Microfluidics were also key to creating the first line of COVID vaccines. They were also why it was hard to scale up production—turns out machines than can perform microfluidic chemistry aren’t mass produced and take time to make.
>turns out machines than can perform microfluidic chemistry aren’t mass produced and take time to make.
Can you provide a link to more information about this? I was under the (probably mistaken) assumption that microfluidics were using semiconductor-based lithography processes, and we've figured out how to scale the heck out of that.
I can’t find the original article, but Derek Lowe (famously of the Things I Won’t Work With column about exciting chemistry) published a series of articles on the topic around 2021 - 2022.
Ah, but now we get back to Step Four. As Neubert says, "Welcome to the bottleneck!" Turning a mixture of mRNA and a set of lipids into a well-defined mix of solid nanoparticles with consistent mRNA encapsulation, well, that's the hard part. Moderna appears to be doing this step in-house, although details are scarce, and Pfizer/BioNTech seems to be doing this in Kalamazoo, MI and probably in Europe as well. Everyone is almost certainly having to use some sort of specially-built microfluidics device to get this to happen - I would be extremely surprised to find that it would be feasible without such technology. Microfluidics (a hot area of research for some years now) involves liquid flow through very small channels, allowing for precise mixing and timing on a very small scale. Liquids behave quite differently on that scale than they do when you pour them out of drums or pump them into reactors (which is what we're used to in more traditional drug manufacturing). That's the whole idea. My own guess as to what such a Vaccine Machine involves is a large number of very small reaction chambers, running in parallel, that have equally small and very precisely controlled flows of the mRNA and the various lipid components heading into them. You will have to control the flow rates, the concentrations, the temperature, and who knows what else, and you can be sure that the channel sizes and the size and shape of the mixing chambers are critical as well.
I don’t get all the hate. Sure, JS isn’t the most popular language for TUI apps, but there’s always room for more TUI tools and I’d you’re automating things for your JS project this is a pretty natural fit to make your project scripts friendlier to their users.
I think I’d much rather have more nice TUIs than not, regardless of the language they’re written in.
I find it apropos that this topic (disagreement about if LLMs can "reason") boils down to being an issue of one of the hard problems in computer science: naming things.
One could also the hallucinated citations are null pointers.
At least cache invalidation is easier: the users can backtrack up a conversation as far as they need to in order to un-cache things from the context window.
Not disagreeing with you, but a point to consider for reasoning is that we consider it a key cornerstone of sapience and sentience.
I think one could argue that a LLM could be considered sapient (able to solve problems) in a general sense, but probably not sentient (able to sustain undifferentiated consciousness, continue to absorb and apply information, etc).
Part of the difficulty of these conversations, though, is many of these definitions were made before our math was advanced enough to approximate any of these criteria. We humans have also been notorious for excluding other things that could be considered sapience (e.g. elephants, dolphins, corvids, etc).
In all cases, I think this is going to be a difficult topic to find consensus on until we better understand how our biology results in the emergent properties of our own sapience.
We don't! We've gotten into philosophy, which is always a blast to ponder over. Aside from measuring brain activity and making observations, all we really know is that awareness seems to be an emergent property of our biology.
That said, we _do_ know how probabilistic models work and we do know that a calculator doesn't think or have awareness in the way we consider ourselves to.
> we do know that a calculator doesn't think or have awareness in the way we consider ourselves to.
If only this were true.
Some people take panpsychism seriously, and while it may sound ludicrous at first blush, it isn't actually unreasonable. Hard materialist reductionism may be true but no one's really given an irrefutable explanation for the oddity which is consciousness.
It's tempting to say "Things that don't respond to stimulus are obviously not self-aware", but see locked-in syndrome for a falsification of that claim.
I agree with this sentiment and would remind everyone that LLMs are probabilistic models. Anything that isn't in the training data set will not be produced as an output. If you squint really hard, you could kinda say an LLM is just a fancy compression/decompression scheme.
That said, in addition to anthropomorphizing something that sounds like a person, I think a fascinating thing about these discussions are the variety of unstated opinions on what reasoning, thought, or awareness is. This whole topic would be a lot simpler to classify if we had a better understanding of how _we_ are able to reason, think, and be aware to the level of understanding we have of the math behind an LLM.
> Anything that isn't in the training data set will not be produced as an output.
Thinking back to some of the examples I have seen, it feels as though this is not so. In particular, I'm thinking of a series where ChatGPT was prompted to invent a toy language with a simple grammar and then translate sentences between that language and English [1]. It seems implausible that the outputs produced here were in the training data set.
Furthermore, given that LLMs are probabilistic models and produce their output stochastically, it does not seem surprising that they might produce output not in their training data.
I agree that we do not have a good understanding of what reasoning, thought, or awareness is. One of the questions I have been pondering lately is whether, when a possible solution or answer to some question pops into my mind, it is the result of an unconscious LLM-like process, but that can't be all of it; for one thing, I - unlike LLMs - have a limited ability to assess my ideas for plausibility without being prompted to do so.
> remind everyone that LLMs are probabilistic models
The problem is that's overly reductive. You and I are also probabilistic.
That's not to say an AI must therefore be like us, as the entire universe and everything in it is also a probabilistic thanks to quantum mechanics.
Every proposed test of "real intelligence" I've seen in these threads has much the same issue, it's just that some of the tests count too many things as intelligent (e.g. a VHS tape and recorder can "experience input", record that as a "memory", and "recall" it later) or excludes all humans (e.g. by requiring the ability to violate Gödel's incompleteness theorem, a standard which surprisingly even comes up on this site).
I'm happy to describe even the most competent LLM as "dumb" in the IQ sense, even though I also say they're book-smart — because even last year's models were a demonstration proof that a brain the size of a rat's can, with 2.5 million years of subjective experience, reach the performance of a work placement student in almost every book oriented field at the same time.
While I like the premise of this piece of writing, I quite strongly disagree with the title and this line:
> the only thing we truly possess, the only thing we might, with enough care, exert some mastery over, is our mind.
Anyone with ADHD, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and many other conditions simply do not and cannot have full control of their minds without medical intervention.
That said, there is a lot to be said for learning how to recognize and compensate for one’s foibles. Meditation and therapy can be helpful for ADHD and some other conditions.
It’s not surprising to me that these same things can help people from all walks of life feel more centered and empowered over their own destinies.
You raise a fair point. I think some of this is likely reactionary to some degree. Very often the response to a person struggling with a condition is "just try harder", so it's really, really easy read statements like the one you quoted as being more prescriptive than they are likely intended.
> Anyone with ADHD, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and many other conditions simply do not and cannot have full control of their minds without medical intervention.
Who are you and how are you privy to what I can and cannot do without intervention? Where do you get off?
I'm speaking for myself (ADHD) and anecdotal experience from people in my life with these conditions (clinical depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD). I don't claim to speak for anyone.
Your experience may be different, and that is fine and valid. The point I'm trying to make (and that you're also making) is that things that are fundamental truths for some are not always applicable or valid from the context of another person's lived experience.
> I'm speaking for myself (ADHD) and anecdotal experience from people in my life with these conditions (clinical depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD). I don't claim to speak for anyone.
Now you say that. But you made a very clear, absolute statement that these people “cannot have full control of their minds without medical intervention”.
And everyone’s lived experience is eventually respected with some back and forth in these exchanges. But making absolute statements about what people can or cannot do cuts both ways. So it’s best to make your vantage point clear from the start.[1]
I’m personally much more offended when someone says that my “type” cannot do something. Compared to assuming that I can.
Thanks for the clarification.
[1] For all we knew you could have been a medical researcher.
As someone with severe, often debilitating ADHD, I understand not wanting to depend on medication. It was forced upon me under threat of punishment as a child and heavily exacerbated my OCD and tic syndrome, which led to further punishment anyway.
Learning to be okay with medication has taken a long time. But the last couple decades of research have made a few things clear. Importantly, ADHD has been shown to be a genetic disorder, wherein your brain simply doesn't produce the same amount of dopamine receptors as a normal person.
This has a profound impact on your mood, executive functioning skills, motor function and more. Drugs which increase the dopamine available in your system can have negative effects (some extra dopamine gets shunted to your motor cortex and causes motor dysfunction/aggravates tics) but when you consider that 60% of ADHD sufferers are also diagnosed with depression, or in my case a large comorbidity with OCD and bipolar disorder, it becomes clear how valuable medicine can be.
ADHD is beginning to be understood as a reward-deficiency syndrome [0] and in this light, meditation/mindfulness and good habits are only coping mechanisms for an underlying condition which is ultimately genetic and massively aided by dopaminergic drugs. The result is literally night and day for many people, especially those who did not get diagnosed until adulthood and never developed coping mechanisms.
> But making absolute statements about what people can or cannot do cuts both ways.
I just lost one of my best friends last year because I moved in with him and experienced incredible prejudice around my disorder, which he was convinced was made up and not real. He would wax on and on about mindfulness, and constantly get defensive and aggressive at the slightest, most inconsequential manifestations of my disorder, and it rapidly deteriorated my mental health at a time where I was already in dire need of a safe space. His bias and increasingly erratic response to my disorder made me feel unsafe until I had no choice but to leave. The entire experience was very traumatic and reminded me of all the times as a child that my disorders lead to punishment and physical abuse. Some people have mild ADHD and it might be a slight convenience for them, but in my case it has been a major defining aspect of my life with a long list of consequences over the years.
> Anyone with ADHD, clinical depression, bipolar disorder, and many other conditions simply do not and cannot have full control of their minds without medical intervention.
Right - hence "might", not "do"; and "some", not "full".
You're right, but it's a bit of an uncharitable take on the post. Nowhere does the it say that medical intervention is unnecessary for people with conditions requiring it.
The title, and quoted passage, are fully applicable to those with the listed conditions and without. The advice from the post supplements medical intervention for folks requiring it.
You're getting disproportionately criticised and having uncharitable replies but, you're right.
Any serious psychiatrist will confirm that medication is immensely helpful to the majority of ADHD cases if not all. Our brains are just different, chemistry-wise.
I don't know why people get so offended by this notion.
> immensely helpful to the majority of ADHD cases if not all
Definitely not all. Medication doesn't work for something like 10% ~ 20% of us. In my case it worked well for 6 months and gradually I acclimated to it and the effects went away, I switched medications and had the exact same experience. I gave up after that.
People have already responded with their reasons. You can try to hammer on with further digressions from what the submission is about (not even wrong), complete with that inflamed/emotionally charged interpretation, but what’s the point in spilling more bytes on this.
How fragile are you? My comment is about why I don’t think spilling bytes on this question of yours is worth—it was already answered before you posted the comment.
Which is my opinion. Which doesn’t silence anyone.
You know every time someone mentions walking, they’re not obligated to mention some people cannot walk right? Can we stop moralizing and grandstanding everything, it gets so tiresome.
I read no moralizing or grandstanding in GP’s comment. It’s a valid point - most humans on planet earth will experience some form of mental disorder in their lifetime.[0]
People largely understand that folks who can't walk can't walk. There is still a lot of moralizing around mental health and treatment. "ADHD is not a real thing, they just need to stop being lazy"/etc/etc.
You know, the entire point of this website is to comment on articles with our own thoughts, experiences, and opinions - even if it's moralizing and/or grandstanding.
Can we stop discouraging comments in the comment section? It gets so tiresome.
Honestly the bigger problem is probably that creating lasting habits is hard. Everyone knows that exercise is important but how many people maintain a consistent routine?
With mindfulness it's even worse because there is no way to track how strong your equanimity is. You can't know if you are making progress or just deluding yourself.
I can only confirm this and still struggle whenever I want to create a new habit. Russel Barkley when speaking about ADHD in children suggests to prefer productivity over quality. Want to work out more? Go for a walk/run every day, start and don't bother about the distance or duration. Same for the gym, as long as you keep going there, doing whatever you improve the likelyhood of doing it better this or the next time.
People are creatures of comfort. That's why I'd disagree with your first sentence. I think creating long-lasting habits can be easy, in fact sometimes you don't even realize it happened until it's too late.
Now getting rid of the bad habits and keeping only the good ones, that is the hard part.
I realize you said it in jest, but as someone with ADHD generalizations like this hurt. Many of us love science and we have enough day to day difficulties to contend with.
That said, I can think of a few reasons for not releasing a photo:
1. Solar sails are flimsily and fragile. The photo would likely not be representative of the craft in action.
2. The labs building these things may not have a professional photographer available.
3. A prototype craft might just look like junk. Wouldn’t be surprised if they want to iterate on the design a bit before they solidify the public’s vision of what a solar sailing craft looks like.
> as someone with ADHD generalizations like this hurt
Apologies -- I was mainly referring to the "overstimulated generation" of kids and their effect on media becoming more clickbaity with fancy/fake images. It was a poor choice of mine to summarize this idea using the word ADHD.
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