It’s called research. You search for something, can’t find it, so you try again; hence the prefix.

Either way, NASA is already exploiting it. I guess, next they’ll find a way to glitch through the very fabric of the universe to teleport to a distant galaxy without moving at all or even using any energy.

That keyboard thing was pretty clever. I would not have thought of that.

Man, that is just such a cool little easter egg. Totally love it!

The idea of modern medicine is to sell chemical compounds that actually have an effect. It’s a philosophical and ethical thing. All products have a unique psychological effect that gets intertwined with their biochemical effect. If you can’t study them individually, it’s impossible to tell if the biochemical effect even exists at all. If your medicine relies heavily, or even entirely, on the psychological side, it’s no different than homeopathy. The idea of modern medicine is to be better than the old stuff that preceded it.

I prefer to think of this as an equation like this: Pm+Bm=Pp+Bp

Pm=psychological effect, medicine

Bm=biochemical effect, medicine

Pp=psychological effect, placebo = surprisingly big

Bp=biochemical effect, placebo = 0

If these sides are equivalent, the medicine is just as effective as placebo. If the medicine side is bigger, you’ll want to know how much of it comes from the P and B terms. In order to figure that out, you would need to know some values. Normally, you can just assume that Pm=Pp, but if you can’t assume that, it you’re left with two unknowns in that equation. In this case, you really can’t assume them to be equal, which means that your data won’t allow you to figure out how much of the total effect comes from psychological and biochemical effects. It could be 50/50, 10/90, who knows. That sort of uncertainty is a serious problem, because of the philosophical and ethical side of developing medicine.

Statistical tests are very picky. They have been designed by mathematicians in a mathematical ideal vacuum void of all reality. The method works in those ideal conditions, but when you take that method and apply it in messy reality where everything is flawed, you may run into some trouble. In simple cases, it’s easy to abide by the assumptions of the statistical test, but as your experiment gets more and more complicated, there are more and more potholes for you to dodge. Best case scenario is, your messy data is just barely clean enough that you can be reasonably sure the statistical test still works well enough and you can sort of trust the result up to a certain point.

However, when you know for a fact that some of the underlying assumptions of the statistical test are clearly being violated, all bets are off. Sure, you get a result, but who in their right mind would ever trust that result?

If the test says that the medicine is works, there’s clearly financial incentive to believe it and start selling those pills. If it says that the medicine is no better than placebo, there’s similar incentive to reject the test result and demand more experiments. Most of that debate goes out the window if you can be reasonably sure that the data is good enough and the result of your statistical test is reliable enough.

Yeah, that’s the thing with placebo. It’s surprisingly effective, and separating the psychological effect from actual chemistry can be very tricky. If most participants can correctly identify if they’re bing fed the real drug or a placebo, it makes it impossible to figure out how much each effect contributes to the end result. Ideally, you would only use effective medicine that does not need the placebo effect to actually work.

Imagine, if all medicine had lots of placebo effect in them. How would you treat patients who are in a coma or otherwise unconscious?

I’ve seen a bunch of Terminator style movies where an AI slices, dices, scorches and/or nukes humanity to oblivion long before climate change gets us. I have it on good authority that we don’t need worry about the temperature change.

That just goes to show how complex the immune system is. Even though we learn more about it all the time, I get the feeling that we’re only scratching the surface.

Space is mostly empty anyway, so the chances of crashing into anything is pretty low. That’s why space travel is so safe.

If that gets implemented, it would help AI devs and common people hanging online.

A few years ago, people assumed that these AIs will continue to get better every year. Seems that we are already hitting some limits, and improving the models keeps getting harder and harder. It’s like the linewidth limits we have with CPU design.

We should have hired him to make a scifi movie about how humanity fixed the climate change.

LOL, I recall seeing HD sunglasses somewhere roughly 15 years ago. That was the period where everything had to have an HDMI port. I guess someone must have made an HDMI compatible toaster too.

Basic internet etiquette. Never read the article. Disagree with everyone. You are always right. Everyone else is always wrong etc.

Very sneaky! So basically some people have found an exploit in this game. Are the devs going to patch it any time soon? If not, this could become the next meta.

Speaking of the engine, if Mozilla ever decides to stop developing gecko, it’s going to force the community to continue that work on their own. If that ever happens, it would have a big impact on all the forks too.

People who hunt said predators.

That’s a very good addition. The old filters are still there and any one of them could still come back and bite us. However, when better technology becomes available, the older filters become less and less of a problem. Let’s take the bioweapons as an example. At the moment, we can develop cures and vaccines, but that technology has its limits. Perhaps one day our biotech is advanced enough that stopping a bioweapon from harming the citizens is as trivial as updating some software and changing a few passwords. Likewise, the climate catastrophe becomes less and less of an issue if the species is no longer bound to a single planet, but can also thrive in space.

Will this antimatter reactor consume the entire planet?

Meh, probably not.