Cats pretty much domesticated themselves for the mutual benefit of both species.
There are "captive" pets living in cages or other enclosures that might be a bit more dicey, but cats and dogs are probably a pretty poor example to get upset about.
an apartment or small garden for dogs or cats who usually cover at least 10km daily is captivity
another point is also their environmental footprint (20% of meat and fish production, many services and indirect pollution, impact on birds, lezards, etc..)
20% seems very high. I also thought their food was a byproduct of the meat industry, maybe that's the reason? It's 20% that no one else would eat anyway?
(I'm being pedantic but that'd suit my narrative, I'm mostly vegan and I'm easily annoyed by people with pets)
Generally, yes; for example, routine colonoscopies are not practiced in many developed countries, and it doesn't necessarily translate into any difference in overall health outcomes. One recent study is described here: https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/09/health/colonoscopy-cancer-dea... . One explanation is that such cancers are slow-growing and tend to be discovered late in life, so treating them doesn't actually help much, and any benefits are offset by potential harms of the procedure itself, the risk of false positives, etc.
There is value in targeted screening and education, but annual checkups for otherwise healthy people aren't necessarily the way to do it. Not to mention, many of these checkups are perfunctory.
A lot of the gains in life expectancy have little to do with advanced diagnostics and treatments. Sanitation, hygiene, antibiotics, and increased standards of living do a lot of the heavy lifting here. And when the needle moves in the other direction, the causes tend to be mundane too - e.g., opioid abuse in the US.
> Generally, yes; for example, routine colonoscopies are not practiced in many developed countries, and it doesn't necessarily translate into any difference in overall health outcomes. One recent study is described here:
This overstates the impact of the Nordic study. If you go to the original article[0] you can see why, this study had very low participation and event rates which limits how strong of a conclusion we can draw from this as treatment effects may not be accurately reflected (for example in some countries the colonoscopy arm only had 32% participation). We also have historical studies looking at gFOBT and flexible sigmoidoscopy showing mortality benefits which can be extrapolated to colonoscopies. For a full picture of the evidence behind colon cancer screening I would suggest referring to the USPSTF which provides a publicly accessible summary and rationale[1].
With respect to developing countries, colorectal cancer (and living long enough to suffer its sequela) is mostly a developed country problem although this is changing.
In recent years, we have been seeing a surprising rise in colorectal cancer rates occurring at younger ages presenting with advanced disease which has led to the USPTF lowering the recommendation for screening to 45 from 50. With this trend in mind and historical data, we would really need extremely strong evidence to make the claim that screening colonoscopies are ineffective which the Nordic study does not provide.
> Similarly, while hypertension is a problem, there is scant evidence that routine treatment of it is beneficial.
This is just boldly incorrect and a VERY dangerous statement to make. The article you link to is entirely irrelevant as it looks at acute hypertension which is a very different beast, this article is describing what we call permissive hypertension in medicine. We have known for several years now that we do not need to tightly control inpatient blood pressures (which are often temporarily increased due to stress/illness) and that doing so is harmful. This says nothing about the consequences of untreated chronic hypertension in the outpatient setting.
For treatment (beyond the scope of USPSTF which does provide a grade A recommendation for hypertension screening) we can turn to the ACC[2] which also helpfully provides an evidence synthesis specifically drawing your attention to:
"In a meta-analysis of 61 prospective studies, the risk of CVD increased in a log-linear fashion from SBP levels <115 mm Hg to >180 mm Hg and from DBP levels <75 mm Hg to >105 mm Hg. In that analysis, 20 mm Hg higher SBP and 10 mm Hg higher DBP were each associated with a doubling in the risk of death from stroke, heart disease, or other vascular disease."
"This is just boldly incorrect and a VERY dangerous statement to make."
I couldn't agree more. I worry that individuals will read things like the grandparents uninformed take on hypertension and conclude "I guess I don't need to worry about my blood pressure". Be careful what medical knowledge you take away from HN. Imagine forming opinions about software engineering practices by reading a forum filled with medical doctors.
That was my worry as well, especially with how misrepresented the cited evidence was.
I’m very supportive of the intellectually curious looking at evidence for themselves, but directly evaluating primary medical research is challenging even for a trained academic physician. Like in all fields, a lot of the papers published (even in reputable journals like NEJM and JAMA) are biased/flawed.
As one example, there was a landmark trial 40 years ago that claimed screening mammography doesn’t improve outcomes which was discordant with other smaller trials and mostly ignored by the medical community. That study was recently exposed as borderline fraudulent[0][1]. Had we stopped screening undoubtedly many women would have died of breast cancer. Those of us involved in colorectal cancer screening/diagnosis are well aware of the Nordic trial, but it is not practice changing.
For the curious HN reader wondering why we do some of the things we do in medicine, my strong recommendation is to refer to the USPSTF or Google “society guideline on [disease/intervention]” where you will always find an excellent summary of the evidence, strength of recommendation, rationale and limitations written by domain experts in that specific area rather than risk misinterpreting a single study, it’s how physicians practice too.
And thus eliminate the reason many (if not most) of these books and webpages existed in the first place.
This may be fair in the short term, but on a longer timescale, it leaves us worse off unless LLMs master reasoning about and being creative with things not in their training set. Possible, but a crapshoot right now.
Keep in mind that success at this endeavor means that UBI becomes possible. With UBI we can expect to see more human creativity, not less, as humans are no longer forced to do a robot's job.
Copyright law cannot be allowed to stand in the way of this. If it does, break it. It's that important.
In absolutely no way, no way at all, does any of this imply that UBI will exist. It is no more reasonable to expect a society structurally against the idea that suffering should be avoided because we can avoid it to adopt UBI because of large language models than any other reason. Penury (for others) is a feature, not a bug, here.
Couple "the cruelty is the point" with figuring out exactly who will be giving up resources for UBI, and you have a very long road to hoe to make that a reality.
> Keep in mind that success at this endeavor means that UBI becomes possible
UBI is already technologically possible. Yes, as automation becomes even more powerful and abundant, the feasible payouts from UBI will increase. That's never been the problem. The problem is that hundreds of millions of Americans (and a significant portion of everyone else in the world) would rather live in poverty as indentured servants to their rich masters than ever see those people benefit even a tiny bit from any government policy. Cruelty and suffering is literally what they want in the world; they fight tooth and nail to prevent anything that might uplift all of humanity (themselves included). They are deeply disturbed, horrible, irredeemable pieces of shit, and they're the majority.
And the very tiny minority of people who could ever do anything about this are exactly the ones who are poised to take all the benefits from automation and AI. I'm not scared of AI. I'm scared of humans. And very soon, the humans who already own everything are going to have no need for the rest of us.
> Keep in mind that success at this endeavor means that UBI becomes possible.
UBI is always possible. The achievable minimum support level might be higher with this, but also, with this occurring without UBI existing first, so will the concentration of economic and political power in the hands of entrenched interests who would want to prevent UBI (since it would be redistributing resources outward from them.)
If copyright were at least set back to 14 years, people would still write books.
After that we could explore other economic models that make sense in a world of internet and AI, instead of blindly sticking with the system we designed for the world of the printing press.
Airport is probably a very different environment, though? I imagine that if you have a military installation, you don't mind blasting some birds with RF every now and then (and the birds probably don't mind either).
A bird is small and largely non-conducting. I'd guess it could plausibly survive a burst of microwave that could disable a drone, at any practical distance from the weapon.
Microwave covers a huge range 300 MHz to 300 GHz and they want something that will work in the rain or fog which means minimizing absorption by water as much as possible.
Unfortunately I do mind. Here’s where I live, there’s a bunch of endangered birds that live near the airport and don’t live literally anywhere else. Can’t really just go shooting them with death rays.
Same here. I have zero terrorists in my backyard. I do have kids, rabbits, lots of birds, kites, etc. What's up with these idiots thinking about putting this microwave bird killer in my back yard where there are no threats against which to protect. Idiots.
If any birds are in that situation near a military base or war zone I hope we got some if them in a zoo or dna as a backup for if we invent really good cloning since otherwise those birds are extinct
That's how development always happened in much of the US. Cities expanding into forestland or grassland. The problem isn't that the homes are all of sudden luxurious, or that we somehow do less planning than in the 1880s or 1960s. It's that a mix of well-intentioned environmental policies and activism mean there's no fuel reduction happening at all. Controlled burns are one way, but logging is another.
Yes but ultimately No and No. US cities have always expanded but the current level of "exurban" development is new - a continuation of the expansion trend no doubt but still more expansiveness, sufficient to be a barrier to fixing the problems created by fire suppression forestry.
And logging doesn't fix things the way natural fires fix things. Logging companies only want big trees and a sustainable forest has big trees that survive fires and little tree that are removed by modest fires. Clear cut areas tend to burn quite intensely because they're all small tree.
But it will. Because it doesn't matter if it's fundamentally better than a good recruiter if it's orders of magnitude cheaper. If you can have it pursue far more leads, maybe the outcomes are going to be the same or better. And if you used it to replace a bad or a mediocre recruiter? In any case, you might not care: hiring is a crapshoot anyway, and AI is saving you millions of dollars.
You want to weed out people who are clearly unqualified, but that's not rocket science. Beyond that, every company has a different hiring bar, a different process... and approximately zero data that their approach works better than anybody else's. Interview performance is a poor predictor of job performance. Whether the bar is high or comparatively relaxed, around 70% of the people you hire will be good, and the rest will underperform, leave after a couple of months, have difficult personalities, and so forth.
This is the only "pro-AI" comment that I've seen that makes sense. This isn't too different from the non-CS interviewing strategy. Try to make interviewing cheap and accept that it is a noisy (and biased) process. This also makes it easier to let bad candidates ("false hires") cheap replace.
As I see it, you're trying to optimize: p(X|F,C) > T, F=filter, and C=cost, and T=threshold. Treating this as a probabilistic problem seems important. So reducing C is valuable, even if F is not as good.
"in Europe" doesn't mean anything because every European country has different employment law. In the UK it's trivially easy to fire someone quickly if they're a recent hire.
Early GPTs were fairly bad at following instructions. The innovation was RLHF, where human raters (Mechanical Turk style) would be asked to evaluate on how well the LLM is able to follow instructions stated as a part of the prompt, often in this style. Countless such ratings were incorporated into the training process itself.
So it did not happen out of the blue, and you didn't need a whole lot of existing webpages involving this sort of role play.
There are two innovations: instruction fine-tuning (via supervised learning), which gives you a model which behaves as if it is in a dialogue (instead of predicting text) and, additionally, reinforcement learning from human feedback, such that it responds to the instructions in a certain way.
As the old saying goes, good ideas shouldn't require force. If they have a "no-brainer" offering, no need to strong-arm people into using it, right?
I get it that they are not a charity and can monetize or paywall their platforms as seen fit, but there's something just sad about the model where you build a customer-friendly and open platform, then progressively crapify it once you capture a niche and eliminate most alternatives, and then start penalizing users for trying to work around that.
And doing anything with Chrome to undermine people will not only harm them in this ad-blocking race, but also cause them to lose massive market share in the browsers... They won't do that. They're not that dumb.
Chrome has no effective competition in the browser market, so Google has no need to worry about market share.
Firefox's user base has shrunk to the point where it's barely relevant. (And I say this as a user myself.) Beyond that, Mozilla currently needs to follow Google's lead just to stay alive. They rely on Google financially, and need to keep up with Chrome's features to maintain what market share they have left.
Brave and the like could be easily killed off by taking Chrome closed-source. Microsoft would probably strike a deal to keep Edge alive. I doubt Safari supports extensions, and Apple wouldn't have any qualms about pulling a few to keep the peace with Google.
Getting us out of this will be difficult. Barring Google returning to their old slogan, the only option I can see is a move to a new set of standards. Hopefully things will move back towards decentralization as peoples' technical literacy increases.
Everyone still remembers Firefox fondly. The wrong move from Google and everyone (who will take a step to manually download a browser) will return to it.
Sure, but I still won't be paying. There's nothing so important in YouTube that I'd ever even consider paying, I'd drop it like a hot turd if I couldn't block ads.
This is often impractical when shipping costs more than the components.
Yeah, there are things you shouldn't be buying "just in case" - for example, a stash of SoCs will age faster than you can use them - but definitely buy a hundred of common capacitors, such as 100 nF, 1 µF, or 10 µF, rather than buying them one-by-one.
You generally don't need a complete set of all standard resistances or capacitances - there are precious few circuits where you need precisely 47 pF and 6.8 kΩ - but there's plenty of stuff that goes into almost every single project you build. Battery clips, 100 Ω / 1k / 10k resistors, 100 nF / 1 µF / 10 µF decoupling caps, LEDs, PCB-mount switches...
There are "captive" pets living in cages or other enclosures that might be a bit more dicey, but cats and dogs are probably a pretty poor example to get upset about.