Do we really need a $200M study? It seems like the literature is already pretty clear. https://demo.studyrecon.ai/search.html?id=214&preview=true#

This example stands out: Eat a balanced diet focused on fresh fruits and veggies, whole grains and healthy (non-saturated) fats. https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/healthy_eating/index.html

I wouldn't trust any powdered turmeric. Especially in the quantities people are consuming it these days. Buy it fresh and grind it yourself. It tastes better that way anyway.

I've seen a scientific researcher do literature review manually. Search, refine, print, read, highlight, collate.

Lots of time can be saved by automating those steps (and many researchers don't enjoy it so their job satisfaction could be increased). Also the resulting output could be improved if the researcher had a well structured summary to use as the foundation of their outline.

Improve search with semantic search (search by concept not keyword) Improve refinement by preprocessing and summarizing Don't print, display clean and concise data. Summarize, cite and display.

https://studyrecon.ai

This stops short of literature based discovery, you have to bring your own research question.

We've also had some luck finding a gap in existing research. We did a POC where we scraped pubmed and graphed study results by concept. We then used the graphed concepts to explore the conceptual space.

It seems that vitamin D protects against cancer and heart disease. It seems that vitamin D supplementation protects against cancer but not heart disease. Is this because of some previously unknown effect of sun exposure (the primary natural source of vitamin D) or is it just that people with adequate vitamin D go outside a lot more and therefore also get more exercise? Don't know, would love to read the paper if someone studies it ;- )

It's actually possible to use LLMs to assist literature reviews. We built a product that works smashingly. The key is to keyword extract, use a vector database and do search based generation.

Our key insight is that the process of citation needs to be handled outside the LLM. They're good for text processing and summarization but as you said, the LLM itself is poor at citation.

https://studyrecon.ai

I founded a company working to help companies use AI to organize their private knowledge. We have focused on semantic search and knowledge graphs, but we started integrating a chatbot last week and it seems a short leap from where we are.

https://www.summitlabs.ai/

We'd be happy to help implement something. You'll certainly want an embedding database. The open models are getting pretty good, but you'll want to stand up a testing framework. I have a reasonably good model running on a desktop machine in my office with a reasonably priced consumer grade nvidia GPU.

We also have some tactics and practices around hallucination prevention that we'd be happy to share. Feel free to reach out: human at summitlabs.ai

Wasn't that the previous wave of remote work? And didn't it end badly for IT and software engineering?

I'm currently cleaning up a mess left by some well-meaning but unskilled and improperly managed overseas teams. They spent months and didn't deliver. My team cleaned it up in a few weeks but it wasn't cheap. And consider months of opportunity cost for lost execution time. In a startup with a fixed runway that can mean death.

The IT story is even worse. Poor outcomes, unhappy employees, data breaches. I heard from a neteng friend that when Google purchased Motorola the offshore neteng contractor was so bad Google that classified the Motorola network as actively hostile. The contractor was so deeply entrenched it was impossible to get them out and they were actively serving malware. Any machine that visited the motorola network had to be wiped before being allowed back on the corp network.

So yeah, if that's the next phase we already know how it ends.

They'd act like a solar sail. Putting them in L1 would not keep them positioned. It would be possible to design an orbital scheme that would keep them in place, but it wouldn't be simple. As other people have mentioned, this idea seems impractical and secondary effects haven't really been considered. Glad to hear someone's thinking creatively though.

Here's a simpler plan: 1) Crack down on the deliberate and aggressive misinformation pretending climate change isn't real. We allow this under the guise of free speech, but it's obvious it's being perpetrated to deliberately push a known falsehood. We know who's doing it, we know why. We know where the funding originates and where it goes. There's no ethical dilemma, no slippery slope. Just one lie that's killing the planet. 2) Shift all subsidies from carbon intensive energy to renewables and make it permanent. (This accelerates decarbonization and costs literally nothing). 3) Create a replacement for the Paris agreement but this time focused around collaboration, technology sharing, and a stack-ranked collaborative plan. (Develop and share technology around methane reduction, grid stabilization, electrification etc)

That's it. 3 step plan, net zero cost. Guaranteed to work. Won't ever happen if we don't address the public opinion campaign turning us against each other. But it is way easier than space bubbles.

The problem is not intractable. It's quite solvable. The one blocker is that we're working against ourselves. Let's stop working against ourselves and actually work together to save the livability of our planet.

The US will never be a leader in climate change reduction till we address tiny the minority that inexplicably wishes to profit from the destruction of the only place in the universe that is perfect for us. This is the literal garden of eden, we are willfully destroying it.

No plan can succeed if we don't address the cause of resistance to the plan. That's deliberate deception and manipulation of public opinion by a handful of billionaire oil barons.

The word "neglect" as it is used creates an incorrect framing. But is actually a great word. The whole problem with Nuclear in the US is that we neglect the projects. Our plan around large, long-term nuclear creates a vicious incentive structure. Recouping billion-dollar investments leads to to nuclear plants being run as long and as cheaply as possible.

This is a recipe for disaster. Until we figure that part out, we are correct to hold off building them.

Perhaps a better framing is "We've neglected to figure out an incentive system that allows us to build, safely maintain and safely decommission nuclear projects."

Can someone tl;dr? Not that the paper is too long, but I think I'd need to go back to university and major in biology or statistics to understand what they discovered and more importantly what it might mean.

I also find this unreadable but for a different reason. I'm on mobile and it's rendering unreadably small. On the one hand maybe I should put more time into my setup. On the other hand maybe we, the target audience of this sort of content should comment when the format is unusable. If your power users find mailing list popups annoying to the point they go elsewhere don't you want to know? Isn't a comment on hacker news a great way for someone to learn what their readers like or don't like?

This in no way matches my experience. My best employee is in his fifties. He has more experience and knowledge than the next three people put together. We call him in for difficult and subtle problems (he's a data tier expert and damn good at what he does). I'd love to have five more like him. Actually, I just signed a big contract yesterday so make that ten.

Go look at a Tesla. The Brakes are the same as any other car. Regenerative braking kicks in first so you use it less, but it is all still there. It is exactly the same as a gas car: Same hydraulic system, same calipers, same pads, same rotors.

Thank you for posting that. I've never read this story before and I love it.

It so perfectly captures the tension of gender and turns a common critique of gender transition on its head. What is it called when you fill the straw man with rebar and concrete?

I am also unsurprised that it generated controversy.

There was an article yesterday about the Cassandra project using sentiment in fiction to track social change and conflict. This piece is a great bellwether for conversations around gender.

I've seen it personally. Totally brazen, no attempt to hide it. Two teenage girls, one had clearly done it before, the other had not and was nervous. They just openly loaded up their bags, walked out the front door and got on the bus. The clerks have apparently been instructed not to intervene. The guy at the counter didn't bat an eye. I'd go so far as to say "studiously ignored them". This was at CVS on Mission and 30th. Shoplifting has been around forever, but I've never seen it like this. It looked exactly like the video. I walked out after them. The girl who was nervous thought they were getting busted. The one who had done it before walked with the confidence of someone who knows nobody is coming after her.

That being said most people wait in line and pay for their purchases like civilized folk. I'm happy to pay, but when the line is long I get frustrated that those girls don't have to follow the rules like everyone else does.