I'll add to this: the referenced trial occurred over 8 weeks, so even if we stipulate that the improvements in cognition (which are dubious, as tgv points out in this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48347906) are due to treatment rather than some other effect, we don't know that the effect is disease-modifying as opposed to symptomatic. As with acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, it may just be having a cognition-enhancing effect which, nevertheless, does not alter the underlying disease trajectory (i.e. just shifting the declining trajectory up vertically by a constant amount), and might revert shortly after discontinuing use of the drug.

A controlled trial, over a much longer duration, and ideally with a wash-out period, would be necessary to identify a disease-modifying effect.

I, also a non-expert, spent six months studying what the experts are doing, concluded that they actually seem to know what they’re talking about, and shared my understanding of that with other non-experts.

If you’re going to dismiss me for saying the experts are right, since I’m not an expert, then shouldn’t you dismiss those who spent far less time than I to learn about the subject, who are saying the experts are wrong?

(That said, their numbers are much realer than that.)

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47571349

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Looks like not, but would it actually have been shadier, or are we just used to individual users being fucked over?

I loved Apple IIs at schools and libraries as a young child, fell in love with my Mac IIsi at home at the age of 7. Later, at 13, I had a Macintosh-evangelizing web site and mailing list that Guy Kawasaki (Apple's lead evangelist) even subscribed to.

I've been a primary Mac user through the 68k, PowerPC, Intel, and Apple Silicon days, from System 6.0.7 through today. Got an original iPhone and iPad, have upgraded my iPhone every few years since.

The technofeudalism, bugginess, and UI crappiness has me done and looking for the exits, to say nothing of the embrace of Trump. My next laptop won't be a Mac, and my next phone won't be an iPhone.

But the model "shape" and computation graph itself doesn't change as a result of post-training. All that changes is the weights in the matrices.

[Edit: but to be clear, for a pretrained model this probability means "what's my estimate of the conditional probability of this token occurring in the pretraining dataset?", not "how likely is this statement to be true?" And for a post-trained model, the probability really has no simple interpretation other than "this is the probability that I will output this token in this situation".]

Time will tell if the 30% slowdown continues beyond four years, and/or if earlier treatment with more effective amyloid clearance from newer drugs has greater effects. The science suggests it should.

Even negative numbers and zero were objected to until a few hundred years ago, no?

But this is a bit of a straw man. Mathematical models of the technological singularity [1], along with the history of human economic growth [2], are super-exponential: the rate of growth is itself increasing over time, or at least has taken multiple discrete leaps [3] at the transitions to agriculture and industry, respectively. A true singularity/infinity can of course never be achieved for physical reasons (limited stuff within the cubically-expanding lightcone, plus inherent limits to technology itself), but the growth curve can look hyperbolic and traverse many orders of magnitude before those physical limits are encountered.

[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23928/w239...

[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wcEPEb2mnZ9mtGlkv8lEtScU...

[3] https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/longgrow.pdf