Yeah, the new "weight-loss" drugs seem to have significant psycho-active effects on the dopamine reward pathway. That seems like it may provide a more direct treatment than SSRIs.
Yeah calling them weight-loss drugs seems to really be under-selling them. I suspect the anti-depressant action has more to do with BDNF-TrkB and IL-6 signaling though!
If you ask any practicing psychiatrist, you'll see that they are aware of the problems with SSRIs. They tell their patients that they may need to try several drinks until they find one right for them.
The way you presented those statistics is very misleading. The 70% number for sexual side effects you quoted was actually for patients that stopped taking at last once drug for that reason. Typically patients will have to try 2-3 drugs to find something that works for them and may need to transition to a new drug when the old one is no longer effective. So it's not like those patients are facing those side effects on an ongoing basis. It's just during the initial period when they are adjusting things.
I suspect that the reason why SSRIs perform so poorly in the studies is that the amount of variation in these receptor targets is high, so some drugs actually are effectively placebos to a large fraction of people. But for other individuals they are a miracle. And if you multiply that by the number of different drugs, you can almost always find one of them that helps each patient.
This goes into your assertion about "serotonin receptors are all over the body". That's something doctors and medical researchers have known for a long time. That's why the SSRIs are tailored to the specific variants of the serotonin receptors present in the organs they want to influence. That doesn't mean they have no effect on the receptors in other organs, but that the effect is minimized to the extent possible. But I suspect that one limitation in how tightly we're able to target the right receptors has to do with individual variation - make it specific enough that it doesn't affect other organs then it doesn't work for anybody with the slightest variation in target receptor shape.
But I agree that the role serotonin plays in depression is poorly understood. But I don't agree with the implication of your post that we should stop using them. They are often helpful even in cases where therapy is insufficient, and improve outcomes in conjunction with therapy. They are too useful a tool to discard, even with their issues.
A few years ago there was another AI that tried to beat Pokemon. It wasn't a LLM. I think it was an LSTM trained with reinforcement learning. It got stuck in Mt Moon.
Right now, Claude has been stuck in Mt Moon for nearly a day. It keeps forgetting where it has been. It also almost always runs from battles instead of changing Pokemon or fighting.
At one point it got stuck in a Pokemon center when it mistook the character's red hat for the red carpet around the exit. It kept pressing down and wondering why it wasn't working. It only broke out of that when it mistakenly concluded it had successfully exited the Pokemon center. Then it wandered around a bit and only realized it was still in the Pokemon center after talking to Nurse Joy.
> It also almost always runs from battles instead of changing Pokemon or fighting.
I believe this is because all of its Pokemon are on the verge of fainting, so it's trying to conserve them while it tries to find its way out.
> It keeps forgetting where it has been.
I'm wondering if this could be solved with a better harness; on one hand, that hurts the elegance of having one model dedicated to playing the game, but their existing harness is already cheating a little (they have a second LLM for verification). They're frequently compacting what's in context, which means its visual memory is quite poor - that could potentially be a point of improvement?
In financial news, "cash" is used as a stand-in for treasuries. When an entity is referred to as having a large cash position, it is typically referring to a position in relatively low risk US debt. Warren Buffett reportedly said this at the shareholder conference about Berkshire's position in treasury bills:
"We were aided by a predictable large gain in investment income as Treasury Bill yields improved and we substantially increased our holdings of these highly-liquid short-term securities"
Much of the world would like to replace the US Dollar with something else as the global reserve currency. Problem is, all the alternatives are worse. Until that changes, the Dollar will retain its position.
I think parent post is saying that when they fixed the Y2K problem, they likely also modernized the date representation to comport with international standards. It wouldn't really be any more difficult to do both of those at the same time than just fixing Y2K bugs.
I understand CPU time, as micro-kernels tend to be less efficient, but why do you include programmer time?
My understanding is that it's easier to develop drivers for a micro-kernel. If you look at FUSE (filesystem in user space), and NUSE (network in user space), as well as the work with user-space graphics drivers, you see that developers are able more rapidly implement a working driver and solve more complicated problems in user space than in kernel space. These essentially treat Linux as a micro-kernel, moving driver code out of the kernel.
A microkernel only gives you scheduling, IPC and virtual memory. You and others get to implement everything else on top of that. That means there are no NUSE or FUSE interfaces and if you want them, you get to implement them as part of userland servers. There is no kernel in between to say “this is how it is done”. How it is done is a consensus among the userland components with the kernel abandoning any role for telling them how to things beyond providing the IPC used to communicate.
With NUSE and FUSE, the kernel is very much going in between userland processes and saying “do things this way”. Microkernels do not have a monopoly on the idea of moving code into userspace. There are terms for other designs that push things into userspace, such as the exokernel, which goes well beyond the microkernel by handling only protection and multiplexing.
I think the term library OS has been proposed for what FUSE/NUSE do. It is a style of doing things that turns what were kernel functions into libraries that can either be accessed the old way through system calls redirected to daemons via shims or as libraries in the process address space. This is an extension of monolithic/hybrid kernels, rather than a microkernel. Closely related would be the anykernel concept as demonstrated through rump kernels, which supports the same code being compiled for both in kernel and in userspace uses:
Earlier work in this area can be found in OpenSolaris, where various kernel code were compiled both as userspace libraries and kernel modules. The most famous example is ZFS (it was/is used to make development faster via stochastic testing), but other things like the kernel encryption module received the same treatment.
Yeah, good luck with that. FSD has been a year away for over a decade. I predict states will outlaw it/require the driver to be fully in control of the vehicle if people actually start using it. Right now the error rate is so much higher than human drivers that it's ridiculous.
Yeah, I think it's all those iframes. I'm seeing something weird on my Linux desktop - all the godbolt iframes crash on reload unless I have another tab with godbolt open. I didn't see anything obvious in Chrome's log.
I can't replicate the crash at all on my Linux cloud VM though. Usually the only difference there is that advertisers tend to not buy ads for clients on cloud IPs.
I'm also seeing this on Android Chrome. When I opened the page on my Linux desktop, I also saw the crashes (though they only affected the godbolt iframes).
Note that on Android process separation is not usually as good, so a crashing iframe can bring down the whole page.
The thing about Trump and Musk is that they both believed the other to be a convenient fool. It will definitely be interesting to see who lasts longer.
I'd bet on Musk as he has better connections among the Silicon Valley elite that are propping up this administration. Plus, the way that Trump is rubber-stamping everything Musk does as soon as he hears about it seems to suggest which one is actually in charge.
Time doesn't matter here. Elon can never hold the highest office nor the second highest. The best he can ever do is be their appointed henchman.
The MAGA mobs may only care about a few cherry picked bits from the Constitution, but the requirement of being a natural born citizen (usually meant as born on US soil with 2 US parents, but generally, either one is accepted) is definitely one of them. And he won't be getting meaningful support from anywhere along the other end of the scale anytime soon, so I left them out
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