They have been advertising this initiative with various physical signage in Washington DC for the last several months. Very squarely targeted at lawmakers and the current administration.
How long would the legal process take? How much would it cost? Does she have to sue all proprietors of commercial video generator models? What about individuals using open source models? How many hours of her time will these suits take to organize? How many AI videos of her dad will she have to watch as part of the proceedings? Will she be painted as a litigious villain by the PR firms of these very well-capitalized interests?
Her goal seems to be to reduce the role in her life played by AI slop portrayals of her dad. Taking the legal route seems like it would do the opposite.
This is in vitro (i.e. in a "petri dish," not in a lab animal or a human being).
It's a very very cool idea, but there's a lot of work left to be done to turn something like this into an efficate and safe drug. Plus, a biologic like this would only work if it's active in your body when you're being infected with the virus. So users would either have to take it prophylactically, or it might help to reduce infection severity in a paxlovid-type role.
To be clear, what the researchers & AI here have discovered is not a treatment for IBD per se.
Rather, the gut of some people, especially people with IBD and people who have received broad spectrum antibiotics, can be colonized by enterobacter species. These are bacteria (including some kinds of E. Coli) that are resistant to broad spectrum antibiotics, and this overgrowth is not good for gut health. The researchers have discovered a compound that appears to fight these enterobacter species without destroying the larger gut microbiome. This could help people (especially people with IBD) whose gut has been taken over by this kind of bacteria get back to a more normal gut microbiome, although only mouse studies have been done so far.
“This new drug is a really promising treatment candidate for the millions of patients living with IBD... We currently have no cure for these conditions, so developing something that might meaningfully alleviate symptoms could help people experience a much higher quality of life.”
If I could ask you to speculate for a second, how do you think we will go from here to a clear successor to Parquet?
Will one of the new formats absorb the others' features? Will there be a format war a la iceberg vs delta lake vs hudi? Will there be a new consortium now that everyone's formats are out in the wild?
> In other words, in the study population patients who would have had high LDL were likely to be on statins. The had a lower measured LDL value even though they might still be consuming a poor diet and living an unhealthy lifestyle, for example. Statins don't fix everything about poor diet and lifestyle, but they do help with cholesterol.
The implication here is that the LDL-lowering effect of statins is greater than the CVE-reducing effect of statins. That is, if the statins lower your LDL by 30%, that doesn't bring your risk of heart disease the to the same level as someone who naturally has an identical lower LDL.
For sure. Someone who naturally has the lower LDL is more likely to have had that lower LDL for longer - being on statins necessarily indicates they had a high LDL at some point, and the damage is cumulative over your lifetime.
If you blocked your arteries before you got on a statin, it can stabilize the plaque and reduce the risk of rupture, reduce the ability for more to form and increase the blockage, and if it gets your LDL low enough, regress some of it, but it's not going to give you the same arteries as someone who never had that level of plaque deposition to begin with.
For people who want to dig deeper: The fancy ML term-of-art for the practice of cutting out a piece of a neural network and measuring the resulting effect on its performance is an ablation study.
Since around 2018, ablation has been an important tool to understand the structure and function of ML models, including LLMs. Searching for this term in papers about your favorite LLMs is a good way to learn more.
It's my understanding that dropout[1] is also an important aspect of training modern neural nets.
When using dropout you intentionally remove some random number of nodes ("neurons") from the network during a training step.
By constantly changing which nodes are dropped during training, you effectively force delocalization and so it seems to me somewhat unsurprising that the resulting network is resilient to local perturbations.
> Interestingly she mentioned she was told to take some strong medicine after the transplant. She got this feeling it wasn't good for her and stopped taking them soon after, without telling the docs of course.
Typically, after a kidney transplant, patients are instructed to take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives. This is to reduce the risk of the patient's body rejecting the transplanted organ. Your family member was just straight up lucky that her body didn't reject the organ, even without any immunosuppression.
One thing that's fascinating to me is that most immunosuppressant drugs used today hadn't yet been discovered in the early 60s! AFAIK, all they would have had was prednisone, prednisolone, and azathioprine. Back then, a kidney transplant aided by these drugs would have been as new and revolutionary as the Hepatitis C cure or the triple-drug therapy for cystic fibrosis is today.
That was my thought as well when she told me. Then again, when given just a few years perhaps one considers these things a bit differently. The side effects for the drugs you listed does indeed not sound like a lot of fun.
Oh yeah, they suck. Long-term effects of just prednisone can include everything from muscle weakness to reduced bone density to spontaneously developing diabetes. Generally, doctors prescribe these kinds of drugs for longer than a couple months only in situations where the risks of not taking them are worse than the many, many side effects of taking them long-term.
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