There were 5882 cases of CJD between 2007 and 2020 in the United States (not specific to CWD though). Nonetheless, when I learned of that tally a few weeks ago I didn't expect the tally to be so high. Public health messaging had conveyed to me that CJD was an extremely rare occurrence in the US.
A larger-than-expected percentage of people Dxed with CJD are elderly (mid-70s to mid-80s) women which leads me to wonder if medical equipment was used when delivering babies exposed many women? I wonder if their children (who were being delivered) were also infected? In deer the mother-offspring infection route's quite well studied, but I'm not well informed about the human offspring route.
The incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) has risen considerably from 2007 to 2020, particularly among older women, according to a research letter published in JAMA Neurology.
The progressive, universally fatal prion disease CJD has been stable in the United States (US) between 1979 to 2006. The most common subtype of CJD, sporadic CJD, tends to affect older individuals. As the global population ages, the epidemiology of CJD may be evolving.
To evaluate recent trends in CJD in the US, the researchers sourced data for this cross-sectional study from the Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research multiple cause of death database. Death certificates between 2007 and 2020 for CJD were assessed for volume and decedent demographics.
The incidence of CJD increased consistently between 2007 and 2020, in which there were 5882 total cases and 51.2% occurred among women.
I have no doubt that this "feature" is a backroom deal worth millions because OpenAI is running out of public internet data with which to improve its models. (See this paper from researchers at MIT and a few other schools which predicts that high-quality text training data will be 'used up' by 2026: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.04325 )
Think of all of the email, Google Docs, and other data that Alphabet has that it can use to train and improve its models. OpenAI has limited ways to get non-public text data unless Microsoft is giving them some data from Office users, Hotmail users.
Just my two cents. And whatever Dropbox is doing with retrieval augmented generation (RAG) / "new+better search" with the OpenAI APIs: I'm certain it could be done with less latency and probably would cost less if the RAG 'feature' / 'new search' was built in house at Dropbox.
>The restrictions were supposed were supposed to only come into play on Nov. 17, 30-days after the US first announced it. But in a filing on Oct. 24, Nvidia said it was informed that the rules were effective immediately and that it would affect shipments of Nvidia’s A100, A800, H100, H800, and L40S products. The 800 series chips were designed specifically for the Chinese market to circumvent the earlier iterations of the export control rules.
This video is incredibly long, dull, and lacking in any technical depth (as new product releases often are) but I watched Zuckerberg's keynote speech - the 45 minute-long one - and the engineering guy's speech in which he talks about LLMs because I work in the language models space and was hoping to hear more news about open-source LLMs and Llama2, Llama3, etc.: https://m.facebook.com/MetaforDevelopers/videos/meta-connect... (I wish that video were on a seek-able platform with a searchable transcript like YouTube.)
In any case, the digital avatars of famous people were introduced in Zuckerberg's keynote speech, along with the absurd RayBans+Snapchat camera sunglasses that now record and transmit audio (great...), as well as the third generation of their AR/VR headset. (It seems they're leaning heavily into the _augmented_ reality instead of a virtual world in the 'metaverse'.) Oh, speaking of the AR/VR headset: Xbox games are coming to it in December 2023. I didn't expect that: Microsoft and Meta joining up on an AR/VR headset.
As someone who works in tech in the United States, but who had previously lived in a country in the EU that is more privacy minded than a lot of other EU countries and is decidedly more privacy-oriented than the United States, I must say that the RayBan + Snapchat video and audio sunglasses thoroughly creeped me out.
This article touches upon but a few of the reasons why I do like those devices: https://www-heise-de.translate.goog/hintergrund/Wie-Facebook... Yes, there's an application for hands-on learning with AR/VR goggles and it makes it easier to connect with one's friends and family on the other side of the world, but I don't want to exist in a society where everyone is wearing a potential surveillance apparatus on their face and where people interact with but a digital simulacrum of the real world.
I'm terribly curious as to if anyone has done market (or academic) research into these notions of 'digital avatars' of not-famous people since LLMs have grown in ability? I'd read some of the literature on the perceived helpfulness or utility in question-answering via digital avatars some years ago, but that was probably a decade or more. Can anyone recommend any recent research in the space? I'd also truly love to read any marketing-focused materials on this flavor of tech product as I'm just not convinced that there's a real market there for digital avatars / digital 'holograms' of real (live or dead) humans.
See my comment elsewhere on this post. Greg Brockman, head of strategic initiatives at OpenAI, was talking at a round table discussion in Korea a few weeks ago about how they had to start using the quantized (smaller, cheaper) model earlier in 2023. I noticed a switch in March 2023, with GPT-4 performance being severely degraded after that for both English-language tasks as well as code-related tasks (reading and writing).
Check out this post from a round table dialogue with Greg Brockman from OpenAI. The GPT models that were in existence / in use in early 2023 were not the performance-degraded quantized versions that are in production now: https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/146rgq2/chatgpt_...
Greg Brockman from OpenAI said a round table chat a few weeks ago that ChatGPT is heavily quantized since the end of Q1/early Q2 2023: https://www.reddit.com/r/mlscaling/comments/146rgq2/chatgpt_... ; I am looking for the source document / source quote from which I read it, but the big switch from 'not so stupid' to 'pretty damn stupid' occurred with the 1 March 2023 model switch.
That's around the time that I noticed `gpt-3.5-turbo` becoming lower quality, whether in the UI (ChatGPT) or programmatically (via `gpt-3.5-turbo`) API calls.
The 10-20x lighter-weight version of the models that they're (OpenAI) running now - the heavily quantized version - allows them and Microsoft to save on far-and-away their largest expense: cloud expenditure. I suspect/expect that the AMD GPU announcement with OpenAI will come to fruition in the next few years as all of these LLM companies depend upon large piles of GPU compute to be able to train their models and no one wants to be beholden to NVIDIA or any one other GPU manufacturer.
A while back I was reading up on private equity as an 'industry' after a prior employer was bought up by PE, carved into bits, with each 'chunk' being sold off to the highest bidder.
Has anyone ever looked into if pinball can be used in the same way that Tetris can for PTSD? Several friends with (C)PTSD love to play pinball, so I wondered if the research supports the whole eye-movement desensitization aspect that Tetris has for trauma patients.
This page is pretty jank-tastic but it has some charts on it in addition to serving up H1B lottery numbers, the # of days in which the lottery cap was reached, etc. Has some interesting data points around the GFC plus or minus a few years: https://redbus2us.com/h1b-visa-cap-reach-dates-history-graph...
2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 saw no H1B lottery.
2007 took 55 days to reach the cap; 2010 took 264 days; 2011 took 300 days; and 2012 took 235 days; and 2013 took 71 days to reach the H1B visa cap.
I haven't averaged out the 'days to reach the cap' during the other years shown on that chart but the decade or so of "5 days" mixed in with a few 10 and 20 days tells me that the cap is usually reached in about a week or so.
I'm sure that there are sites with prettier bar charts. What surprised me the most was that in the early-to-mid-2010s you were looking at ~85k H1B applications, with that number increasing into the high 100ks, low 200ks by the late 2010s. 2022 saw ~300k applicants with 2023 seeing half a million.
IMO, as someone who has (briefly) worked in real estate tech the United States NEEDS TO pass legislation similar to what Canada has passed regarding the ownership of homes by non-Canadian:
>Broadly speaking, the Ban prohibits foreign corporations and individuals who are not permanent residents of Canada or Canadian citizens from purchasing residential real estate in Canada between January 1, 2023, and December 31, 2024. Any contractual obligations arising or assumed prior to January 1, 2023, will not be subject to the Ban
Banning non-Canadian residents from purchasing residential properties as well as banning corporations that are owned (in part or in whole) by non-Canadian residents seems like a good start. It will be interesting to see how many LLCs (or the Canadian equivalent) get created by Canadians but that are actually used as shell companies for international buyers. I hope that there's some sort of flagging of Canadian individuals who suddenly become real estate moguls, buying up dozens or hundreds of properties via LLCs, when the Canadian had no interest in real estate prior to 1 Jan 2023 (which is when the law takes effect).
There's a pretty informative video on PFAS in Germany; at the end of the video there's a guy in the US (southeast I think) who is located about five miles away from a PFAS plant whose pets keep dying and who is underwater on his mortgage because no one will buy a house near a literal toxic-waste-producing plant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovCvW22ol3Y
It's not a book but I really like the Elements of AI two-part course series that the University of Helskini provided (financial) support for: the two courses in the Elements of AI series consist of a pure theory course and the second course is a hands-on / applied course. Because not everyone who is seeking to learn about AI has programming skills the second course is a 'choose your own adventure' type course, with one track involving lots of programming, one 'middle of the road' option with just a touch of coding, and the other track not involving any programming whatsoever (suitable for executives, IMO).
I've recommended this course (just the first one if you're a time-constrained executive) to C-suite colleagues in the past who wanted to become more informed about ML, DL and AI, but who didn't want a deeply technical explanation a la Andrew Ng's Coursera courses or similar content.
The Elements of AI courses touch upon the statistical underpinnings of the space (there's a unit on Bayes' Theorem), the societal implications of automated decision-making process (job creation, etc.), what tasks are "doable with AI today" and which tasks are definitely _not_ doable with A(G)I, etc.
Helping non-technical folks develop an intuition about what is possible with "AI" is crucial, I think, to having a workplace and a society that can talk realistically about the benefits and detriments of robotic data processing such as ML, DL, AI.
Does that lower the seizure threshold at all? (I've had docs get on my case about bupropion + mild other medication that can in theory impact the seizure threshold) But I'd be interested - potentially - in trying this combo as things are pretty cobwebby in the brain department lately.
Delysm is Dextromethorphan Polistirex which is a time-release form of DXM. I don't think it lets you get the same peaks / thresholds as 'instant release' dextromethorphan.
You could probably still do that. Or claim an allergy to the additives in Delsym (a corn allergy is a good one because corn is in everything) and ask to get a pure dextromethorphan formulation from a compounding pharmacy.
A larger-than-expected percentage of people Dxed with CJD are elderly (mid-70s to mid-80s) women which leads me to wonder if medical equipment was used when delivering babies exposed many women? I wonder if their children (who were being delivered) were also infected? In deer the mother-offspring infection route's quite well studied, but I'm not well informed about the human offspring route.
--- Full paper here (not free): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/article-abstr...
The article in JAMA, above, has been summarized on this page: https://www.neurologyadvisor.com/topics/neurodegenerative-di... I'll paste the summary text below:
The incidence of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) has risen considerably from 2007 to 2020, particularly among older women, according to a research letter published in JAMA Neurology.
The progressive, universally fatal prion disease CJD has been stable in the United States (US) between 1979 to 2006. The most common subtype of CJD, sporadic CJD, tends to affect older individuals. As the global population ages, the epidemiology of CJD may be evolving.
To evaluate recent trends in CJD in the US, the researchers sourced data for this cross-sectional study from the Wide-Ranging Online Data for Epidemiologic Research multiple cause of death database. Death certificates between 2007 and 2020 for CJD were assessed for volume and decedent demographics.
The incidence of CJD increased consistently between 2007 and 2020, in which there were 5882 total cases and 51.2% occurred among women.
[article continues on the Neurology Advisor page]