> Pieper emphasized that current over-the-counter NAD+-precursors have been shown in animal models to raise cellular NAD+ to dangerously high levels that promote cancer.
As someone who's seen both cancer and Alzheimer's up close, that would be a very easy choice.
From multiple personal experiences, including both of my parents, dementia is a slow, horrible death where you are robbed of your dignity and end up dragging all of your relatives through a very long, very torturous hell. You will be drooling, pissing, and shitting yourself, all while slowly reverting back to a low IQ childhood mentality where you're very likely to have outbursts and verbally or physically attack the people around you. Your loved ones will be tormented, and if you don't have loved ones then if you're lucky you'll be tossed into a room and forgotten about by underpaid, overworked staff at some run-down nursing home. If you're not lucky you'll be laying in a gutter on the street until you die.
Interestingly my wife helped a friend whose father had the disease during the pandemic.
He had worked as a professor and after retirement had suffered with AD for years but had stayed "independent" because his wife was high functioning mentally but low functioning physically and formed a good team.
He'd bought long term care insurance so he had the resources to afford both a room at a care home but also personal help from home aides, including my wife. He didn't really know what was going on most of the time but he never got angry or flustered and was always pleasant to deal with.
We had trouble with certain homes having a way they want to do things or requiring things that weren't really necessary, one insisted that he get a pacemaker because he had bradycardia. When he lived with his son between homes probably the most difficult thing was that he got up in the night to use the bathroom and would end up urinating in the wrong place. He got much better care than many residents because people were always coming around to see him and the staff knew that we cared and would advocate for him.
He passed away at 92 and outlived many of the people who knew him at work so he had just a small memorial ceremony. I saw it as an example of healthy aging and talked about it a lot with my wife -- and it made me think about myself and my own fear that my ability to compensate for my schizotaxia may degrade when my brain degrades and I can picture myself becoming really nasty and it gives me all the more incentive to rewrite my habits while I still can.
Sadly, cancer isn’t one singular disease. Types of cancer can be excruciatingly painful for many years, which is also tormenting to everyone around you. I wouldn’t wish either on anyone.
Cancer. The worst types of it have the advantage of killing quickly. Alzheimer's destroys the self, and you survive a long time with it, leading to much more suffering, both to you (to the extent you continue to exist) and to your family.
I have a different perspective. The worst types of cancer kill slowly and cause agonizing suffering.
Alzheimer's leads to negative outcomes for your caregivers, but by many accounts many affected individuals do not suffer all that much, if at all, due to their lack of awareness.
If I were diagnosed with Alzheimer's, I would seek out assisted suicide. But I think it's more complicated than that: its existence incentivizes pushing people toward assisted suicide. The government finds a way to help with bloated medical care budgets; unscrupulous family members guilt trip the sick to choose the option to keep the inheritance intact.
The best solution allows it for severe cases, while still investing money in research and spending money for palliative care so it remains an option and not a demand. But that's a tricky line to maintain.
My grandmother's case ended up bankrupting my grandfather and seriously straining the rest of the family. Which ultimately put my grandfather in a pennyless position when he was in his 90's, and poor state care when he was declining - not what he or my grandmother worked their entire lives for. Our family couldn't replace what was lost in the years of care for my grandmother's body, long after she herself was gone.
Never something she would have wanted, but you don't really have a choice and dignified death is never given as an option.
Its the slippery slope proved real by places like my home country of canada keeping other people from having it. I am a huge supporter of assisted suicide but what my country has gone way too far. find a way credibly Keep it to impending death with lots of pain and alzeimers like disease and you would have strong majority acceptance.
Except that time of death comes on average many years later for Alzheimer's than cancer. In the same thought, better die from heart attack instantly but unfortunately much earlier, which would be devastating for the relatives.
The dynamic seems to be identifying some phrasing as a secret neo-Nazi dogwhistle and haranguing people who use it. However, that doesn't effect any change, so a new word has to be identified as secretly neo-Nazi. Repeat ad infinitum, until the terminally online exist in such a rarefied universe that 99% of all humans are secret neo-Nazis.
This is bad, because it both 1) waters down actual neo-Naziism (which is fringe and rare) and worse 2) alienates people to the point where they support non-neo-Nazi but bad policy.
(For me personally, my take on "Western Civilization" is along the lines of Gandhi: I think it'd be a wonderful idea.)
Universities believe that constantly putting out pieces that sound like some research is revolutionary and will change everything increases public support of science. It doesn't, because the vast majority of science is incremental and mostly learning about some weird, niche thing that probably won't translate into applications. This causes the public to misunderstand the role of scientific research and lose faith in it when it doesn't deliver on its promises (made by the university press office, not the researcher).
If you watch the video, the cat is unfortunate, but not particularly concerning. It was night time, and the cat ran underneath the car from the sidewalk. It's very unlikely that a human would do any better (though, I'd welcome Waymo adding more sensors to the undercarriage to prevent this in the future).
What is concerning is that a woman went up to the Waymo to try to get the cat, backed away a foot or two, and then the Waymo drove off. That seems dangerous, both for the fact that the woman was so close and also because her crouching down in front of the Waymo indicates that there's something exceptional about the environment so the Waymo should proceed with more caution.
>If you watch the video, the cat is unfortunate, but not particularly concerning.
I suspect you'd feel different if it was your cat.
>It's very unlikely that a human would do any better (though, I'd welcome Waymo adding more sensors to the undercarriage to prevent this in the future).
Except the human driver would've almost certainly communicated with the woman trying to collect the cat. I'm surprised they don't have a robust undercarriage array given the hypothetical risk to children, even adults.
It’s still a red herring. I lived in the country and had many “pets” (well… stray cats) get killed by cars growing up. Humans kill soooo many pets with cars every year.
The only question is whether Waymo is less dangerous than humans on average, not whether Waymo can achieve a flawless track record.
It’ll be great if Waymo models can learn from this and become even safer. Human drivers absolutely don’t do that.
I don't think so. Not if it's easily within their engineering capabilities to make scenarios like this much safer or even completely safe.
Historically there's always been frequent accidents involving low speed fatalities of pets and children in similar fashion to this that tend to happen in driveways, so the fact the scenario hasn't been accounted for adequately is a little shocking.
>The only question is whether Waymo is less dangerous than humans on average, not whether Waymo can achieve a flawless track record.
Even if it's vastly safer than humans on average already, if this particular area is less safe than humans, then that warrants attention.
His argument follows almost directly, and trivially, from his central premise: a 0% or 1% chance of reaching AGI.
Yeah, if you assume technology will stagnate over the next decade and AGI is essentially impossible, these investments will not be profitable. Sam Altman himself wouldn't dispute that. But it's a controversial premise, and one that there's no particular reason to think that the... CEO of IBM would have any insight into.
then it seems like neither Sam Altman (pro) or IBM (proxy con) have credible or even really interesting or insightful evidence, theories ... even suggestions for what's likely to happen? i.e. We should stop listening to all of them?
It's a very reasonable claim to make, but yes, average denizen of peanut gallery can spot this is a bubble from a mile way, doensn't need "insight" of napkin math done by some CEO that's not even in the industry.
Tho he's probably not too happy that they sold the server business to Lenovo, could at least earn something on selling shovels
we need businesses who are willing to pay for ai / compute at prices where both sides are making money
I for one could 10x my AI usage if the results on my side pan out. Spending $100 on ai today has ROI, will 10x that still have ROI for me in a couple years? probably, I expect agentic teams to increase in capability and more of my work. Then the question is can I turn that increase productivity into more revenues (>$1000 / month, one more client would cover this and then some)
It's at least a little bit amusing that, five or ten years ago, if you opposed big corporate tech allying with government to impose undemocratic political programs, then you were a fascist, while all good thinkers supported that partnership. Only to have that valence switch on a dime when the context changed.
If the Left (and the Right, for that matter) want to make durable political change, they really need coherent theory beyond who's the Bad Guy of the moment.
As someone who's seen both cancer and Alzheimer's up close, that would be a very easy choice.