fullsquare

you know maybe it's a good thing that people can't sleep on ceiling, everybody's rent would double

the problem is that there is natural (as in, unmodified) cheap generic insulin available, it's just that it sucks compared to everything else. you see, insulin is a peptide that is supposed to appear, do some signalling, then disappear and unmodified insulin copies this thing exactly. the problem is, most of the time when peptide is supposed to work as a pharmaceutical, you don't want to do that, you'd like insulin to last longer than usual, which means changes to it that make breakdown slower, or adding something that makes it stick to albumin, which has similar effect because it hides insulin somewhere enzymes can't reach it and also it makes it start acting slower. this means less frequent dosing and less changes in insulin activity over time. there are also other insulins that start acting faster than natural, and this is also due to a couple of modifications in its structure

for another example, ozempic was not the first drug in its class, it's also a modified peptide, and it can be injected s.c. once a week, compared to previous iteration (liraglutide) that requires daily injections. if natural peptide is injected i.m. instead, its halflife is half an hour, and in serum it's only two minutes (it gets released a bit slower than it is metabolized)

manufacturing costs are about the same for any variant, most of it is in purification. patents for a couple of these have expired anyway by now, but if manufacturing is limited then price can be set arbitrarily high (see daraprim)

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain

at least he didn't cause a civil war

more like task failed successfully

plenty of drone teams release geolocated videos day after they happen, but in this case i'll guess that real sauce is classified top secret, that thing is outdated info and everyone is five steps ahead

ahem

triple the defense budget

it's a bit like crude oil. lumber cut up to what standards? or maybe chipboard or veneer or paper or cellulose fiber (used in many things including artillery propellant, hot commodity lately)? or maybe some form of chemically modified cellulose or maybe something else? then do you have industrial capacity and logistics for that? what if customer from egypt won't accept fiberboard made to an argentinian standard, that you made for an argentinian customer that changed mind or the other way around? canada is a rich country, can you make it competitive? sometimes it works. i heard of a case of company that bought logs from finland, processed them in poland into fiberboard and sold them, at least once, to a customer in tanzania

if it's for paper or chipboard, entire log can be used (waste is fuel for process heat/power)

the theoretical reason for doing that is that if you have to split jamming power over broader frequency range, then for every n^2 times increase in bandwidth, here number of channels, range decreases n times. however gnss signals are so weak, it probably doesn't matter, and if you're adding extra power per channel, then it doesn't apply

now if missile detects that gnss is fucked with (signal too strong, wrong direction, physically impossible location), the correct thing to do would be to fallback to inertial navigation while accepting that accuracy decreases until gnss can be received again, if at all, and acted upon. theoretically speaking, it's a matter of software update, better hardware also can help with that, so idk why would they release this. maybe there's something that prevents this

that's gotta be $3500/mo just for it

So for the record i think it would be reasonable to say, if there was ever a machine that processes information in a way that human brain (or better, entire nervous system) does, at comparable speed, then that machine would be thinking in some way. Focusing on byproducts would be a bit like saying that the point of running weather simulation is waste heat

that said, this is something that our current techbro overlords aren't even pretending to be doing. ANNs are gross caricature of actual brains that barely resembles them in function of its parts or architecture. if all transmission of neural signals went through ionotropic receptors only and dendrites weren't a thing, then it would be sorta accurate, but this is not what we have irl

So literally before the visual signal has even got to the brain the information has already been processed in a clever and efficient way that isn’t captured in any naive flop estimate!

there's a lot of this with neurons, there's a way to process some of incoming information for free just by using physical properties of dendrites, that would in silicon require some extra processing per neuron to pull off. ANNs ignore cable theory entirely, these neurons are modeled as pointlike. irl there might be more than one threshold, too

another one is that all connections are assumed to be happening through synapses, and appear to be ionotropic-like. current goes in, current goes out, ~~you can't explain that~~ in biological neurons neither of these are true. on second point, first difference is timescale, as it can be wildly variable but can start later and last longer, but activation of ion channel influences potential instantly. another and more important imo is that there's a lot of effects that aren't related directly to transmission of signal in current pulse, side effects if you will. activation, or lack of activation of metabotropic receptor can do some other interesting things, like internalize receptor that was just triggered, phosphorylate some kinase which changes how active it is, cause some receptor to stick to another protein, or even alter gene expression in some way, all of which are likely to change how neuron responds to that stimulus in the future. that is, real neurons have a lot of internal state that we already know is pretty important, and very crude tools to manipulate it directly are already used as pharmaceuticals (valproate), or indirectly (some third of pharmaceuticals do something with GPCRs)

another thing is signal transmission that does not depend on synapses. there's couple dozens of signalling peptides in brain, that are just released out and diffuse away, binding to whatever receptor these can find on their way and getting decomposed constantly. say, for example, that there's a neuron that releases big dynorphin. it's a peptide that binds to kappa-opioid receptor, and it's big, so it diffuses away slowly, and there will be a bubble where kappa-opioid receptors nearby will get activated, until it diffuses away below concentration that is relevant or gets decomposed. if there's instead, or additionally, some dynorphin A and B, which are half its size, then these will diffuse away faster, giving a bubble of larger radius and shorter duration. (whether one or another gets produced depends on intracellular calcium concentration, among other things). in ANN that would require adding some extra weight per every pair of peptide releasing neuron and neuron with receptor for that peptide, with weights dependent on distance. that's probably will be a lot, because even if KOR is not particularly common receptor, there's a lot of different peptides and proteins that behave this way. all of these bind to metabotropic receptors, and these have lots of unusual effects, including formation of new synapses

another way that synapse count undersells complexity of biological brains is that autoreceptors exist, which means that you can conservatively double number of synapses when comparing them to weights in ANNs, with every extra synapse pointing to the same neuron it came from. this has a big part in what makes signals to stop, and also is implicated in learning. from what i understand, this is not even a thing that ANN architectures allow. nature has no obligation to be efficient to simulate on blackwell and instead of neat prismatic slabs of neurons that only take signals from layer before and only feed to layer after there are in real brains structures of variable depths and plenty of loops that change their behavior slightly with every pass

there's more. ANNs use some imaginary single neurotransmitter, i'm not sure how bad simplification it really is, ANNs average all of impulses into some continuous time-independent smudge, this is not very biological, and overall i think that between incoming ai winter fallout, recession, end of moore's law and severe effects of climate change that will set in before next ai spring can happen, machine like this will never get built