Multiple opinions won't necessarily help unless you research first. I'm not sure about other disciplines but in orthodontics for example there is a very definite split between whether they are "airway focused" or mainstream. I saw 6 or 7 different doctors, dentists and orthos in the UK over a period of about 10 years and none of them saw anything wrong with my jaws. Saw an airway focused ortho and a surgeon specialising in maxillo-mandibular advancement surgery and they recommended aggressive surgery. I agree with them, mainstream medicine is ignoring an epidemic of jaw underdevelopment because it challenges current practices in orthodontics.
Article says sleep apnea is caused by muscles collapsing in the upper airway, but an overlooked cause is structural deficiency in the bones of the midface.
I haven't found an explanation yet that answers a couple of seemingly basic questions about LLMs:
What does the input side of the neutral network look like? Is it enough bits to represent N tokens where N is the context size? How does it handle inputs that are shorter than the context size?
I think embedding is one of the more interesting concepts behind LLMs but most pages treat it as a side note. How does embedding treat tokens that can have vastly different meanings in different contexts - if the word "bank" were a single token, for example, how does embedding account for the fact that it can mean river bank or money bank? Do the elements of the vector point in both directions? And how exactly does embedding interact with the training and inference processes - does inference generate updated embeddings at any point or are they fixed at training time?
(Training vs inference time is another thing explanations are usually frustrating vague on)
One of the things that made me think of doing this was Nat Friedman's (GitHub co-founder) project, PlasticList[1].
The idea was to give consumers real-world data to inform their decisions around avoiding/minimising microplastics. Some sources are orders of magnitude worse than others, so this potentially allowed people to eliminate a large portion of their exposure by just avoiding the products with the largest amounts.
This was a project that someone wanted to happen and was willing to pay for, but for whatever reason wasn't being done by the usual institutions (universities, governments).
The idea of this post is to give people who have money a way to find out about other projects that fit this shape, so they can fund them.
Background: changes related to agriculture and industrialisation are causing our jaws to grow smaller and more backwards and downwards. This is behind much of the prevalence of malocclusion (crooked teeth), sleep-disordered breathing (inc. sleep apnea), and jaw joint problems we see. It's being ignored because a) historical separation of dentistry and medicine -- neither GPs nor dentists are trained to recognise it, and b) it challenges the business model of orthodontics (common procedures such as extractions and retraction can cause or make issues worse; if orthodontics accepts the jaw epidemic idea as stated then almost all practitioners will have to retrain significantly).
Funding needed: Living expenses for one person + server costs, ~£700 per month.
Possibilities for further funding: improving website, running ad campaigns for awareness.
Modern environments and lifestyles have changed our jaw development dramatically, contributing to the high prevalence of sleep-disordered breathing (snoring through to obstructive sleep apnea), chronic tension, jaw joint problems, and orthodontic need.
A few counter anecdotes: I read a story about a baseball coach making the players hold water in their mouths while training to make sure they couldn't mouth breathe. I'm pretty sure if you watch an MMA fight the fighters will mostly have their mouths closed. And the airway-focused orthodontist Bill Hang ran a marathon with tape over his mouth (only removing it for hydration) to make a point about the importance of nasal breathing. Also, I can do sustained moderate to high intensity exercise with only nose breathing.
Buteyko is helping me manage thoracic outlet syndrome (I think; haven't had a diagnosis). My main symptom was a jarring feeling in my head when walking. Went from months where walking even a short distance gave me very mild concussion symptoms, to walking and running 12 miles in a day without issue, and the only difference seemed to be the way I was breathing.
Edit - a couple of other things possibly helped around the same time, so I'm not sure if I ever isolated the effect of breathing. But it definitely felt like it was a significant part of it.
Someone at the bank was finally able to give me a hint: this is a continuous payment authority, which is not the same as multiple one-off card payments.
Someone at the personal finance stackexchange[1] mentioned that with a CPA you "still owe the money" if the transaction fails, which kind of makes sense. Maybe the "transaction for full available balance" was just the easiest way of conveying the notion that "a merchant is entitled to take an amount that's greater than or equal to your full balance".
Still, misrepresenting the merchant's actions with basically a made up transaction seems like a sure way to create confusion where we really need clarity and accuracy.
Yeah that would make sense. I don't have any arranged overdraft but my balance can go negative by a small amount in which case it will be displayed. The most likely explanation does seem to be that they are just displaying my balance in a weird way - but still, very odd to show a transaction for a different amount than was requested. And having spoken to them, they see exactly the same thing I do in whatever systems they can access, so it's not just how it's represented to the customer.
That was another possibility I asked about but the bank said it's absolutely not possible to query the balance. Could have been misunderstanding what I meant, I guess, or just wrong - do you know for sure that it is possible?