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R_Man77

11 karma · joined January 8, 2026

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R_Man77··on Open-source 3D-printed portable MRI machine built for under $70k
Unfortunately the utility of MRIs (for human diagnostic purposes) does not scale linearly with power at least on the lower end. You need a certain resolution to reach a level of confidence to make a diagnosis and act upon it.

When radiologists or neurologists who are used to looking at slices from 3T machines have to look at lower quality images you can hear a few grumbles about how it would increase their diagnostic certainty about what they are looking at if they had just another slice or 2.

Still a very cool project though!

R_Man77··on Sam Altman responds to Anthropic's "Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude" ads
I am far from a SamA stan, but this line was pretty good a zinger:

"More Texans use ChatGPT for free than total people use Claude in the US, so we have a differently-shaped problem than they do. (If you want to pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro, we don't show you ads.)"

Why the incumbent BigCo AI CEO -- who has more Texans using their product than apparently Claude's entire US userbase -- needs to or rather is choosing to be using zingers to make a rebuttal about a competitor's ads is much more interesting than the content of the message itself... which is mostly corporate feelgood slop.

Is OpenAI's runway actually as bad as the doomers like Ed Zitron think it is? Is OpenAI's deal with NVIDIA actually on ice? Are they seeing something in the subscription data that is troubling? Maybe it's nothing and SamA just felt like doing some dunking on twitter today. Or maybe the stress levels around running openAI have increased.

I previously thought OpenAI was going to be fine and the doomers were wrong. I still think the race is theirs to lose since they have very strong branding and userbase right now. But this is a very weak signal that gives me more pause about OpenAI's future than any of the doomsayer articles have.

I give a slightly higher weight to my psychoanalysis of the company's CEO's actions because none of the doomer articles have access to material nonpublic information or company internals to truly opine on the financial health of a multibillion dollar enterprise.

R_Man77··on ChatGPT Health
Since someone else asked and you said you didn't remember, do you think he may have had Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH)? And the surgery which he had may have been a VP shunt (ventricular-peritoneal) -- something to move fluid away from his brain?

Quite a mouthful for the layman and the symptoms you are describing would fit. NPH has one of my favorite mnemonic in medicine for students learning about the condition, describing the hallmark symptoms as: "Wet, Wobbly and Wacky."

Wet referring to urinary incontinence, Wobbly referring to ataxia/balance issues and Wacky referring to encephalopathy (which could mimic dementia symptoms).