The correct way to read the sentence is “all cancers do not have the same causal mechanism” but people don’t talk like that because it’s off putting. Language is fluid and it’s generally on the reader to infer meaning from context. If we can do so reasonably, we do it, and we don’t need to then write additional posts chiding people over an interpretation that’s highly unlikely to be the intended one. I don’t mean to be pushy about this, btw. It’s just that pedantry can be valuable, but only if it isn’t abused.
It's a lot more interesting to actually look at the mechanisms, then just to play "I'll believe it when I see it." Right now there are huge drawdowns of storage capacity in the US and Europe and China. Those have finite lifespans, although China has a lot of storage (120 days at 2025 rates.) Also, Chinese refiners have stopped processing as much fuel. Lastly, there's been a big reduction in consumption of transport fuels (again, mostly in China). These have combined to reduce prices in the US and take China off the buying market, so we're seeing lower prices than you might expect.
But this stuff won't last forever. If the Hormuz blockage doesn't resolve, things will get bad. You're seeing a patient that's a little more resilient than we thought, but who is mostly being carried through by massive blood transfusions. This buys time, but does not heal the patient.
I was recently offered a sale price by a restaurant on Doordash, when I was logged out. I logged in as a subscriber and the sale deal went away, which meant that the delivery actually cost slightly more. I've noticed this pattern a lot: the subscription supposedly offers savings, but when you A/B test the same meal against a subscribed/logged in account and a non-subscribed account, the amounts are usually very similar.
My conclusion is that Doordash actually cares more about their non-subscribed users than their subscribers: that's where they see growth.
I'm not arguing with you that science and technology can produce nightmares. And I'm not saying that science is all sunshine and roses.
But the original post said "science does not provide the kinds of answers people want." I think what most people want from science is to have better things, or less disease and misery. I would argue that it has done a lot of that in our lifetimes. That doesn't mean everyone is spiritually fulfilled, nor does it mean that we won't nuke each other. But it has done real things that make our lives much better.
The distinction you make doesn't make any sense to me. Every single one of the technical advances I listed was preceded by a scientific advance, usually a series of them. To take one example: how do you think we discovered the role of Glucagon and then learned to build similar peptides like the receptor agonists in Semaglutide and Tirzepatide? How much (of what we would both consider) "pure science" went into making these drugs possible?
The only distinction I would make is that "pure science" has also produced many additional findings that are not immediately useful to me today, but some of them might be in the future. (And that's the only prediction I'm making about the future in this entire thread.)
Science in my lifetime has produced tiny pocket computers, machines that talk and think like humans, cars that drive using the sun as a power source, effective treatments for a variety of afflictions including HIV, and a drug that lets me stay skinny without consciously dieting. Maybe we’ve just developed unrealistically high expectations for what “science” should do.
I had the experience recently of asking an LLM about the Buddhist view on reincarnation, and then hearing its views on what this means for its own existence. I'm not sure any of it left me feeling better about death, but it was a fascinating conversation.
My financial advisor might have recommended that expensive fund to me because it was a good idea, even though he also received kickbacks from the fund for doing so. The point of being a trustworthy index is to avoid the perception of conflicted interest.
Because hardware depreciates quickly, datacenter rentals are a competitive business with much lower profit margins than the IPO prospectus requires (even if there is a temporary bottleneck now) and there's no real moat.
SpaceX's S-1 says they're going to make more than $320bn by 2030 at a 74% expected profit margin. That implies they're going to succeed at selling high-value AI services, not compute, which is a competive business with typical profit margins at or below 30%.
A company can have poor fundamentals compared to its stock price, and also have an enormous P/E multiple if it has committed investors. We've seen this with multiple meme stocks and Tesla. I have no doubt SpaceX will fly high for a while and people will make a lot of money, but I don't think the company is going to make $320bn/year in AI services (with 74% profit) by 2030 as the S-1 suggests. At some point the market price will coincide with real earnings.
That doesn't really answer the question of whether it could be used to deliver "numbers station" type messages. Encrypted key material and enciphered messages should be indistinguishable. There are 18 bytes of high-entropy ciphertext that could be used for both purposes.
You're assuming it requires specialized military gear, as opposed to consumer gear with a flashed firmware. I believe GPS L1 C/A subframe 4 is on the ordinary L1 C/A civil signal, which means commercial receivers can receive it. They just can't (ordinarily) decrypt it. But a few KB of extra code would change that. A pretty broad set of Android phones can receive this data, without even needing to reflash the GPS firmware: you can decrypt on the application processor, since this field is readable.
Benchmarks are governed (to some extent) by natural selection. If the S&P criteria prove obsolete, then it will be replaced by other indices that use your proposed criteria. Everything's going to be just fine.
Yes, it's the same principle that gets you financial advisors who push you into high-fee fund choices that earn them kickbacks. Completely understandable from the PoV of these parties' self-interest, yet entirely contrary to your own self-interest as a customer and investor.
Claude Code is essentially a terminal emulator that runs on mature OSes with excellent support for this type of application. Why are they having difficulty implementing it?
Solar doesn't have to be colocated with consumption. There is a massive amount of available solar in Europe and North Africa, even in the winter, and HVDC (including underwater HVDC lines) makes this available.
I'm confused. Those boring flat places that get tornadoes have massive wind farms, because that's where wind blows. Tornadoes are not a major economic threat to wind farms. Have you been to the midwest? There's at least 40GW of wind capacity out there, and the wind farms are really something.
Does the First Amendment actually let the US government dictate the types of speech you're allowed to put in your LLM? I mean, a US government that's bound by the Constitution, obviously.
I think the key complaint about remakes isn't "the idea isn't totally original", the complaint is that studios are only willing to make IP that customers are already deeply familiar with. I don't think Green Planet really counts.
This is a lesson I've learned over thirty years. If the GOP says "the Democrats are doing X" then you can be assured the winning Republican plans to do X (or already has.) It inoculates them. Crushing academic free speech is just one of several X's.
"Political" in the context of research funding generally doesn't mean what it means under this administration. Administrations have always shifted priorities as far as what scientific fields they want to fund, and individual PMs have also made more opinionated choices. This is normal and expected. A DARPA PM is limited to a 7-year term to ensure that fresh blood constantly enters the system. What's happening now is political in the "partisan political" sense, where specific grants are being killed because they violate political priorities or because the researchers spoke up against the President. This is new.
ETA: Slightly off topic, but a colleague had his already-granted NSF grant killed by DOGE because it contained the word "censorship". He was researching ways to allow Iranian people to bypass their regime's Internet censorship.
Really depends on the valuation and P/E they plan to list at, and some estimate of their future revenue story. I love Codex and Claude Code but OpenCode/Kimi is wildly cheaper and 90% as good.
Those articles don't really say what the "botch" is. Was it the anesthesia? The actual endoscopic examination? Removal of polyps?
If its the polyp removal, I can certainly see how that could lead to problems. But you're a little stuck: even if you use another technique to do the scan, you still have to remove any polyps you find, don't you?