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Midjourney Medical 1 month ago

It's a controversial and complicated idea. The downside, and the reason why most doctors do not recommend full body scans, is that every human body is a bit weird and there will almost always be something "wrong" that will be visible in a full body scan. This can lead to unnecessary testing, anxiety, and even unnecessary procedures. Many of these oddities flagged by the scan would never have caused any actual issues had the patient never been aware.

While there are many individual stories of full-body scans detecting early-stage cancer before it became symptomatic, there seems to be a general sense among doctors that implementing full-body scanning on a population level would lead to overall more harm than good. The thinking is that it is better to do regular targeted screenings for diseases that you're in a risk group for (e.g. colonoscopies, mammograms, cancer marker blood tests, etc.) rather than full-body scans.

I'm not a doctor, and I personally do find the idea of full-body scans very appealing, but I also know that if the scan detects a possible cancer, I wouldn't be able to just ignore it if the doctor tells me it's likely ok. Any time I felt any pain or any sort of symptom in that general area, I know I would worry about it. Maybe that's worth it for the potential life-saving results, but it definitely is a cost of this type of scan that needs to be acknowledged.

Claude Opus 4.7 3 months ago

its cyber capabilities are not as advanced as those of Mythos Preview (indeed, during its training we experimented with efforts to differentially reduce these capabilities)

I wonder if this means that it will simply refuse to answer certain types of questions, or if they actually trained it to have less knowledge about cyber security. If it's the latter, then it would be worse at finding vulnerabilities in your own code, assuming it is willing to do that.

Turing Oversold? 5 years ago

He was focused on using his machines to efficiently generate mathematical tables. It was Ada who realized the potential of the analytical engine as a universal computer. She even wrote that given a good numeric representation for sound, one could program the analytical engine to generate algorithmic music based on mathematical rules. Babbage himself wrote examples of programs for the engine, but they were all very simple examples of numerical calculations that would be applicable for generating mathematical tables.

That is simply false on a basic level. That notice by the CDC says the EXACT OPPOSITE of your comment. They're recommending that labs switch to a multiplex test that can screen for both flu and covid at the same time because PCR only detects SARS CoV 2.

I maintain a pretty optimal WLB at my current job (I don't remember the last time I've done any work outside of normal work hours) but I do like having work Slack and calendar on my phone. In my case I feel it adds freedom to my day since it makes it easier to just go run a quick mid-day errand without worrying that you're missing a meeting or something. I didn't used to have any of it on my phone because I always heard it was bad psychologically, but as a result I always felt nervous stepping away from my desk for too long because I'd have no way of knowing if someone needed me. I think if I was in a position where I was asked to do work outside of work hours I'd feel differently about this though, but the extent of my after work Slack is mostly requesting days off and browsing some announcement threads.

That's a misinterpretation of the statistics. The most vulnerable population has a much higher vaccination rate than the population as a whole, with well over 90% of Israelis over 70 vaccinated. People over 70 have a much higher chance of being hospitalized, so to only see 60% of hospitalizations be of vaccinated people shows how effective the vaccine still is at preventing serious disease.

I asked my dad this who's a virologist, and he said this isn't known yet, but it's likely that there isn't really a correlation. The symptoms of the vaccine and the antibody production are caused by two different mechanisms. The first is the innate response which reacts to any antigen and triggers inflammation, fever, etc. The second is the adaptive immune response where your body develops memory B cells which produce neutralizing antibodies that bind to the spike protein and prevent it from entering a cell, and killer T cells which identify infected cells and kill them before the virus can replicate and spread. If you didn't get a fever from the vaccine, it just means that the innate response didn't cause noticeable symptoms, but it doesn't mean that the adaptive response wasn't strong.

A main difference in this research is that it's very difficult to actually measure the levels of neutralizing antibodies. Traditional antibody tests aren't able to tell if you have high neutralizing antibody levels yet, as a BSL3 lab is needed to perform these experiments with live virus. Antibody levels aren't always a clear indication of level of immunity, so this was still an open question with COVID.

This study has serious implications for a recommendation for a third dose. It was known for a while that a 3rd dose increases levels of neutralizing antibodies, but this study now ties that increase to a significant boost in immunity which has implications for the new variants like Delta. It means that likely we don't need to wait 3-6 months for approval for a new strain specific booster. We can just use the doses we already have to bump up the neutralizing antibody level.

It also has implications for how long the 2-dose or 1-dose regimens are good for, since it has been known that the neutralizing antibody level does tend to dip after around 6-9 months, so this gives more evidence for the benefit of getting a booster after around 6 months to keep neutralizing antibody levels high.

It's just semantics. A brain is just a "simulation" of a consciousness. Unless you want to bring religion / spirituality into the discussion, there's absolutely nothing to suggest that there's something magical about the human brain that allows it to support a consciousness in a way that a hypothetical man-made computer cannot.