We'll be fine, then. There's lots more gold than Sarah Conner clones.

Precisely.

There are 1500 genes involved. As effects are likely not merely down to specific genes, but gene interactions, you're going to need a model that can handle 2^1500 different permutations. That's simply not something that is classifiable.

As far as gene therapies are concerned, since autism seems to involve combining elements of Neanderthal neurology with homo sapiens neurology, the obvious fix would be to add further Neanderthal genes where combinations are known to produce adverse effects.

What did you expect from an algorithm named after the Roman Empire?

There are 1500 genes associated with autism and nobody has them all. This gives us 2^1500 different forms of the condition. So, yeah, more than one.

Autism is definitely a complex phenomenon. The number of people diagnosed today in the US is about the same as was being diagnosed in Europe 25 years ago, so no, I don't think anyone is jumping onto bandwagons, it's just Americans are being less stupid.

Fuck off you illiterate moron

I have a plain Debian image I can pop in about 90% of the machines we're removing Win10 from without any hassle. When the hell is the last time you installed Linux?

It's Powershell, it probably takes up 2gb in libraries.

Well, that, and they're likely to start harassing their coworkers, because they have be inculcated with the belief that every utterance that comes from their is not merely profound, but their absolute right to blurt out.

If human activity was on a fixed time, that point in time could never be visible to astronomers, at least not unless LIGO was rebuilt on the moon. This doesn't necessarily offer benefits, but it would be sensible if this was a possibility that was considered.

True, it means we can't use gravitational triangulation, but the detector is nothing like close enough to being sensitive enough to be useful there.

Either way, between radio astronomy, optical astronony, and gravitational astronomy now being largely defunct on Earth due to humans messing things up, we really need detectors on the moon or on Mars before we can do anything significantly beyond what we've already done. Space telescopes are just too small and although you could precisely measure 3D positions with sufficient precision to do interferometry, it would not be easy.

Basically, each space telescope would need to measure acceleration with incredible sensitivity and time with incredible precision, record over a very long time, then have a means of collecting the data on physical media and bring it back to Earth for combining with the other recordings. Real-time interferometry wouldn't be possible.

You're much much better off building your telescopes on the surface of a solid planetary mass like the moon or Mars.

We're learning that hallucinogens can indeed do wonders for depression and can even result in some degree of brain repair, but they are also capable of worsening depression, causing further brain damage, and even creating whole new conditions the patient hadn't previously suffered with.

This has been under discussion for well over two decades, in both the US and UK, and, frankly, I'm horrified that there hasn't been much, if any, meaningful research in many of the substances, with the result that the horror stories rival the success stories in magnitude. We could have avoided ALL of that simply by finding out who benefitted (is there a specific set of conditions? a genetic contribution to outcome?) and who worsened. It was gross incompetence by the governments of both countries and the corresponding health research grant bodies, who damn well AUGHT to have done the legwork, because it was perfectly obvious to everyone that if nobody got told anything practical, people would start experimenting on their own. A far worse outcome, because now we've no idea of why the difference in results, nor what can be used to repair damage where damage is repairable.

Ignorance is useless. The craving of it is, in all honesty, extremely irritating.

By now, after two decades of calls, we should know precisely what genetic and experiential outcomes make which substance applicable and what the correct and safe therapeutic dosage should be. We don't. We don't know anything. Oh, sure, we know it helps some people, but we can't predict who, why, when, or how to repeat those results without messing things up. We've had two flipping decades to learn that. We didn't.

I am, as you might have figured out, not happy, although that might not be obvious to all.

I am not going to say substance X is good/bad/ugly, because (a) no substance works that way, and (b) nobody did the proper research to find out.

(Yes, there has been a little bit, here and there, but nothing I'd consider systematic - it's very piecemeal and not much of it has been replicated. But it's not enough to have any confidence in reliable results.)

As with most IT boondoggles, there's plenty of blame to spread around from both the management and consultant side of the transaction. Even where seemingly water tight contracts are in place with KPIs, milestones and penalties, sooner or later the sunk cost fallacy will get triggered. The consultants know this, which is why quotes are largely fictitious.

I don't know what the solution is. Having been on both sides of that coin, I've seen how getting customers to come up with a well-defined spec and resisting inevitable feature creep is insanely hard. From the customer side I've seen how eagerly in a competitive procurement process bidders will say whatever the RFQ/RFP requires, and how hard it is to actually verify claims without making the procurement process even longer.

The real problem here is that governments, and indeed many private organizations, have hollowed their IT departments, basically contracting out pretty much everything to outside consultants and service providers. This means there are few people, or in some cases no one, in house that can actually meaningfully assess bids and quotes. You basically have consultants' sales teams both making the pitch and assessing how great it it is, so that they can say almost anything and the elected officials or civil servants, with no direct knowledge of how complex such projects can be, basically swindled by the false economy of the lowest bid.

ChatGPT is struggling to produce valid SQL even for basic stuff. I use it to produce technical stuff, but everything is checked against at least 2 other AIs and is hand-verified by me, because otherwise there are too many errors.

This is not even close to usable for anything technical.

On one project, after 8 months, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini (combined) have managed to produce a technical specification that is as riddled with errors as a draft document produced by an engineer, so one could (I suppose) argue that it's not worse than a human, if given sufficient time. However, the specification has probably cost millions - if not billions - in electricity at this point. If the same amount of money had been spent on human engineers, over the same length of time, my guess is that the document would be of much higher quality and much closer to something that could be implemented.

True, I would never have been given that kind of cash, so it has democratised wasteful spending, but that's not necessarily useful.