow shoulders, indignant “I am a Citizen. Do you want my number?”
Jesus Mercy. He was a real person after all. “No,” she said. “Just curious.”
She cursed herself for pushing things, but a woman could only take so much.

Listening to Peter talk about GPT as if it was an all comprehending oracle when he was interviewed on Hannah Reloaded was unsettling, because I know he’s not alone in thinking it’s (paraphrased) “a pattern detecting intelligence, that can see things we can’t” my brother in Christ it is a better Markov chain engine.

I’m just saying, I game on a Windows 10 machine, use Firefox for a browser, and have never ever had this problem.

Nobody, monkeys included, deserves to die the way those monkeys did.

To get the new genetic material into cells, they engineered harmless viruses to carry it. Doctors carefully injected a tiny amount of liquid containing the viruses into a part of the children’s inner ears called the cochlea, a spiral-shaped chamber that contains hair cells. The first patient in the trial received the gene therapy in December 2022. Researchers followed the participants, who ranged in age from 1 to 6 years old, for 23 weeks after treatment.

While the gene therapy did not give the children a “normal” level of hearing, they went from not hearing anything under 95 decibels—about as loud as a food processor or motorcycle—to perceiving sounds of around 45 decibels—the level of a typical conversation or the hum of a refrigerator.

“The families are very, very excited,” says Yilai Shu, a head and neck surgeon at the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University and an author on the paper. For some of the parents, it’s the first time they’ve heard their children say “mama” or “baba” (Chinese for “papa”).

Other children in the study had previously received a cochlear implant in one ear and had already learned to speak. In those cases, doctors injected the gene therapy into their other ear. Cochlear implants are surgically implanted devices that stimulate the auditory nerve to provide a sense of sound to its wearer. The implants don’t reproduce natural hearing, though. The resulting sound can be robotic or distorted. And when they’re switched off, the wearer can’t hear at all.

With gene therapy, researchers are aiming to provide a natural sense of hearing. When they followed up with patients after the injection, they turned off the cochlear implants to assess how well the therapy was working in the children.

“They became more engaged and responsive. It’s like a change of personality,” says Zheng-Yi Chen, an associate scientist at Mass Eye and Ear, who co-led the study.

One child’s hearing didn’t improve at all. One explanation, Shu says, is that the child had preexisting immunity to the type of virus used to carry the new gene into the inner ear cells—meaning the treatment would have been destroyed by their immune system before it could take effect. It’s also possible that the dose was too low to be effective, Lustig says.

Several companies are pursuing gene therapies for this same cause of deafness. Boston-based Akouos, which was acquired by Eli Lilly in 2022, has treated two subjects in a clinical trial that began last year. Eli Lilly announced this week that one of those participants, an 11-year-old boy, could hear within 30 days of receiving an otoferlin gene therapy.

And in October, Regeneron’s Decibel Therapeutics in Boston reported improved auditory responses in one patient as part of an ongoing clinical trial. Otovia Therapeutics in China and Sensorion of France are working on similar treatments. The Fudan University trial reported today

Born deaf, the 1-year-old boy had never responded to sound or speech before. But after receiving an experimental treatment injected into one of his ears, he started turning his head when his parents called his name. Five months later, he spoke his first words.

The boy is one of six children with a type of hereditary deafness who are part of a gene therapy trial in China. Five of the children can now hear, according to results reported today in the scientific journal The Lancet. The news follows an announcement this week that yet another child born with profound deafness can hear after receiving a similar treatment developed by US drugmaker Eli Lilly.

“It’s remarkable,” says Lawrence Lustig, a hearing loss expert at Columbia University who was not involved in the trial. “We’ve never had a therapy that restores even partial hearing for someone who’s totally deaf other than a cochlear implant.”

The children were all born with a mutation in a gene that makes a protein needed for hearing called otoferlin. We hear things when sound waves in the air cause the thousands of sensory hair cells in our inner ears to vibrate and release a chemical that relays that information to the brain. Otoferlin is necessary for the release of this chemical messenger. Without it, the ear can’t communicate with the brain.

More than half of hearing loss cases in children are due to genetic causes, and otoferlin mutations account for 1 to 8 percent of those, affecting about 200,000 people worldwide.

The treatment the children received works by delivering a working version of the otoferlin gene to the inner ear. The cells of the inner ear then read this gene and produce the protein. In the US and Europe, a handful of these cutting-edge therapies have been approved, including one for a type of inherited blindness. Given just once, they’re designed to correct disease-causing genes—hopefully permanently.

For the deafness treatment, researchers at the Eye & ENT Hospital of Fudan University in Shanghai collaborated with a team at Mass Ear and Eye, a Harvard-affiliated hospital in Boston.

I approve of this humorous framing.

I mean I had that too, but fuck ads. All my homies hate ads.