17 March 2024

Who has been the closest and the farthest from the Sun? Surprising answers.

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Can Large Language Models reason and plan? Nah.

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Stanford is no longer the Stanford it was when I was younger. No more anarchy or craziness. Probably just as well. Back then, there was no Internet. You could afford to be "out of bounds". Wink-wink. Now, you might do something, and it'll be recorded forever. Wouldn't want that to happen, right? Times have changed.

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This article makes it sound like we should put it in the drinking waterPsilocybin therapy alters prefrontal and limbic brain circuitry in alcohol use disorder. Seems like it fixes all that ails you.
Specifically, psilocybin treatment led to increased activity in the medial and lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and left caudate — regions implicated in higher-order cognitive functions such as goal-directed behavior, decision-making, and emotional regulation.

Additionally, a decrease in activity was noted in the insula, motor, temporal, parietal, and occipital cortices, as well as the cerebellum. These areas are often associated with craving, automatic behavior patterns, and sensory processing, indicating that psilocybin may diminish the salience of alcohol cues.

The study also revealed unique responses to different types of emotional cues. For negative cues, psilocybin increased activity in the supramarginal gyrus, a region involved in empathy and emotional processing. For positive cues, there was an increase in right hippocampus activity and a decrease in left hippocampus activity, which may reflect changes in how positive emotional experiences are processed and integrated.

“Patients treated with psilocybin showed similar brain responses to pictures of alcohol and positive and negative emotional scenes,” Pagni told PsyPost. “This suggests psilocybin may have a general mood stabilizing effect, rather than altering processes specific to alcohol or negative emotions. The pattern of neural response was characterized by increased activity in the lateral and medial prefrontal cortex, brain regions associated with regulating emotions and behavior, and decreased activity in the insula, a brain region associated with craving for alcohol.”

Just what people living in modern society need right now.

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Moderate to severe sleep apnea was found in a quarter of women and half of men. This is probably linked to all that obesity. But likely people need to fix how they sleep. It's a vicious cycle, and being sleep-deprived can make you fat, too.

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Anxiety drug pregabalin linked to rising number of deaths. A lot of folks are takig pregabalin for treatment of neuropathy. Only now we realize how dangerous it can be?

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If you like Bach's Cello Suites, you definitely need to check out this page.

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The TikTok Problem Is Not What You Think. We do need to come to a consensus about what constitutes invasion of privacy. TikTok is not alone in what it's doing. We will need to talk about Google and Meta, and data harvesting companies, and define what it is that they should not be doing. Again, the adage is true – if the service is free, you are the product, not the customer.

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The Atlantic writes about Why Oregon’s Drug Decriminalization Failed. As I type this, though, Tina Kotek still hasn't signed the bill. What is she waiting for?

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Techies are getting laid-off. It seems strange that with all the boom in artificial intelligence that there is less of a need for them. It's because the current techies know little about artificial intelligence. They're old-school techies. The ones that are in demand need to know how to implement LLMs and Computer Vision and data science.  That's what matters now.

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What are the worst paying jobs five years out?  No surprises here. The article doesn't talk about what the best ones are. To get that info, you need to go to the source.

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As A.I. tools get smarter, they get more racist

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