admiralteal

admiralteal, hace 3 meses

The wide public has accepted calling all LLMs as "AI". LLMs are probably the best tool to create quality, native-sounding translators. Since LLMs are called "AI", modern translation engines which are made using LLMs will be called AI.

The other guy is just being a prescriptivist with language. It's a sentiment I sympathize with and which others have made very coherently, but at some point we have to just accept that the "buzzword" is the way it is going to get used and stop getting bent out of shape about it.

admiralteal, hace 6 meses

you - Rahn - oos

You don't even need to change the spelling, just pronounce it a way that better resembles the underlying Greek. Problem is, no English-speaker needs to think about pronunciation for the other planets because the latin is just pronounced phonetically.

It's weird that it's the one Greek-named planet. If we're changing things up, it should just be Caelus to match the others.

admiralteal, hace 8 meses

The study is very clearly talking about non-diabetic patients, too..

These are almost certainly people who want the weight loss primarily for aesthetic reasons rather than health ones, and may face these terrible health complications as a result. Makes it even worse, I think.

You're almost certainly better off somewhat "fat" than skinny by way of a drug like this. Especially given that "fat" is an entirely subjective measure and the "objective" measures like BMI overweight/obese are not based on points of any kind of phase change in health outcomes but are just somewhat arbitrary statistical variations. Dramatic interventions like these should be reserved for people that have dramatic need, at least until we have such an intervention safe enough and with few enough side-effects for over-the-counter sale.

admiralteal, hace 10 meses

I mean, we're overweight in significant part because being overweight is simply a defined point. It's based on 1970s statistical analysis of the weights of straight white men. It's defined based on BMI, a statistical scale, and not based on any kind of weight threshold where we start seeing a meaningful phase shift in outcomes. You could get rid of a lot of obesity by just raising the setpoint of "obese" on the scales and your new system wouldn't necessarily be more or less medically sound/evidence based than the current one.

Even this article is making sweeping claims based on a tiny cohort of a nondiverse group of people. It's... just not interesting science. Very little science around weight is particularly good. Worse, it has some really obvious logical flaws. There's an implication here that eating fewer carbs increases your risk of death -- it could be the opposite, that people who are more likely to die eat fewer carbs. There's a reason people use the word "healthy" to describe big appetites -- not because gorging yourself is good, but because poor appetite is an almost universal sign of bad health. And the "40% increase" in cancer from high-fat diets may represent a very small increase in actual total risk of cancer because these factors are already so damned low.

Most people should just worry a lot less about how fat other people are because it's really none of their business. We should be making sure people have access to healthy, fresh food and that processed food companies face strict regulatory oversight for predatory practices just because keeping people fed well is something we value, not because we hate fatness.

admiralteal, hace 10 meses

Any time you see any science article -- especially cosmology stuff -- claim some law of nature is being "proved wrong" or breaking down or failing or anything like that.... it just means an edge case was found that has some tiny but statistically significant deviation from our models. It means there's a missing piece of the puzzle that until recently was so inconsequential that we didn't even know we were overlooking it, but that the rest of the picture is becoming so sharply focused that its absence can no longer be overlooked. Or it means the observational data simply had errors in it.

"THE SCIENTISTS WERE WRONG" in all of its various forms makes for great clickbait, but it's only clickbait. We're highly, highly unlikely to be finding any new models for cosmology that totally upend our understanding of the universe as we continue to shine light through the fog at the edge of our understanding. There's vanishingly few cases of a scientist being genuinely wrong, and even fewer cases where the theory they were wrong about has any meaningful mass appeal.

Articles like this one set my hackles up. I get it, but "an observed system does not move precisely according to the predictions of our current best models of general relativity" isn't much of a headline, especially when the research was published by a guy who's heavily invested in proving MOND right in spite of compelling evidence that dark matter exists and the modified mechanical formulas aren't needed.

admiralteal, hace 10 meses

Does MOND actually address dark energy in any way? I don't think it does or is even particularly intended to do so. As far as I know, MOND does not even pretend to have an explanation for Hubble expansion, but if there's some fringe of it trying to do so I'd be interested to see. There's no particular need to introduce dark energy into this discussion though. It's mostly just a different thing.

Dark matter is an extraordinarily strong theory that has a lot of pretty clear confirming evidence. Euclid is out there right now gathering the exact kind of observational data needed to further advance our understanding, which is very exciting since we know there's fuzzy edges at the fringes that need to be brought into focus.

This paper aside, MOND basically explains the motion of galaxies and little else. Dark Matter explains the motion of galaxies AND a litany of other observable phenomenon. The cutting edge of MOND, as it exists now, still relies on dark matter to explain most of those phenomenon. It has no explanation for the absence of dark matter in galaxies but its presence in things like galactic clusters to trigger lensing effects or the lack of isotropy in the CMB.

I imagine this is how Curtis felt debating Shapley though. One side of the debate shows that their theory explains FAR more, but does require we vastly expand our horizon of understanding. The other says no, I can come up with an alternate explanation one at a time until we do not have to expand our horizon. Ad hoc theories are inherently weak and should be met with skepticism.

admiralteal, hace 11 meses

This is the Twitter effect.

The more the engaging and respectful leave for greener pastures, the more concentrated the bile left behind is... the more someone trying to be engaging or respectful is compelled to leave.

The only way out of the death spiral for Reddit is to either totally revamp the way they engage the community (not going to happen) or else to completely give up to being a mil-deep platform primarily for advertisers, trolls, and bots.

admiralteal, hace 11 meses

For anyone uncertain of terminology, "organic" does not mean or even necessarily imply life.

For example, "organic" molecules -- tholins -- are the reason Pluto's got red on it, and there's pretty close to zero speculation of life out there. In Pluto's case, they form just from UV interactions with methane. Both methane and the tholins produced from it are fairly abundant in our solar system out past the sun's frost band.

What this does indicate is even more evidence that Mars at least has at some point been a place suitable for life. These are among the ingredients you need to make a big old bowl of primordial soup.