How do you respond to people that say the profit motive is what drives innovation, and in the long term we’d rather have better, novel treatments sooner
Profit motives for medical / biotech research, yes. What innovations have insurance companies made in the last 100 years besides to squeeze out more profit?
A lot of that research is primarily done in university labs, mind you. On the taxpayer dime. Somehow the research escapes a lab and Pfizer manages to put some stupid name on it and reaps billions in profit.
It requires billions of dollars and a decade+ to translate academic research into a clinical outcome. Most academic research is not reproducible or robust enough to even be replicated outside of the lab that performed it - and this will only be discovered after spending millions of dollars of private funding.
I get that completely - and you're completely correct: most research isn't ready for clinical trials let alone commercial distribution. And even then, only a small amount of reproduce-able work matures into a finalized product. Yes, there needs to be financial incentives for the private sector to find promising work, and funding the next steps once it escapes the University ecosystem. I'm all for that. But as a society we need to be clear about where the initial funding comes from, and who those are who pay for that first round of funding are.
I'm not trying to go to the mat for Big Pharma, but I'm certain that they do a lot more than slapping a stupid name on the research right at the end of the pipeline. Most universities can't fund sustained, large or diverse clinical trials, for instance; they also can't generally do the long-term post-market research/surveillance once a drug has been released.
So the only contribution of Big Pharma is that they take the risk, collect the funding and do some administrative stuff. It sounds to me like we can get rid of this middle man with some well managed governmental institutions.
> So the only contribution of Big Pharma is that they take the risk
That seems to me like the big thing you're kind of glossing over. Like I said, I don't really want to go to the mat for them, but I'm sure there's plenty of risks Big Pharma corps have taken buying up research they thought would pay off and then failed to bring to market.
Maybe it'd be better to have governments buying the research and bringing it to market, but as this subthread hints at, profit is one of the big motivations for researchers to do what they do. Hopefully the government would still be paying big bucks for the research, and hopefully the taxpayers wouldn't vote in someone who wants to gut whatever arm of the government is responsible for that after enough failed purchases.
>and hopefully the taxpayers wouldn't vote in someone who wants to gut whatever arm of the government is responsible for that after enough failed purchases.
Most pharma companies can't even fund clinical trials. That's why big pharma (Pfizers of the world) are more like holdings companies that buy smaller pharma companies (biotechs) with novel molecules and they big pharma eats the risk of putting the smaller companies' inventions through trials.
There should be a method + requirement to pay royalties back to public funding for basic research, but pharmaceutical companies really bear 99% of the risk and complexity of bringing a drug to market. It's not all that expensive to find molecules that might do something useful, it's obscenely expensive and risky to prove one does something useful.
CRISPR was obviously commercializable, most academic research is quite a bit further from commercialization and some tiny portion ends up being extremely valuable way downstream nonetheless.
That's a fair criticism, although I've worked in both industry and research -- a lot more directed practical research to reach commercial viability happens in industry, whereas a lot of the fundamental research happens in academia. And as a sibling commented, a lot of unreproducible research comes out of academia. Also, there are spinoffs from academia regularly that allow the original researchers to profit directly from their efforts.
Still, that doesn't justify insurance companies siphoning off money for their shareholders. Especially in these cases where they own/control both the insurance company and the pharmaceutical distribution.
I'm not sure about UHC specifically, but insurance companies do innovate. Some insurers have invested pretty heavily in biotech and wearables, and they're also a big driver behind telehealth/remote health monitoring tech. We can cynically say that they're just in it because they want to reduce costs – and that's probably true – but it'd be simplistic to say investing to reduce costs is purely selfish.
We are talking about delivering care, not innovative medical technology. The biggest single target for innovation in care delivery is to get rid of private insurers.
By informing them that most of that is funded by taxes and students doing all the work, not corporations and not based on their revenue. If anything, they have an incentive not to make better treatments because better often means less profitable.
You can't possibly argue in good faith that being able to provide less than 0.1% of novel treatments is somehow more valuable than providing good, standard healthcare with already existing drugs and treatment protocols to the other 99.9% at a sane cost.
> He’ll remain an adviser to the Sonos board through June and get paid $7,500 per month until then. He’ll be paid a cash severance of about $1.9 million, and his unvested shares in Sonos will vest.
Not the OP, but if you have a little budget, HifiBerry's AMP2 [0] sounds great. After my dad gave his Hi-Fi stack to me (due to having no space at home), I built a small system with this and connected to a set of passive 2.1 Kenwood Hi-Fi speakers for him. They sound amazing, plus HiFiBerry OS is superb for connectivity.
I just want to note that software is built with collaboration of Bang & Olufsen. Both hardware and software oozes quality.
The hifiberry documentation is a mess. Let’s say you want to get rid of your Sonos system and start at zero with a Pi (it’s not my first one)… which features could be replaced by hb? What hardware should I buy? Which licenses?
I don't have a Sonos system, but I'll try my best to run it down for you.
Platform has two starting points: Raspberry Pi + AMPs (or DACs) or Beocrate [0]
If you go with the former, you need a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 (even 2GB models are OK), HiFiberry board of your choice, a case (available from HifBerry), and a PSU in 19-24V range.
My setup is as follows:
- Kenwood 2.1 passive Hi-Fi speakers.
- HifBerry AMP2
- Raspberry Pi 4 / 2GB
- Steel case for Raspberry Pi + Board
- 20V Meanwell power supply with a barrel jack.
If you prefer to use your own amp or powered speakers, there are DACs which you can directly connect to line level inputs. They support the same OS, and some are even support XLR outputs or multichannel I/O for production/studio needs.
If you want go all in, you can add a DSP into the mix which allows parametric eqaualization, and room compensation with optional USB Mic (similar to how B&O speakers measure room to self-optimize). Also you can design your own DSP chains and upload to the DSP.
Regardless of the OS you run (HifBerry OS or HifiBerry OS64 (which is beta)), you get the following services out of the box:
- Roon
- AirPlay
- Spotify Deamon
- Spotify Connect
- RadioBrowser & TuneIn support
- Squeezelite for Logitech/Squeezebox
- Music (for local files)
- Bluetooth
Spotify daemons require a premium (Spotify) subscription and Roon needs a license/subscription.
There are also extensions, but I don't use any of them and don't know what's available.
I use the system mostly with MPD to play music from my and dad's personal collections. MPD can also connect to a Samba server.
If you have any other questions, I will try my best to answer. Hope this helps.
Fiber keeps you feeling satiated for longer. Also, it’s bulking effect reduces your caloric intake while consuming the meal since the feeling of fullness can be reached with fewer calories.
Fiber fills you up now by taking up physical volume. Try eating the equivalent of 200 calories of broc vs 200 calories of bread or pasta. The problem is that your body can't digest fiber so the digestive system moves it along quickly!
Fat and protein extends the feeling of satiation by turning off the hormonal signals for hunger.
If you eat an apple, try it with two tablespoons of peanut butter (the kind with only peanuts and salt). If you eat a serving of carrots, add two whole hard boiled eggs.
That is adding so many calories though? Adding the 2 tablespoons of peanut butter is another 200 calories.
An example, im targeting 2200-2400 calories. with 3 600 calorie meals (which tbh is pretty hard to do 7 or 800 is more likely) , there isn't that much buffer to add stuff like thhat.
Is it? An apple is only ~100 calories. 300 calories. You could make it a full meal by adding 500 calories of chicken or beans/lentils + rice to get to your 800 target and that's a very solid meal. A whole can of tuna in water is only ~200-250 calories and another option to add more protein.
No, not over a certain level (low/no fibre would be it's own type of bad).
Carbs give a type of satiety I can't replicate with unlimited fat/protein/fibre. IMHO it's not actually hunger/stomach related but relief from withdrawal symptoms. Carbs are CNS stimulants that trigger serotonin release and very addictive to me at least.
After fasting or eating keto for a sufficient duration this carb specific form of absence/satiety no longer exists. Hunger/appetite stops feeling like a gnawing craving desire, instead it feels like a more neutral empty/weak signal.
Anyway, if eating carbs, best bang for buck satiety is the potato.
> I can run Qwen-2.5-coder 14B on my M2 Max MacBook Pro with 32gb at ~16 tok/sec. At least in my circle, people are budget conscious
Qwen 2.5 32B on openrouter is $0.16/million output tokens. At your 16 tokens per second, 1 million tokens is 17 continuous hours of output.
Openrouter will charge you 16 cents for that.
I think you may want to reevaluate which is the real budget choice here
Edit: elaborating, that extra 16GB ram on the Mac to hold the Qwen model costs $400, or equivalently 1770 days of continuous output. All assuming electricity is free
It's a no brainer for me cause I already own the MacBook and I don't mind waiting a few extra seconds. Also, I didn't buy the mac for this purpose, it's just my daily device. So yes, I'm sure OpenRouter is cheaper, but I just don't have to think about using it as long as the open models are reasonable good for my use. Of course your needs may be quite different.
> You might be surprised to learn that manufacturing is larger industry in the US than our tech industry, or that our domestic oil industry is even larger
US oil and gas industry has $240bn in annual revenues. This is about comparable to how much Americans spend at Apple (almost $200bn)
This tells you that annual production of just crude oil is > $300B/yr. The US also has plenty of downstream processing after production (https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pnp_unc_dcu_nus_m.htm), which means that total annual revenue must be significantly greater than this.
Types are a useful design tool to explore the problem domain first, while the rest are details that emerge from that. Sure, if one starts with architecture, you're right. The software architect needs to consider these first. The programmer on the other hand ideally expects those as inputs.
When tasked with wearing on multiple hats (architect, programmer, user), I agree with your point. From a programmer's point of view, however, (abstract) types are IMHO indeed a much more useful tool as they cover many of the other concerns (policies, performance, etc.), too.
It's interesting that you think about those things without even understanding how you are going to solve the user's problem first. Aka functional requirements.
- encoding invariants and define valid evolutions of the codebase
- memory safety without a garbage collector (see Rust’s Affine type system)
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