will_a113

THE COMMON COLD

(well... just the coronavirus variants that cause it about 50% of the time, no word yet on a norovirus vaccine - https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/moderna-sets-sights-common-cold-triple-attack-against-respiratory-diseases)

I try to be a "silver lining" type of guy whenever possible, and a recent example that I've been using is mRNA vaccines. They were advancing achingly slowly before CoVID-19 basically turned the whole world into an mRNA lab. Now, thanks to that, there are vaccine trials underway for seasonal influenza, Epstein–Barr virus, HIV, RSV and several types of cancer. There's even talk of a bona fide cure for the common cold.

• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01294-2
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-024-00902-1
• https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2307079

Shocked that Florida made it to double digits.

(sent, with love, from Florida)

I gave my kid my big crate of capsela a few years ago. Aside from having to sand a few contacts it all worked great after 25 years of non-use and also led us into some cool 3d printing projects. I wish they made more toys like this today.

Is that pedal set up up to drive the machine, or is it just for looks?

The argument was that before we drilled holes into them, those stone formations had held similarly sized pockets of natural gas for eons, so just refilling them with CO2 would be fine. It sounds not completely stupid on first thought.

On second thought it sounds completely stupid tho.

I spent my childhood in Brooklyn (just a bridge away from Manhattan) just before the internet was a thing, and it seems pretty normal relative to what friends from other places describe. In fact, better in some ways. It was always easy to get a group of kids together to do whatever. We had pickup baseball (usually stickball), basketball, hide-and-seek and other games. There were 2 nice parks and several pocket parks in easy walking distance. Most of us had and rode bikes everywhere. A lot of my friends went to different schools (because of the density you might walk 3 blocks to the elementary school north of you, or 4 to the one south), so there were always new pools of people to interact with.

Though I moved away my sister still lives there and has kids of her own, and it seems pretty much the same now as it was then. Since the density of the place hasn’t changed too much it actually seems more the same than where I live now, which has significantly changed in terms of population and traffic (and is heavily car-dependent) in just the last 15 years.

wasn't there some research recently that said that like 20% of what your brain does was actually controlled by your gut microbiota?

The critical thing to remember about LLMs is that they are probabilistic in nature. They don't know facts, they don't reason, they don't evaluate. All they do is take your input string, split that string into tokens that are about 3-4 characters long, and then go back into their vast, vast, pretrained database and say "I have this series of tokens. In the past when similar sets of tokens were given, what were the tokens that were most likely to be associated with them?" It will then construct the output string one token at-a-time (more sophisticated models can do multiple tokens at once so that words, phrases and sentences might hang together better) until the output is complete (the probability of the next token being relevant drops below some threshold value) or your output limit is reached.

Is this a copypasta or just new greatness?

I love how all of the characters are scowling and have their game faces on… and then there’s Kirby, who’s like “Hi there! I’m gonna eat you and extract your power!”

Think the Baltics have a vested interest in seeing Ukraine succeed?