In studies like this I always wonder if they have the causation reversed. Is the exercise staving off the dementia or are people who are healthy enough (mental and physical health) to exercise in the first place less likely to get dementia?
Fascinating. I have a prompt running on GPT4 turbo that takes an input text and outputs a report in a tabular format that includes some summary and analysis, and on about 1 in 50 runs, after the table headers it'll output a few hundred newlines and then spit out some Korean or Thai text, which, if I put it in Google translate can be pretty weird (i.e. it has nothing to do with the input text).
This varies a lot between cultures and jurisdictions obviously. But not even half of Dells emplyees are in the US, so presumably a large chunk of these layoffs will be elsewhere.
Dealerships should not exist and only exist due to terrible laws making it illegal for most automakers to sell direct. And there is a reason the dealer lobby has fought Tesla's direct selling model tooth and nail.
My rule when buying a car from a dealer is refuse everything they try to sell you. They will basically hold you hostage up to and including telling you that you are being foolish and irresponsible for refusing warranties and gap insurance and whatever else. (I even have had them take my wife aside to tell her how irresponsible I was being). But you have to ride it out.
> Dealerships should not exist and only exist due to terrible laws making it illegal for most automakers to sell direct.
Dealerships exist because the automakers wanted them, and those laws exist due to the automakers' foul play.
Automakers want to make cars. They don't want to manage stores, deal with thousands of different municipalities' rules for selling and registering vehicles, repair vehicles they've already sold, or store millions of cars in inventory until they're sold. They let someone else do all that, and it lets them run their factories at a nice even pace with essentially guaranteed buyers for their output.
Automakers did, in the 1990s, start to get jealous of the money their dealerships were making on the back of their products. Ford and GM both opened factory stores competing directly with their own dealers. They knew just where to open those stores and what to sell at them, because they had full knowledge of where their successful dealers were, and what they were best at selling at those dealerships. The franchisees were taking all the risk in selecting sites and financing inventory just for their franchisor to swoop in and undercut their business with their own store next door.
That unfairness is what led the dealers to lobby for those state laws banning the automaker from competing with its own franchisees.
If the dealerships don't like it, they should learn advanced engineering and industrial manufacturing, and make their own cars. If they can't, then they should have been let to fail since they couldn't adapt.
I don't understand how you can say that. If McDonalds opened a new restaurant next door to each of their highest grossing existing restaurants, and charged lower prices there, do you think that would be completely fair to the franchisees that spent millions of dollars building and operating those restaurants for McDonalds? Why would it ever be fair for a franchisor to act like that?
Unless the franchise has a contract with the franchisor that states non-compete, then it is not only fair but completely legal.
A franchise had the capital to make their own restaurant but chose to be subservient to a franchisor instead. That's on them. Owning a business has great rewards, but is supposed to have great risk too.
It is time we brought the risk back. Policy the is cut throat to business is good policy. Businesses should be ravenously competing, failing, and going bankrupt. There should be no bailouts. There should be no patents. It should be survival of the fittest -- as it is for the poorest of society.
The last time I bought a car I wanted to pay cash, and the sales person gave me this wet puppy look. So I negotiated a 5 year finance rate where I calculated it would be net-zero in difference to me, literally; let's say it was 50K in cash, so I would pay $25K now, and finance $25K over the next 5 years, and they would get ~2% more, which in the grand scheme of inflation, meant a net-zero loss on my purchasing power.
I considered it a win-win situation, since it left me with more money in the bank, the sale person got their kick backs from the finance company (they proceeded to give me the free replacement car mats and other freebies associated with the finance deal), and I got positive credit ratings.
Isn’t the pain of even thinking about the existence of a monthly payment a true cost? I’d so much rather just pay upfront and never think about it again.
I've never had an auto loan, is there a reason they couldn't just take the financing to get the incentives and then just pay it in full the next month?
They can come with early payoff penalties. It seems weird, but a loan is a thing that can be and often is packaged up and sold. If you pay it off, they have nothing to sell. Resale value of your loan is a factor in how much it costs.
Asset-backed securities are a strange world of value based on value that can either lead to market collapse (because someone misvalued them, see 2007-2008) or market efficiency (because more people can afford debt for stuff).
I only sort of agree. Yes you can setup autopay but it's still there, and you still see charges on your account. Perhaps this is minor, but I still prefer to have no additional things out there floating around that require any thought.
I don't understand why this is your concern, to the point where you were willing to take on debt to satisfy this stranger's arbitrary incentive.
Please don't take this the wrong way but I think you might want to revaluate if it really was a win-win, or rather if you caved to their pressure tactics and now you're lying to yourself about it.
Dealerships should exist, their exclusive right to sell cars should not.
Customers should have the option to buy from a factory and to buy from a dealership.
Maybe I need a car now or want a curated selection instead of infinite choice, but I also want to buy from the factory and get my dream car or work truck in the exact specification I need without the dealer markup.
By allowing the choice they would be forced to compete and that should be good for the customer!
Don't go to dealerships that play these games. Seek out dealers that focus on business sales where the direct to consumer is not the bulk of their business. A lot of countryside dealers (deep country) have the same attitude. They let you drive the vehicle, if you want it they will find financing if you need them to. Sign the papers and leave. They will probably pitch some accessories and a warrantee extension. Zero drama. At those dealerships if they try that shit (sneaking in charges or playing any games) they could lose generations of business from a person. City dealerships are a pressure cooker because they have so much competition. If someone leaves they are never coming back. There is no philosophy of repeat business from a particular customer. If that happens it's just gravy.
No, dealerships exist so that the manufacturer doesn’t have a monopoly on the sales, and especially post-sale warranty service, of your car. Witness Tesla’s service deception and customer abuse along the Rivian shit show as plain evidence that monopolies are bad.
It’s certainly the case that the Tesla service centers suck, and perhaps they would be better if they were independent and competed with each other. But I’m not sure what this has to do with new car sales. I think my personal preference would be to buy a car from the manufacturer (the actual thing I want to buy, i.e. the car, is identical no matter what route it takes from a manufacturer to me), but perhaps service should be a competitive market. After all, a Tesla owner is not buying corporate Tesla service — they’re buying service from a specific customer service operation and a specific set of technicians.
I think automakers should be allowed to sell direct but most prefer to sell through franchised dealers. Building out a nationwide dealer network and holding inventory takes an enormous amount of capital.
The dealership service centre's are only good for oil changes that cost a premium. They don’t the time to care about anything other than routine servicing at a huge markup. Got an oddball issue? Your average self run mechanic is a much better option.
I wouldn't put the blame entirely on the dealerships. The automakers are complicit in this whole thing too. Without the dealers there is no service model.
It's mostly on the car manufacturers. Most of them seem to want the dealership model nowadays.
There's no such laws in place requiring independent dealerships in Canada. Aside from the usual direct sales car companies, Genesis dealerships in Canada are all owned by Genesis Canada and I can order a car direct from Genesis. Yet most of the big names in cars operate with independent dealerships, as well as practically every motorcycle manufacturer as far as I know. In fact, Mercedes-Benz Canada just sold off all their Toronto dealerships to a AWIN/Zanchin [1] and AFAIK it wasn't because they were forced to.
I don't have any real insight into why this is the case. Most I can say is that if direct sales was so lucrative for car makers, one has to wonder why they didn't take advantage of it here. That being said, FortNine released a video on why motorcycle dealerships work this way; I suspect a lot of it applies to cars as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meHYBhcpdvQ
If manufacturers sold direct they would have to book all inventory until it sold. Right now, dealerships work with the banks to finance inventory until it sells. Part of the reason they are so aggressive...they are paying interest on each vehicle daily.
The manufacturer gets cold hard cash for the vehicles, now. They are off the books except for the warrantee.
This is cool but definitely can see where you're running into some of the same AI tendencies that I've run into in my own (much less fun) projects.
There's some variety in here but AI in general really struggles to vary in tone within a single output. I'll be interested to see if the project can overcome that tendency.
The scoring - AI HATES to give things low scores. It's too nice. In my experience it does better if you have named outcomes e.g. negative, neutral, positive and then convert those to numbers. A more interesting solution might involve logprobs where you ask "do you like this person yes/no" and then use the logprobs value on yes/no to measure the AI's "uncertainty" about the match.
Maybe AI is "losing steam" but this is an opinion column masquerading as news, with one or two quotes (from e.g. noted AI skeptic Gary Marcus) or anecdotes supporting each section.
It would be equally possible to collect a series of similar but opposite data points to assert that AI is in fact gaining steam.
Of course it's an opinion column. But how is it masquerading as news? All opinion columns have a central thesis that is supported by facts. This is a thesis about the current state and future of AI. Like any opinion piece, the author chooses facts that support the thesis.
Sure. I just think one should interrogate and really understand the data points being used to support this claim. Let's see how they look when presented as bullet points:
- Nvidia's Revenue and AI Spending: Sequoia says "the industry spent $50 billion on chips from Nvidia to train AI in 2023, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue." - This comes from some Sequoia presentation which it appears was originally cited in an earlier WSJ article and then has been repeated everywhere. It would be nice to see that presentation and the context of this data in that presentation. And yes, this nascent industry in essentially its first year of commercialization brought in less than was invested in anticipation of future growth
- Synthetic Data for Training: "To train next generation AIs, engineers are turning to 'synthetic data,' which is data generated by other AIs. That approach didn’t work to create better self-driving technology for vehicles, and there is plenty of evidence it will be no better for large language models," says Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist. aka Gary Marcus a noted AI skeptic
- Incremental Gains in AI Models: "AIs like ChatGPT rapidly got better in their early days, but what we’ve seen in the past 14-and-a-half months are only incremental gains," says Marcus. "The truth is, the core capabilities of these systems have either reached a plateau, or at least have slowed down in their improvement." aka Gary Marcus a noted AI skeptic
- Convergence in AI Model Performance: "Further evidence of the slowdown in improvement of AIs can be found in research showing that the gaps between the performance of various AI models are closing. All of the best proprietary AI models are converging on about the same scores on tests of their abilities, and even free, open-source models, like those from Meta and Mistral, are catching up." No citation provided for this "research".
- Commoditization: "A mature technology is one where everyone knows how to build it. Absent profound breakthroughs—which become exceedingly rare—no one has an edge in performance." A broad generalization.
- AI Startups Facing Turmoil: "Some AI startups have already run into turmoil, including Inflection AI—its co-founder and other employees decamped for Microsoft in March. The CEO of Stability AI, which built the popular image-generation AI tool Stable Diffusion, left abruptly in March. Many other AI startups, even well-funded ones, are apparently in talks to sell themselves." People at a couple of start-ups are moving around. Unsourced general claim that unnamed AI startups are looking to sell themselves (is this actually bad news?)
- High Operational Costs: "The bottom line is that for a popular service that relies on generative AI, the costs of running it far exceed the already eye-watering cost of training it... analysts believe delivering AI answers on those searches will eat into the company’s margins." Unsourced "analysts". Would be interesting to see the context of this discussion but also it is not unusual for investment in a new wave of growth to eat into margins initially
- Survey Data on AI Use: "A recent survey conducted by Microsoft and LinkedIn found that three in four white-collar workers now use AI at work. Another survey, from corporate expense-management and tracking company Ramp, shows about a third of companies pay for at least one AI tool, up from 21% a year ago.
This suggests there is a massive gulf between the number of workers who are just playing with AI, and the subset who rely on it and pay for it." Two cherry-picked surveys conducted for marketing purposes jammed together to make an unrelated claim.
- Limited Revenue Growth: "OpenAI doesn’t disclose its annual revenue, but the Financial Times reported in December that it was at least $2 billion, and that the company thought it could double that amount by 2025.
That is still a far cry from the revenue needed to justify OpenAI’s now nearly $90 billion valuation." It is completely normal for the leading edge company showing massive growth in a nascent field to have a huge valuation. It doesn't always work out well for that company but this is expected whether the company is ultimately a success or not and the ability to tap that valuation improves the likelihood of success
- Productivity and Job Replacement: "Evidence suggests AI isn’t nearly the productivity booster it has been touted as, says Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. While these systems can help some people do their jobs, they can’t actually replace them." Non-specific "evidence" is cited here.
- Challenges in AI Usage: "AIs still make up fake information, which means they require someone knowledgeable to use them. Also, getting the most out of open-ended chatbots isn’t intuitive, and workers will need significant training and time to adjust." Author assertion
- Historical Patterns in Technology Adoption: "Changing people’s mindsets and habits will be among the biggest barriers to swift adoption of AI. That is a remarkably consistent pattern across the rollout of all new technologies." Author assertion
I have direct experience with this and it is indeed a miracle. What's interesting is that the protocol largely emerged outside the regulatory channels, with a handful of doctors worldwide developing it once the science became clear that exposure could help and more and more offering it to patients every year. These allergists have carefully figured out regimens that work and it can take a year of daily dosing, with dose sizes increasing twice monthly, until one can safely eat, say, a handful of peanuts.
There's still today another camp: Many allergists still preach avoidance however and put fear into worried parents about the dangers of oral immunotherapy.
Because it can be hard to find an office that will run your immunotherapy program for you, or costly if you do, many parents are doing it on their own, following dosing protocols they find in Facebook groups or on YouTube. The ones I've seen have been supportive and helpful, not quackery.
Meanwhile the medical establishment is finding ways to monetize this immunotherapy by turning, for example, peanut doses into pharmaceuticals, e.g. Palforzia, which is a recently FDA approved "food allergy treatment" and is in fact simply peanut protein.
Oral immunotherapy is indeed dangerous. Eosinophilic esophagitis is real. Anaphylaxis is common. It's a long, tedious road, with daily dosing for years, and in many people the treatment ends in failure rendering the effort wasted.
Although many do achieve remission, there is no guarantee that the allergy is gone for good. The immunity obtained by immunotherapy is not necessarily the same as natural immunity. It may not be complete and it may not be long lasting. The immune system has a long, long memory and we do not have any reliable tests to determine if anyone's immunity is permanent. For that reason allergists recommend continuing dosing indefinitely to maintain immunity, and continuing to carry an epi-pen. For the rest of your life. You will get sick of peanut butter.
All that said, we are doing sublingual immunotherapy for our son. But I am hoping that within his lifetime new treatments are developed that will free him from allergies completely.
Precise control of the immune system would be the holy grail of medicine IMO. Dysfunctions of the immune system are at the root of so many diseases, not just allergies. If the immune system could be easily trained to ignore or attack arbitrary targets at will it could likely cure almost any infection or cancer. And I bet it could be useful in treating the diseases of aging as well.
> There's still today another camp: Many allergists still preach avoidance however and put fear into worried parents about the dangers of oral immunotherapy.
Because immunotherapy can be dangerous, even when conducted in a doctor's office with supervision. I know two people with serious adverse effects requiring getting rushed to the ER.
We think we know a lot about the human body, and we do, but our immune and nervous system and its myriads of interaction paths are to a large part a mystery, with most of what we think we "know" being observed knowledge without understanding the foundation.
I asked our doctor about immunotherapy and she urged against it saying it was lots of trips each week, risky, unlikely to work and the benefits were limited.
"Breakthrough Therapy Designation" is a regulatory term. It's definitely good news, but it's also a pretty common occurrence that the FDA designates a breakthrough drug, and it does not guarantee that drug's ultimate approval.
It's also not really "news". It's a development that incrementally smoothes the path for what is still a highly uncertain outcome. And per the linked article it appears to be based on interim data in a phase 1/2 trial. Very early.
There are many drugs that look promising at this stage (that's why the breakthrough designation exists!) But this piece of news is unremarkable. Merus, the company behind Petosemtamab, alone has like seven cancer drugs in various stages of development.
And there are probably hundreds of cancer drugs in development at any given time.
So this is just a mechanical write-up of a regulatory checkpoint for a drug that's like 30% of the way to approval and is among many, many other cancer drugs all sitting at different points along the same continuum.
HN is really random, but also the submitter is an author whose posts are regularly submitted to HN and is a participant (I believe) in a trial for the drug in the article. The regular updates (and the author’s participation in threads) have endeared him to the community.
there is no way of avoiding it man. You invest in tech and you get skynet, you invest in biology, you get biotics... tough call for me. as i like the brutalist design of terminator but being passed around amongst famous historical figures as their f#kboi for eternity has its own appealas long as you never run into Seth Rogen...
Don't forget that you can score points with the basilisk by actively spreading awareness of its existence (and thereby ensnaring more people in its gambit). ~
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