FYI they have an english description. Just select english in the top right (which it defaulted to, for me), then click About. There are some mistranslations above.
In general this line of argument is questioning how we can know that a particular virus causes a particular disease. It ignores decades of technological improvements developed toward actual viral bulkup, purification, and infection.
Is it easy to know that a particular virus causes a particular disease? Not always, particularly if the disease syndrome is complex. Is it possible to link particular viruses to particular diseases? Definitely. For the more straightforward diseases it's even relatively straightforward to show that a particular virus causes that particular disease, with enough work.
> For the more straightforward diseases it's even relatively straightforward to show that a particular virus causes that particular disease, with enough work.
I'd be really interested what this work would look like. Koch's Postulates have always made logical sense to me and I've never understood why they where abandoned for virology. How can we prove a high likelihood of causation when at best we only have data of hosts that already showed signs of disease?
Aside - this thread seems to have gone down a rabbit hole where many are assuming I'm claiming viruses don't exist or don't cause disease. I get that viruses have been made a political topic these days, but I'm only raising that as far as I'm aware viruses have never been isolated in the same way as bacteria or fungi. We've never, again as far as I'm aware, isolated a virus from a sick person, exposed a healthy person to it, and seen the same disease symptoms show up with the virus now present in their system.
One could point to vaccines for this proof, but even those include other adjuvants that are present specifically to inflame the host and help promote a stronger immune response. I'm not claiming that including those adjuvants is a problem as far as the vaccine goes, only that it doesn't fit the definition of introducing an isolated virus.
Have we found plenty of evidence that a specific virus is present in a host after symptoms are shown? Absolutely. But have we ever successfully checked the box on Koch's Postulates with a virus? Not that I know of.
Perhaps, a better way to traverse this would be to look at the history of virology, trace main events, starting from the discovery of bacteriophage, and check out associated work. It is hard to say what kind of evidence would satisfy you. Viruses have been isolated many times, and transmissibility has been shown on cell cultures and animal models.
You can't purposely infect real people with disease-causing viruses in research so you won't find much studies like that. But there is no doubt that viruses are transmissible and can cause disease, and there is plenty of evidence to support that. Check out studies on yellow fever virus and flu done more than a hundred years ago.
Viruses, and some unculturable bacteria and other organisms, are simply unique with regard to Koch's second postulate, in that they literally can't be cultured in a pure manner. Hierarchical and tangential flow filtration can, however, get them incredibly pure (as quality controlled by electron microscope) after culturing. I'm not an expert here. This is probably not routinely done as it would be costly and to no purpose for the particular experiment. But it can be done, and I'd be extraordinarily surprised it it hadn't been done.
> We've never, again as far as I'm aware, isolated a virus from a sick person, exposed a healthy person to it, and seen the same disease symptoms show up with the virus now present in their system.
Yes, we also don't typically expose healthy people to disease-causing bacteria either. This is a hard sell post-WWII.
Typically when you culture a virus you'll also have a separate culture that is exposed to everything else minus the virus. You'll "purify" both in the same manner, expose some animals or cultured cells to the purified virus culture, and expose other animals or cultured cells to the purified control culture. The only thing that differs is the presence of the virus.
> > For the more straightforward diseases it's even relatively straightforward to show that a particular virus causes that particular disease, with enough work.
> I'd be really interested what this work would look like.
A stringent example:
1) Replicate the virus in cell culture and ensure you're isolating the virus while doing so.
- A: homogenize and passage a virus containing sample.
- B: passage it through cell culture.
- C: dilute the supernatant from cell culture until the dilution, on average, has less than one virus per aliquot.
- D: Use these aliquots to inoculate further cell culture.
2) Analyze all cultures
- A: As, on average, some of the aliquots contained no virus, there should be a number of cultures which look identical to the uninfected controls.
- B: Any cultures which show morphology or pathology distinct from the uninfected controls should contain specific virus particles and show specific viral RNA/DNA on a PCR test. Likewise, any cultures which look like the uninfected controls should be free of virus based on these tests.
- C: If any cultures show morphology or pathology distinct from the uninfected controls but do not contain virus particles (given sufficient time for the virus to propagate and emerge from the cells), then you've got a thinker on your hands. Triage for contaminants or another disease causing agent.
3) After demonstrating that virus is the causal agent of the infected culture morphology or pathology, use multiple of these infected cultures to infect animals (and have control "infections" from the uninfected cultures). Then repeat this process from the infected animals to demonstrate that it is indeed the identified virus which causes the disease.
If you can't use an animal model for the disease then you're stuck doing this in cell culture and comparing the infected culture cell morphology and pathology to that of cells in biopsies of diseased people.
Pretty darn good evidence that it is a virus, and a particular virus at that, which causes the disease.
Realistically it's much more convenient just to use 2B as evidence. You get some issues with natural immunity and lysogenic versus lytic viral stages (these have different terms in Eukaryotic viral infection), but it's pretty decent for showing things like HIV being the causative factor of AIDS even prior to showing the effect of HIV presence in immune cells.
Cash transactions over $10k have to be reported to the IRS. You'd have to provide ID and TIN. If that weren't the case, criminals wouldn't have had problems with money laundering.
Theoretically, they can lock you out by suspending your passport and preventing you from traveling even if you leave the country. Also they can have full access to your bank records given the warrant and you can't make any serious purchases with cash.
Even in an unlikely apocalyptic scenario you have described they won't gain much more power than they already have. I don't see how this makes you a slave by itself. Only if government begins using this as a tool to control you but then, if we hit such a point, they have much more other tools people have to worry about.
I never get this argument. There is no magic in the human creative process. One way or another, algorithms should be able to replicate it and eventually surpass it.
I think the human creative process is more interesting than AI. I love learning about the person behind the creation, and hearing how their upbringing and experiences shaped what they created.
This is the most important comment in the thread. Humans want to connect with other humans. You can pump out all of the perfectly-rendered perfectly-customized & personalized fully-immersive metaverse simulation but at the end of the day, we bags of meat and gas will still want to sit around a fire and tell ghost stories.
The market for 'fully tech driven' content exists, sure, but it'll always just be that.
The examples I always think of are Kurt Vonnegut and Raymond Carver.
Vonnegut's experience in WWII heavily impacted his writing and views, and led him to create one of his best works.
Additionally, when I talked to a war veteran about Slaughterhouse Five he said that the time travel was very relatable. When he came home, he felt like he was moving backward and forward in time. Everything at his home was the same, and it was like he never left. It was such an interesting conversation, and something that made me appreciate Vonnegut so much more.
For Carver, I just really enjoyed learning about his life. His work experience, personal relationships, and experience with alcoholism shows up in almost all of his stories. I find it cool to read a story, and draw parallels to his life.
Additionally, my father was a blue collar worker and worked in many different jobs his entire life. I draw so many parallels from the stories he's told me to Raymond Carver's stories.
I really love forming connections like this to the art that I enjoy.
This is why there will still be a market for human-created art, but it'll likely be very niche, for people who care. When it comes to sheer quality, the AI should be able to surpass us at some point and create masterpieces we can't even think of.
It's more God In The Gaps. Something is declared ineffable, beyond the grasp of the mind, science, tools, AI. Then we have an undeniable breakthrough, and they roll back that stance the very smallest amount to accommodate the new knowledge.
There's a strong historical pattern that the appearance of the limits of reason has always been due to a lack of imagination, often in the very people who just spent their lives expanding its borders. And these arguments so often rest on "je ne sais quois," it comes off as more ridiculous than parsimonious. If you think you found an illogical or indeterminate system, I'd bet that your body of kmowledge just needs reframing.
Though ever further we might see, surely dragons further be! c:
Isn't the reverse of God In The Gaps just as ridiculous? Just because we have been able to use a materialistic, scientific approach to get this far doesn't necessarily mean it will keep working forever on everything.
Using your metaphor at the end: "There's dragons just over the next hill" and "There haven't been dragons so far so there will never be dragons" are both just guesses.
Creativity is not just cognition and pattern matching. There is something more fundamental at work... obviously calling it 'magic' doesn't describe it, but some people call it 'inspiration' and they feel it on a physiological level. They starve and torture themselves to serve it. To recreate something like that you would need to simulate not just a human's biology but an entire world.
I don't know. It's like Frankenstein's monster reading The Sorrows of Young Werther. He could somewhat understand what the words meant, but he couldn't ever feel what was being described. Even if the monster could write about human feelings, it would be just as an observer, a reader, repeating and copying.
"They" refers to the programs that exist (or more broadly anything based on "statistical likelihood or mashing up the familiar", which is the overwhelmingly dominant sort); "never will" refers to "never will write the next great novel or create the next great painting", not "never will exist."
I think the author might agree that they never will exist, but because of his actual point about what they will do to creative work and communities, not any physical limitations.
I think it is still a solid argument, especially when juxtaposed with anything related to developing something new and innovative, whether in the domain of arts, science, or business. But what I found insightful in this quote was the note about the least predictable things.
This implies you know how the human creative process works. I doubt you do: it's an unsolved problem, like most things in this category (intelligence, creativity) dealing with how our brains function.
The magic is the biology. Computers are not going to understand the pain of taking a bullet or childbirth. What can they write about these topics except trite regurgitation?
I had a period when I used THC (edibles) for sleep every night. This was one of the worst things I have ever done to myself. At first, you don't notice much side effects, but slowly it creeps up on you. It makes you depressed, depletes of any motivation, gives brain fog and you may just feel weird over all. When I quit I was amazed by how much better I started feeling and by how much my cognitive function improved.
I would highly recommend getting off it asap. Maybe taper off if you can't quit right away. First nights will be tough: sleepless, cold sweats, crazy dreams, but then it should get much much better. Be well!
~10 years from now we’re going to have better data on chronic THC consumption and after being a heavy user I’m pretty confident it’s going to shock a lot of people with negative externalities.
Tip for getting off weed - start by lowering the damn dosage. A lot of commonly used products are the equivalent of a triple shot. And folks do it daily.
I used to use THC heavily, but the negative effect was noticable in multiple aspects. So I stopped for a while. Now I take full spectrum CBD oil that I make myself. It has a low amount of THC in it, which boosts the overall effects. It's a much better experience than taking high THC strains imo.
> It makes you depressed, depletes of any motivation, gives brain fog and you may just feel weird over all.
Meh, I was like that prior to using THC. I will admit that it can sometimes increase brain-fog the next day. But I'd say the pros and cons are pretty 75/25 split for me.
It is really hard to get people to understand that. And there is a lot of false beliefs about thc being safe and being overall good. Maybe in small occasional amount, but I keep seeing disasters around me with heavy consumers.
Its odd to me that the "logical" and "scientific" types, or self-styled types, sing the praises of cannabis, but there's no mechanism in evolution to make this a healthy drug for us. Its just an accident of history it makes us high and that obviously comes with many costs as the blind watchmaker of evolution had no template for any of this.
Of course the drug war was a classist and racist thing and ultimately a failure because its propaganda couldn't keep up with people's desire for cannabis and the truth on how its far less dangerous than they were told. But to win politically you need to go big, so now we've over-corrected into cannabis being entirely harmless or even being a wonderdrug and cure-all, which obviously isn't true.
I see people on reddit recommend it for any number of health issues which I think is reckless and ignorant. A lot of these people have health issues that need to be treated. Covering up these issues with cannabis isn't going to help in the long run. Worse, almost zero discussion on how cannabis can trigger lifelong schizophrenia for people who have schizophrenia in their family and have latest schizophrenia that otherwise would have remained dormant for a long time, even the rest of their lives.
It reminds me a bit of the crony capitalism that kept stevia from being used as a sweetener. Society over-corrected with that as well, and honestly it tastes kinda terrible. And like all sweetners, who knows if its healthy. I don't think the blind watchmaker was expecting sweetness with no calories the same way she didn't expect being able to artificially shoot up your dopamine and serotonin with things like cannabis.
I don't think modern people realize how unbelievably delicate our bodies and mind are and how many 'ordinary' things are reckless and risky experimentation on us. I think we're still in this 19th century mindset of "conquering nature with science," which is obviously a pretty flawed premise and poor social philosophy. I'm not sure if its even possible for a capitalist technological society to leave that mindset.
I quit my job more than a year ago and wanted to participate in this crazy (but fun) rush to find creative applications of AI. Tried many things, first attempts failed miserably, but it's a fun journey and I'm getting useful experience.
Right now, I'm building an app that allows you to apply AI to create interesting visual effects for images and videos.
Currently, there are two main features:
- You can swap faces in videos to create personalized memes.
- Generate artistic self-portraits.
You probably have seen such features many times already and maybe even tired of it, but for me it was just a starting point. I plan to continue adding new features as new interesting models and technologies become available. Right now there is only a web version and I'm working on rolling out ios and android versions (Almost there!).
Floor796 is an ever-expanding animated scene depicting life on the 796th floor of a massive space station!
The goal of the project is to create an animation as vast as possible, filled with numerous references to movies, games, anime, and memes.
Most characters are clickable: you can find out who the character is and follow a link to the source. Non-clickable characters are fictional.
All scenes are drawn by a single person as a hobby in a special online editor (https://floor796.com/editor/l0) directly in the browser. The drawing process of some blocks can be watched on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCribkEGzOuMQ9ozb0ektMCQ.