The dot com bubble ended when the ecosystem of fairy tales and lies which built up around a technology were generally decided to be nothing but hot air. It is true that the technology sticks around but the wildly inappropriate estimates of future finance, social behaviour and technological capability subside after these bubbles burst. Plus a bunch of too-willing-to-believe investors lose a bunch of money.
Cave was expressing an answer to a question about cutting corners in the process of creating music. ( https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chatgpt-making-things-faster... ) There is certainly value in the work of nurses, bouncers and servers, and my interpretation of Cave's other written works leads me to believe that he is a proponent of finding joy and creative expression, even in tasks which don't have an obvious artistic product. AI lacks insight and lack of insight is what can turn a succulent feast of a life into biweekly deliveries of Soylent.
> AI lacks insight and lack of insight is what can turn a succulent feast of a life into biweekly deliveries of Soylent.
Does a picture of a humming bird lack insight? Does collage art lack insight? Do remixes lack insight? Does mass-produced formulaic pop music lack insight?
Maybe. Or maybe some artists enjoy those creative processes and some audiences enjoy the output. Maybe oil painters who critique photography, and photographers who critique collages, and musicians who critique mash-ups, and DJs who critique modern production studios, and, yes, artists who critique the use of AI models in creative processes, are all just being pretentious assholes.
(It is possible I am simply misunderstand Cave. I take most of his writing to be artistic prose. It's possible that these are sincere metaphysics and that Nick Cave does literally believe in some sort of ur-religious "essential and unconscious human spirit underpinning our existence". In which case I think he's got a nutty religion and consider the fact that AI is an existential threat to that religion mostly a net good for humanity.)
I studied computer engineering. It's not a CS curriculum and it prepares you for the PE test. They also drill into your head that you can only refer to your self professionally as an engineer in Canada if you pass your engineering practice exams. Just to illustrate the difference between a computer engineering workload and a CS workload, I generally had 40 hours of classes, tutorials and lectures per week while my CS friends had about 24.
They insist that they have a genome sequencing company but when I attempted to use them it became apparent that any success happens despite their equipment and processes, rather than because of it. Months of waiting led to admonitions that no valid samples could be found, which then precipitated further waiting for test kits to be re-sent and new tests to be run. Although they eventually refunded my fee (after about a year in total of waiting), that only happened despite their customer service. I was left with the impression that they were selling something that sometimes might work but hoping that you'd be willing to hang around for months or years until you win the lottery and their process actually generates genomic data. Avoid.
Sigh, That's not a study that's an article reviewing other cherry picked articles.
It doesn't really mean all that much tbh.
You would have to review what this review is reviewing.
Long covid is still not properly defined and is more of a blanket term of feeling like shit after virus infection
* extreme tiredness (fatigue)
* feeling short of breath
* loss of smell
* muscle aches
OR.
* problems with your memory and concentration ("brain fog")
* chest pain or tightness
* difficulty sleeping (insomnia)
* heart palpitations
* dizziness
* pins and needles
* joint pain
* depression and anxiety
* tinnitus, earaches
* feeling sick, diarrhoea, stomach aches, loss of appetite
* a high temperature, cough, headaches, sore throat, changes to sense of smell or taste
* rashes
* confusion
* trouble concentrating
* headaches
* aches and pains in the muscles
* stiff joints
* a sore throat
* swollen lymph nodes
Which was considered perfectly normal before the big C.
Maybe long covid is a thing, but it really needs proper definition then.
How sick I am of the Covid nutters. If you want research money for something it seems to be just enough to slap some covid label or other and a cheque will be written no questions asked.
Also nature is falling from grace as a top notch elite non-partisan publisher as they have definitely turned partisan in the last few years, they still had the courage to publish the devastating outcome of their political agenda though
I've got 3 friends with brain fog symptoms after 3 years of a COVID infection.
I myself take 6 months to have my brain work like before after contact with someone with COVID.
Wym "maybe long covid is a thing"? Didn't the deaths show the response to COVID is extremely varied already? I'm happy you didn't have it but I bet you know someone that does.
I agree Nature is admittedly dodgy to the left if the issue is political (climate change models, the infamous proximal Origins) but I honestly don't see long COVID being one.
Correlation doesn't equate to causation. Sub-optimal health is pervasive. Misattributing it to long COVID—as the evidence suggests is what's happening—is entirely plausible.
“With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work7, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages”
So this line needs a lot of context due to the nature of academia. It's best not to read much into it. What ends up happening is that you do some research, type it all up into a paper and then your advisor makes you add something to connect your results to the "real world." And because it's a study on virology not economics the author will just speculate on some stuff that'll later be used for marketing fodder or grant writing to say the university is working on important things. Which they are, but important work doesn't sell. Important work that laypeople recognize as important sells. And when you want government money connecting it to jobs -- ooo boy.
Ok this conversation can get pretty silly, let's try to avoid that.
Now at 2023 we have lifted more people out of poverty and ill-health in both raw numbers and as a percentage of the population than any time in the planet's history.
Without prescribing anything in so far as dealing with the world's problems, be careful flippantly trading that off. It may not be you, your friends and your family that previously watched their children die and now don't but I don't see that as making this quite frankly stunning achievement as an irrelevance.
Yes we have made great progress with maternal and basic health, these are really great and represent real meaningful knowledge and capability gains. However, there are other health trends that are not looking very promising at the moment that take a bit of the shine off.
Poverty has some very definitional issues with the chosen metrics and I am hesitant to actually draw any conclusions on if it has brought net positive human fulfillment.
In any case the whole system is a pretty precarious place at the moment with rapidly closing windows to maintain stability, and if we don't those "stunning achievements" are going not going to persist in a meaningful way.
I work from home and haven't noticed significant additional wear and tear on my toilet. The same with my sink, fridge, doors and floors. I did buy a chair. It was about 300 bucks and it's a better one than I've ever had in an office.
There is much more information about Long Covid than the general public is aware of. The assumption that it is merely a wide range of vaguely defined symptoms isn't valid.
This. There's more understanding now, and less ambiguity. Long COVID is an inflammation disease, and can be seen in MRI scans of heart, lungs, and brain.
Recovery seems to be in the first year or not at all. “As soon as it’s 12 months, it plateaus,” says study co-author Tala Ballouz, an epidemiologist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. “You have a higher chance of recovery during the first year, and after one year it really becomes more of a chronic condition.”[1]
The incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases, and 10–12% of vaccinated cases.
Since roughly everyone should be expected to become infected, doesn't this mean that 10-30% of the population would have had, or should expect to get, Long COVID?
That just doesn't tally with what you see out in the world.
A sizable chunk of the work force has dropped out due to long COVID. You don't see them, because they don't show up at work or go out much. They're just not there.
The term Long Covid (shortened here to "LC") covers an array of symptoms and severities. For example, depending on who's defining the duration, if after infection you feel light fatigue for 3 months and it then goes away, you've had LC. Most people I interact with have no idea I've been experiencing LC for a year. I know what it's done to my stamina, but they usually don't.
Right. That can start to reconcile things. But it is not only not visible from afar, but nor is it reported in smalltalk.
> [LC] covers an array of symptoms and severities
I'm fully behind the need to break down the array and make it studyable.
But, unless you net in a sizeable cohort for whom the symptoms were ultimately transient, barely noticed, or successfully managed by the sufferer, it simply can't stack up with the reality of life.
I'm aware that headlines generate $$$ for research, but 10-30% means it has to be ascribed to marketing over science. It's essentially an irrelevant figure in serious any analysis.
> I've been experiencing LC for a year
Right. And it is that long tail of high-severity/low-incidence research should focus. But here we're talking about 0.1% of the 10-30%.
> Right. That can start to reconcile things. But it is not only not visible from afar, but nor is it reported in smalltalk.
I imagine whether you hear it in smalltalk varies a lot by peer cohort, average age within the cohort, and it wouldn't surprise me if it's distributed very unevenly across the population.
Using my cohort as an example: A brother-in-law took 18 months to feel normal again. One of my neighbors reported that three of her friends took at least 3-6 months before they felt better. She herself got it and said it took "months" to feel better. Yet my boss said I'm the first person he knows who has LC.
One thing's for sure: Covid seems like a pretty bizarre disease. :-)
