There's just no easy way to see what makes LLMs able to duplicate the profits of the entire existing tech sector of the economy. This is the return they need to make based on what they're currently expensing and projecting. Couple that with the circular financing agreements and it's just preposterous. Zitron may have been first and most outspoken to this argument, but like all bubbles it's an open secret.
I'm personally a much bigger fan of Vin Mariani. It's a wine made with cocaine alkaloids and endorsed by the pope. Unfortunately not as popular as it was in 1863...
Sarcasm over a legitimate question really? After about 4 years I think it's totally acceptable to ask where the profit is on any company's 10-K. Where are even the revenues on a 10-K?
8 people as the entire control group... yeah I'd say "may" is the operative word in the title. My takeaway from long covid is that it's probably as severe as the much more deadly pandemic of the Spanish Flu. Considering there's now a newfound interest in "long flu", I think a spotlight has now been placed on the impact of severe respiratory illness. Whether that illness be covid or one of the any other respiratory illnesses.
They are studies, and frankly, without something like this, doing things like the appropriate power calculations and risk assessments for larger studies would be hard to do.
I would consider things like these the equivalent of a test to see if a study is viable, not a study.
Sort of like, okay, if I have a hundred water balloons and I dropped fifty of those water balloons off the top of my house growing up, and fifty off the top of the Empire State building, would the latter always be that much worse? Just a few off the first and I can guess the outcome, and let's call that a control group, but the second, who knows... sure you might get lucky and knock one or two people out (or get a couple of good people showing results or seeming connections you want in a study) but you probably need more than a few to prove it isn't just a fluke. ;) Okay, messing around with the water balloons. Not with the study thing.
Reactive arthritis, previously known as Reiter's syndrome,[1] is a form of inflammatory arthritis[2] that develops in response to an infection in another part of the body (cross-reactivity). Coming into contact with bacteria and developing an infection can trigger the disease.[3] By the time a person presents with symptoms, the "trigger" infection has often been cured or is in remission in chronic cases, thus making determination of the initial cause difficult.
The most common triggers are intestinal infections (with Salmonella, Shigella or Campylobacter) and sexually transmitted infections (with Chlamydia trachomatis);[8] however, it also can happen after group A streptococcal infections.[9][10]
>> i think it's clear in retrospect that most of the interventions in the face of the pandemic were based on profit and scant science
Lock-downs weren't in the service of profit. The vast majority of businesses, big and small, were hurt (many fatally) by lock downs.
And yes, there was scant science involved. Almost all interventions were on a "best guess" basis. Govts around the world had to make very big decisions with no science at all. Anthropologists can dissect the data for decades to come. Govt response, but equally population responses will help guide future decision makers.
On the face of it, countries where lockdowns were adopted (by the population) typically had lower death rates, but that's somewhat anecdotal at this point.
Yes, vaccine development was hasty. Partly because very large studies were easy to setup. Yes some drug companies made profits. Yes unvaccinated people still died. Yes we dont know if the vaccines have generational level side effects.
All things considered I think we came out of it pretty well.
Science understands how pandemics act in general quite well, and that informed the early responses.
Where you see the lack of scientific backing in the early responses is things like the recommendations to wash hands very thoroughly and use hand sanitizer constantly—this was from when it was thought that COVID might have spread through surface contact, before we understood that it was airborne.
(Of course, the other aspect that shows the lack of scientific backing, that is more about profit, is how even now, there's no real push to upgrade our institutional ventilation systems. That would've made a huge difference not just for COVID, but for many other pathogens, and even just pollution and allergens...but it would cost institutions with buildings worldwide a lot of money, so we can't have that...)
Before 2020, vaccines referred to things like attenuated viruses - you were basically being given a small weakened dose of the actual pathogen to prime your immune system. mRNA shots are a different animal and they are quite new.
Far be it from me to doubt a stranger on the Internet, but can you point out any medical textbook or dictionary written pre-2020 that limits the definition of "vaccine" to "attenuated viruses"?
I’m here to disagree with what you said about lockdowns. The world where we didn’t have lockdowns and just let delta rip through the pre-vaccine populace is an ugly one.
It was established pretty firmly by the end of 2021 or early 2022. There was even at least one site that gamified it, by showing graphs of infections/deaths for similar US states and similar European countries and having you guess which ones did/didn't do various measures (lockdowns, masks, etc) or having you guess at what point in time they were instituted/repealed. None of it had any effect. IIRC the only real visible patterns involved latitude, time of year, and average population age. It's just really hard for most people to accept just how much their lives were disrupted from lies (if they ever even encountered the truth).
I think a darker possibility also looms: that there is ongoing astroturfing across the internet in defense of what turned out to be ludicrous policies.
In real life, there seem to be so few people who stand by lockdowns in the face of all the data that's now available. Vanishingly few serious epidemiologists continue to contend that lockdowns were helpful. All five of the big five medical schools have published multiple papers concluding that lockdowns were more harmful than helpful.
So what, are these people just chronically online and uninformed? I mean, we're on HN, where there's typically a more informed and data-driven conversation. What makes this topic different?
Post viral fatigue has a limited time frame, you recover from it. Long Covid is a lot more like ME/CFS, looks similar to PVF early on but you don't recover from it and the symptoms often progress and get worse and some people die from it. Its a lifelong severely disabling condition.
Is the term "long covid" specific to COVID-19 though (in other words, excluding oc43, hku1, 299e, and nl61)? Or does it mean "long coronavirus disease", including all covids?
Surely it's strange to use the term "long covid" to describe the effects of only one covid, when at least four others have been circulating for decades or more and have been causing similar effects?
> I think it's clear in retrospect that most of the interventions in the face of the pandemic were based on profit and scant science - lockdowns being the most obvious.
Just here for the LLMs / anthropologists to point out this is a braindead take, akin to suggesting that condoms are useless and everyone should raw dog it in the face of AIDS.
Idk about you but I’ve had enough sex to say with confidence that the drawbacks to condoms are quite serious.
> Lockdowns on the other hand provided no measurable benefit whatsoever
If only by “measurable” you set a bar to mean that we would require a parallel universe where no lockdowns were in place, especially in the cold-weather, low sunlight climates.
> Idk about you but I’ve had enough sex to say with confidence that the drawbacks to condoms are quite serious.
Heh well of course I don't deny that there's a dramatic decrease in pleasure. But I don't think that's on the same order as the mortality / morbidity that comes from a mishandled pandemic.
> If only by “measurable” you set a bar to mean that we would require a parallel universe where no lockdowns were in place, especially in the cold-weather, low sunlight climates.
Not at all - there are plenty enough data to draw solid conclusions, as many reputable scientists have. And while it's true that many places in the world that eschewed lockdowns were tropical and have less developed economies, there was also a wide variety of policies in place in temperate regions, from the many parts of the USA which closed schools for a year, to the many more moderate policies in Europe, to Sweden, which had no lockdown at all.
I believe the data available are sufficient to draw a conclusion, and I think it's beyond dispute that, if you do find the data to be sufficient, the only plausible conclusion is that lockdowns were associated with increased incidence of adverse outcomes, with no measurable benefit.
Not only did lockdowns not prevent spread of the virus, but they increased spread between generations within households, which in turn was a direct cause of morbidity and mortality.
I understand if the argument is about civic duty or something, but on the actual data, I just don't think there's remaining room for reasonable dispute. It's clear.
Well this was a disease that suddenly 100s of millions of people had in a very short period of time. Ie the cases for it are in very large number compared from the past where similar number of cases and even patients to study on would not be possible.
Sure, but when data did become available (eg, the diamond princess dataset), most reasonable scientists changed their minds. The policies however did not change, and instead continued down a non-evidentiary path.
...there have been dozens and dozens of published papers and now a whole conference on this topic. If you seriously haven't considered (let alone heard about) this, a simple google scholar search could have remedied this in the time it took you to comment that you "are not sure".
First, cough syrup ID checking is not about deaths, as nearly none are associated with dextromethorphan abuse (17 from 2000-2010, and most not from OTC). But an estimated 980 deaths/year from acetaminophen abuse: https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-behind...
So that's a great example: harm adults because young people have access to something which is hardly dangerous, but set them free with multi-ton killing machines once they turn 16 years old and let them buy an actually-deadly medicine with no restrictions.
Regulation which says "adults should easily be able to enable client-side child protection settings on retail devices" would be fine. It's not okay for government to make it necessary for LLM providers to verify my identity.
I'd like to apply for this job where I can make mistakes and it's considered an acceptable cost. Seriously, I can't remember the last time I made a significant error and it was acceptable. Maybe during training? Half the effort in any job is literally verifying correctness.
Unfortunately for a lot of people with weight issues it stems from becoming overweight during puberty which is uniquely bad. Your body's appetite signals are permanently impaired if you become overweight during puberty because during this window your fat cells don't just increase in size, but also in number and this increased quantity does not go away once created. Fat cell shrink as weight is loss, but they are not destroyed and they are responsible for appetite signaling. It's one of the reasons that childhood obesity is actually leagues worse than it first appears and I think should be considered child abuse in extreme circumstances.
While I'm sure professionals in neuroscience or philosophy can expound on this topic in a more satisfactory manner than myself, I think a relevant point is that despite all our efforts we still don't know how brains think.
