Seems like you're thinking of "extra care" as some sort of life extension, while the GP thinks it means things like help showering and cooking, and the GGP is ambiguous and could believe anything.
The inevitability of death is a philosophical question. I read the GP and maybe the GGP as talking about the more practical question of whether it's moral to let broke old people die from bedsores and starvation or whether we pay for nurses.
That study measured a drop from 83% to 17% in severe autism, and one behaviour typical of severe autism is slamming one's head into the wall, among other things.
I think it's overly dismissive to summarise a drop in these behaviours as just "less obvious and disruptive to non-autistics". I can't imagine slamming your head into stuff is pleasant regardless of whether you have autism.
No, but per my earlier reply, it's one behaviour typical of severe autism, among other forms of self-harm. Pretending that broader society only wants to reduce the severity of autism symptoms for their own convenience is ignoring the very real suffering that's happening.
Schizophrenia is known to have genetic factors that can increase its likelihood, but is also linked to environmental factors like cannabis use and stress. The group without the environmental factors has a lower incidence of schizophrenia, so it's generally believed that the onset of schizophrenia is triggered by them.
Male homosexuality is believed to have a small genetic component but is also linked to birth order. One theory is that in utero testosterone from older brothers can affect the sexuality of a younger brother.
I disagree that it makes no sense for environmental factors to lead to the onset of autism, on the basis that environmental factors can make someone gay or schizophrenic. That is to say, they can influence a personality and a mind in complicated ways that don't seem intuitive.
If you have 100k people who don't smoke cannabis and 100k who do, 1000 of the non-smokers and 1400 of the smokers will have schizophrenia.
How do you detect schizophrenia in the 400 people in the non-smoker category? The answer is that you can't. They don't have schizophrenia. This is what it means for something to have an environmental trigger.
I get that you're making a point about ableism and environment, but in order to do so you're confusing two things: the onset of autism (at a very early age or even before birth and triggered by who knows what), and the occurrence of any specific symptom of autism (at any age and triggered by things we generally understand).
I'm confused by this. I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school. You can apparently buy a kit to do it online for $39.99 USD.
I'm not suggesting that making bacteria glow in the dark is the same as making arbitrary changes to a virus. At the same time, do you really need $100M of automated freezers and cell culture rooms? Do you need to synthesise a whole virus? Presumably you could just find a building in the desert, shoot anyone who goes near it, feed the past decade of gain-of-function research into Qwen, splice stuff into viruses based on the most promising leads Qwen gave your biologists, then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
I would have thought the main thing stopping people is that this is a clearly stupid thing to do and offers little strategic advantage. But at some point it'll be cheap enough for you or I to do it with a little AI assistance, right? Or at least within the capabilities of an Aum Shinrikyo style doomsday cult.
Adding a plasmid to E.coli is absolutely routine work and you wouldn't need much fancy equipment for that. But that is very far from creating bioweapons. Plasmids are not integrated into the genome, they stay separate.
For viruses you'd need cell cultures of human cells, they're much more sensitive than E.coli. If you don't have sterile working conditions there you'll fail.
And you can't add plasmids to viruses, so you need to integrate your changes into the actual virus genome. I don't actually know how difficult that is, but it is certainly a lot more difficult than plasmids into bacteria.
The $100M lab in that Twitter thread is what they think would be needed for AI to develop new viruses. So the main argument there would be that a lot of actual experiments would be needed, not just theoretical calculations. And if AI is supposed to do them, it needs to be able to run experiments which requires automation.
If you're only looking for a generic virus for terrorist attacks, just get some Ebola. There's an outbreak right now, so it should not be too difficult. And it's plenty scary already, even if it isn't as dangerous in a first world country with proper reactions to an outbreak as a hypothetical designed bioweapon.
A description of how GFP was first extracted is at [1] and includes a custom-made "jellyfish cutting machine" capable of processing 600 rings an hour, and harvesting and processing 50,000 jellyfish to create just a single milligram of purified aequorin, with multiple milligrams needed to conduct experiments required to isolate/describe the compounds of interest. It took the scientists 5 years to reach the point where they had discovered the chemical structures and understood what they'd extracted from the goop of 50,000+ jellyfish.
A video tutorial at [2] then explains what to do next once GFP has been obtained from commercial sale and use of modern cloning, to skip the need to own a jellyfish cutting machine. E.g. need an antibiotic to extract the 1% of e.coli which will end up being modified vs. 99% of e.coli that won't be changed by presence of GFP.
To the point of the DavidRBellamy X thread, isn't the suggestion that an LLM wouldn't know whether it's worthwhile extracting some substance from the stomach of a crocodile, or from the beak of a penguin that only lives in Antarctica? And that much of the difficulty rests with hard physical work of the equivalent of cutting 600 rings an hour off jellyfish, for 50,000+ jellyfish, and conducting experiments to isolate and figure out the use of an extracted compound. Or ordering some obscure chemical compound from a supplier that is normally produced at a rate of 1mg/year and instead the LLM wants to order 1kg all of a sudden, raising eyebrows about why someone might be making the order.
The Twixxer thread seems to be arguing that an AI can't do research into novel pathogens without people, which is probably true. I haven't met anyone who is worried about that and I think it's either mistaken or a strawman.
I've mostly heard "what happens if the next ISIS or the next Jim Jones can modify ebola to be waterborne or create super-MRSA because AI simplifies the process?" which is why I ask what it would take to create a more virulent virus on a shoestring budget. Not do novel Nobel-worthy research, just copy some existing paper from ten years ago.
> then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.
A virus that makes victims die the fastest is not, in fact, an effective bioweapon, because it won't spread much. And the "spreads by itself" part is what actually makes bioweapons worthwhile, if you have to manufacture it in bulk and dump it directly on all targets, you can just use a chemical weapon instead.
> I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school.
That was a fun class! I haven't encountered anyone else outside a students who went to my one HS in Seattle during the late 90s / early 2000s who also remember doing that, interesting to hear other schools had a similar class.
In Australia I had to get into a genetics program, which happened automatically because I was the only applicant from my school, and take a four hour train ride to one of the local universities.
Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.
Why would you modify E coli for this? Use existing gut friendly bacteria and start from those. There's a wealth of material on the genetics of probiotics.
Um... E.coli is an existing gut friendly bacteria, one of the most common ones present in at least 90% of all humans' gut biome. There are only some specific strains which are pathogenous.
If university is truly miserable then multiple years of it are going to give you lifelong issues with learning and set you up for failure later in life.
I'm not saying it has to be sunshine and rainbows all the time, but if you actually genuinely hate it then that's a worse outcome than being a blank slate. A blank slate can pick up a book at 25 and go follow their interest down the rabbit hole, maybe even go to uni. If you had a bad first experience then good luck unlearning all of it and getting back to the point where you're excited about art history or whatever. I also don't believe you can find something miserable the entire time and come out smarter for it.
They don't. They want to let people opt out of social media feeds for the same reason they currently let gamblers self-exclude[0].
Politicians do not believe that casinos are popular despite the gambling and they do not believe that social media is popular despite the feed. They want to protect the general public from addiction.
It's all fun and games when you download Tiktok. Then one day you're scrolling while your kid is in the pool, the lifeguard jumps in to save her, you realise you would have let your daughter die because you're addicted to watching dance videos on the fent rectangle, and you decide to quit.
I think the literal interpretation is correct here. It's a way of saying "you, dear reader who runs this combination of things, might be very kind, but some of your compatriots will be unusually unkind and will turn up in my issue tracker and on my socials to complain".
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