Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@social.cleverlibre.org

Whenever I use two laptops side by side I feel like Jean-Michel Jarre.

@Breakliquid If you like John LeCarre style stories (though to set your expectations, it's not on that level, but then again, nothing is), this is for you. Plus creative profanity from Gary Oldman.

As the Amazing Criswell put it, we are all interested in the future, because that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.

"In 2012, computer theorist Ben Goertzel proposed what he called the “robot university student test”, arguing that an AI capable of obtaining a degree in a same ways as a human should be considered conscious.

Goertzel’s idea – an alternative to the more famous “Turing test” – might have remained a thought experiment were it not for the successes of AIs employing natural language processing (NLP): most famously, GPT-3, the language model created by the OpenAi research laboratory."

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/nov/19/full-on-robot-writing-the-artificial-intelligence-challenge-facing-universities

@enirenberg You may be right - but it's a depressing thought (and down the line it leads to more restrictions on global distribution).

"We therefore took advantage of PLX5622-mediated depletion of these myeloid cell subsets to examine their functional role in C. neoformans lung infection and extrapulmonary dissemination. We found that PLX5622-treated mice had significantly reduced fungal lung infection and reduced extrapulmonary dissemination to the CNS but not to the spleen or liver. Fungal lung infection mapped to MHCIIhi interstitial lung macrophages, which underwent significant expansion during infection following monocyte replenishment and not local division."

#Preprint #immunology #Infection

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.11.18.517077v1

"Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of failed blood-testing start-up Theranos, has been sentenced to more than 11 years in prison for what prosecutors called one of the “most substantial” white collar crimes ever seen in the US."

https://www.ft.com/content/3ab080c9-c13d-40b3-a697-9c58fd9e218c

A good op piece in the Times about the need to keep vaccine development going, but I really dislike the framing of the issue as some sort of global competitive sport (eg 'foreign rivals'). This kind of zero sum thinking about public health is why we're still in this mess in 2023.

"But as a third pandemic winter begins in the United States, its vaccine-making effort has lost steam. Efforts to test and produce next-generation Covid vaccines are bogged down by bureaucratic problems and funding shortfalls. Foreign rivals have raced ahead in approving long-awaited nasal-spray vaccines, including one invented in St. Louis"

#Covid19 #Covid #SarsCoV2

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/18/health/covid-nasal-vaccines-warp-speed.html

@Breakliquid have you tried Slow Horses?