Please tell me this is sarcasm. I mean, I know people love to extrapolate current LLM capabilities into arbitrary future capabilities via magical thinking, but "infinite context" really takes the cake.
IANAB, but from what I do understand. It depends what you mean by different genes. Information wise, DNA is a string of base 4 digits(nucleotides) in groups of 3 digits, these groups are called codons. Each codon corresponds to a specific amino acid*. A protein is made up of a bunch of different amino acids chained together. The gene determines which amino acids are chained together and in what order. This long chain of amino acids tends to fold up into a complex 3 dimensional structure, and this 3 dimensional structure determines the protein's function.
Now, there are a couple ways a gene could be different without altering the protein's function. It turns out multiple codons can code for the same amino acid. So if you switch out one codon for another which codes for the same amino acid, obviously you get a chemically identical sequence and therefore the exact same protein. The other way is you switch an amino acid, but this doesn't meaningfully affect the folded 3D structure of the finished protein, at least not in a way that alters its function. Both these types of mutations are quite common; because they don't affect function, they're not "weeded out" by evolution and tend to accumulate over evolutionary time.
* except for a few that are known as start and stop codons. They delineate the start and end of a gene.
I think this is something in some assembly formats too? I remember seeing it once and wondering if maybe that's where the idea of ending lines in C with semicolons came from since at least in the examples I saw in school, a large number of lines had trailing comments with a description of what the operation was doing.
IDA uses ; for comments in its disassembler view, but it looks like C-style // single-line comments and /* comment blocks */ are also accepted by certain tools: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/X86_Assembly/Comments
Based on what, your personal experience talking to stoners in college? Plenty of people smoke socially, and among people who smoke cannabis, only a small fraction "lock themselves into apartments and smoke weed all day". In fact, that fraction is much smaller than the fraction of people who drink alcohol who lock themselves in their apartments drinking all day. And I don't know if you've spent any time with those people, but they all have cognitive issues too. As do people who do speed all day. As do people who do heroin all day.
Cannabis can be a wonderful social drug, as can amphetamine or cocaine, and I'm sure even opioids, though I don't touch those because I have significant genetic risk for opioid addiction.
I don't think judging a drug by its most addicted users is fair. Especially since you're doing that for weed, and then comparing that to the most reasonable alcohol users.
All that being said, I absolutely agree that cannabis is not good for you in large quantities. It's absolutely bad for cognitive ability, working memory, and long term memory when used chronically. But the only people I've met who would disagree with that are cannabis addicts, and usually young ones at that(the older ones tend to figure it out unless they stay stoned for their entire lives, which does happen). Most people I talk to are well aware of these things. And at least from my own experience, these effects will generally pass once you cut down.
> Based on what, your personal experience talking to stoners in college? Plenty of people smoke socially
Yep. And plenty smoke privately, too. People see the public spectacles and incorrectly conclude it as wholly representative.
Many professionals use cannabis but choose to not advertise it since misinformation is still so rampant, originating from the "Reefer Madness" propaganda days. The tradeoff of potential career damage just isn't worth it.
Problem with that logic is, humans don't just evolve genetically, we evolve culturally, and that cultural evolution ends up affecting our biology as well. So it doesn't really matter how slow genetic evolution is. Cultural evolution is what defines the human species. It's much more rapid because it includes planning and foresight, unlike the blind watchmaker of biological evolution. It is also lamarckian in that it incorporates the experiences of the previous generation into the cultural phenotype of the next one.
That's precisely how we've changed so drastically is an evolutionary blink of an eye.
And now, our cultural evolution has reached the point where we're even able to change our own genetics with planning and foresight in a single generation. So it seems to me that the blind watchmaker is essentially irrelevant now.
How so? If great filters exist at all, which is not a given, there could be multiple ones, first of all. They could be somewhere between our level of biological complexity and the kind hypothesised to be responsible for this signal. Endosymbiosis is a very plausible such filter. The evolution of language and the bootstrapping of cultural evolution is another one. Both n=1 on our planet. Probably there are others I can't think of right now.
This is very exciting. It's certainly approaching the best evidence we could possibly hope for from an exoplanet given current technology.
Of course, the weak link here is the assumption that these bio-markers can't be produced abiotically, which is a pretty big assumption. Our understanding of planetary science is still in its infancy. This is (thought to be) a hycean planet, a type of planet unknown to us until very recently(post-JWST, I believe?). And given that the solar system has no hycean planets, it's a class of planets which is fundamentally poorly studied, with pretty limited access to data. We can make models, and we can get some spectral data on the contents of their gaseous atmospheres. But we have no way of looking at their surface oceans. Thinking about what kind of chemistry might be going on there is mostly just an act of speculative modelling.
So the interesting question is, without new sources of data, can we determine whether these bio-markers are biological in origin? Not really. Not without a much better understanding of planetary science in general and hycean worlds in particular(of course, that's what this research is trying to do, and making progress at). As well as a deeper understanding of abiogenesis. I could imagine a working understanding of abiogenesis at least being able to eliminate some candidate planets, but even that assumes only one type of abiogenesis is possible, which is more or less unfounded. That is, unless the understanding includes some deep information theoretic/evolutionary perspective on abiogenesis which would probably have to include a completely unambiguous information theoretic and physical definition of what life even is. It is conceivable that such an understanding might provide very strong restrictions on what kinds of chemical systems are capable of abiogenesis, and that those restrictions could then be used to eliminate certain planets or even entire star systems from contention. And if these hycean worlds were eliminated that way, we'd know there must be some abiotic source of these "biomarkers", and knowing that, we would likely be able to figure out what it is. But ok, that's a lot of assumptions.
Maybe we get lucky, and some chemists stumble on a non-biotic chemical system that can produce these chmicals in concentrations that can be detected by JWST at a distance of hundreds of light years. Or, conversely, maybe chemists somehow manage to prove conclusively that biotic origin is the only possible source. I'm not a chemist or a microbiologist, so I have no idea what that would look like. It's probably well beyond our current understanding.
I guess what I'm rantingly saying is, while this result changes my credence that there's life on this planet about as much as is possible with current science and technology, it still barely changes it at all. Before it was maybe 0.5 + ε(habitable zone, liquid water), and it is now 0.5 + 2ε.
I guess something which could move the needle much more significantly, is if we found a large number(say 10) of chemically unrelated potential bio-markers in the atmosphere of a planet very similar to earth, in a very similar star system. Then, the assumption of the impossibility of abiotic sources would be much more plausible. I believe doing this type of research for earth-sized exoplanets with JWST is still quite borderline(please correct me if I'm wrong).
Having said all that, this result is still extremely exciting. For the first time, the field of exobiology has any contact with observational data from outside our solar system at all(besides mere astronomical data), and things will only improve from here. Future telescopes will be better at this type of observation, and our understanding of planetary science is evolving at an accelerating pace. I'm very excited to see where this research goes in the future.
I've been saying this for years; LLMs will never be able to replace a good support staff. The only support LLMs can be relied on for is the kind of support you get from companies like google and netflix. Off-shored, glorified clickfarm workers in India, who only have access to some restrictive API and a very rigid playbook. They can do stuff like grandma forgot her password again -> help her reset her password.
For a support agent to actually be useful beyond that, they need some leeway to make decisions unilaterally, sometimes in breach of "protocol", when it makes sense. No company with a significant level of complexity in its interactions with customers can have an actually complete set of protocols that can describe every possible scenario that can arise. That's why you need someone with actual access inside the company, the ability to talk to the right people in the company should the need arise, a general ability(and latitude) to make decisions based on common sense, and an overall understanding of the state of the company and what compromises can be made somewhat regularly without bankrupting it. Good support is effectively defined by flexibility, and diametrically opposed to following a strict set of rules. It's about solving issues that hadn't been thought of until they happened. This is the kind of support that gets you customer loyalty.
No company wants to give an LLM the power given to a real support agent, because they can't really be trusted. If the LLM can make unilateral decisions, what if it hallucinated and gives the customer free service for life? Now they have to either eat the cost of that, or try to withdraw the offer, which is likely to lose them that customer. And at the end of all that, there's no one to hold liable for the fuckup(except I guess the programmers that made the chatbot). And no one wants the LLM support agent to be sending them emails all day the same way a human support agent might. So what you end up with is just a slightly nicer natural language interface to a set of predefined account actions and FAQ items. In other words, exactly what you get from clickfarms in Southern Asia or even a phone tree, except cheaper. And sure, that can be useful, just to filter out the usual noise, and buy your real support staff more time to work on the cases where they're really needed, but that's it.
Some companies, like Netflix and Google(Google probably has better support for business customers, never used it, so I can't speak to it. I've only Bangalored(zing) my head against a wall with google support as a lowly consumer who bought a product), seem to have no support staff beyond the clickfarms, and as a result their support is atrocious. And when they replace those clickfarms with LLMs, support will continue to be atrocious, maybe with somewhat better English. And it'll save them money, and because of that they'll report it as a rousing success. But for customers, nothing will have changed.
This is pretty much what I predicted would happen a few years ago, before every company and its brother got its own LLM based support chatbot. And anecdotally, that's pretty much what has happened. For every support request I've made in the last year, I can remember 0 that were sorted out by the LLM, and a handful that were sorted out by humans after the LLM told me it was impossible to solve.
The ASRS-5, while it only has six questions, is actually a very respectable test for ADHD, often used even in clinical research. It's thoroughly tested against more comprehensive tests and the data checks out so far. It's even seeing clinical use as an early screening before going through the full diagnosis, which in adults is very involved, since diagnosis requires a determination that ADHD was present in childhood.
Source: my dad is a clinical psychologist specialising in diagnosis and treatment of ADHD . I kept seeing this pop up in papers so I asked him about it.
ASRS-5 almost ruined my life. I would highly recommend anyone reading this to get a thorough evaluation for ADHD diagnosis before trying medication; or just use audio :)
If someone prescribed you stimulants based solely on ASRS-5, that's malpractice(at least in most the west, I obviously can't speak for every country), and I'm sorry that happened to you. You could have a strong malpractice case if "almost ruined my life" can be well documented. In that case I suggest talking to a lawyer. If what you mean is you did the self-screening and picked ip some adderall on the black market then, then I guess you're outta luck.
And I'm not sure why this is downvoted. Your advice is good. Get properly diagnosed by a professional. Amphetamine or any other adhd medication is not something you wanna take every day unless you have adhd. And even then, only if it's severe enough to seriously worsen your quality of life.
My ADHD is extremely severe. Without meds I tend to end up smoking large amounts of hash and turning my apartment into a garbage dump as I gain weight and my muscles atrophy from inactivity. I've been back on meds for about 6 months now; my place is spotless, I smoke one spliff every 4 weeks(mostly to learn moderation), I'm losing weight, doing cardio every morning, quit smoking cigarettes, and just recently started coding a bit again. For me it's a total lifesaver.
ADHD or not, I would suggest avoiding strong stimulants (ADHD medication) and working on coping mechanisms in conjunction with natural supplements first.
