> I just don’t buy this argument. By global standards, even the poorest Americans (with obvious exceptions like the homeless) are relatively wealthy. Comparison is the theft of joy.
Define wealth. The cheapest option for many foods in other countries is often not only much cheaper, but also of much higher quality than the cheapest option for the same type of item in the US (bread, rice, etc..) in fact their cheap version could easily be pass for the US premium grocery version.
This resembles the Chinese HIV CRISPR study because the deleted receptor was CCR5, an immune receptor. This was controversial because we don't know the long term effects of of deleting CCR5.
Viruses often use immune or other surface proteins as receptors presumably because they are important (can't be down-regulated too much).
For the pigs, it looks like they deleted just the SRCR5 ___domain of the CD163 protein. CD163 is used by macrophages to scavenge the hemoglobin-haptoglobin complex.
A 2017 article (of 6 pigs?) suggests that the engineered pigs are resistant to the virus "while maintaining biological function" although I don't see any experiments comparing hemoglobin-haptoglobin scavenging ability of engineered vs unedited pigs.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5322883
This 2024 study (of 40 pigs) found 'no significant difference' in a panel of health measures and meat quality, except that the engineered pigs had statistically significantly more greater backfat depth than the edited animals.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genome-editing/articles...
Interestingly, the mean weight of live pigs is slightly higher for edited pigs but lower for dead pigs. Total fat slightly higher for the edited pigs. These numbers are not statistically significant (but only a small number of pigs were tested).
The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
This paragraph is striking:
> Under the conditions of these studies, neither homozygous nor heterozygous or null pigs inoculated with PRRSV showed the acute clinical signs typically observed in commercial pigs and had overall low depression and respiratory scores (1). This may be explained by the fact that these pigs were sourced from a high-health farm and managed with minimal stress, which differs from disease expression under commercial conditions.
Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..
> Sounds like the genetic editing is not necessary as long as the farm conditions are good..
And remember if you document or report on bad farm conditions in many US states, you’ll go to jail for telling the truth while the people running the farm do not.
Parent poster may be referring to laws on the books that forbid the sale of videos depicting where animals are subject to harm or treated cruelly. I suspect that these laws were passed in response to animal snuff videos a few years ago, but the law could be used to prosecute an activist, I guess - although it might also demonstrate the point the activist was making in order for a prosecution to pass.
w/r/t the HIV thing - there are HIV immune populations in Scandinavia who have a natural mutation affecting CCR5, so there is at least some reason to believe it’s safe to edit or knock out.
It's dangerous to assume that everything in biology exists because it's useful in some way. Some things are just spandrels* that came along for the ride, vestigial, or otherwise neutral features. Not everything exists because it provides an evolutionary advantage.
If a receptor is used as an entry point by a common virus and disabling it prevents infection but evolution has kept it around (cells spend energy actively expressing it, not having it encoded in the genome) then you can assume that there is a function provided by the receptor.
Turns out, CD163 already has a known function.
A spandrel not only has to have obvious function but removing it has to not be detrimental. I'm questioning the bar that is being used to say that it's not detrimental.
Unless humanity was on the brink of starvation and this was the only known way to increase food production then no it's not dangerous to be cautious.
On the other hand, I think it's dangerous to assume that a protein only has one function
I don’t believe so. I looked into it a bit more, and it looks like homozygous variant carriers are more susceptible to other types of infection (West Nile is specifically cited), but I don’t see anything showing the variant causes issues with CCR5s other critical functions. I do think a knockout is probably a bad idea based on further reading, but modification seems like a promising path.
> The pigs were assessed at approximately 205 days in age. Pigs can live up to 20 years. Would be good to test the long term effects and the effects over multiple generations.
It would be good to test for those things if the concern was for the long-term health of the pigs. The concern is whether or not they produce safe meat. Somewhere between most and all of the pork I've eaten in my life came from pigs less than a year old.
I understand that. But maybe at 205 days you won't detect a change which would more easily detectable later. Maybe we don't know exactly what to look for, but if something breaks over the long term that would give a clue.
They also only looked at the health of one generation, along with the number of offsprings from that first generation. What happens after 10 generations? 100? Could there be cumulative epigenetic effects from deleting this gene?
Nice, I recently had a very similar idea. I bought the Vusix Z100 from Amazon japan to do this kind of thing. They also run AugmentOS (supposedly? iOS doesn't seem supported yet) so I'll try yours out.
I personally don't want to be left holding the bag on a used battery since I like the option traveling long distance without stopping, but obviously it's your choice.
> tesla inflates their range estimates until the battery is half empty
Yes, but I don't think it's enough to affect this comparison.
> I personally don't want to be left holding the bag on a used battery since I like the option traveling long distance without stopping, but obviously it's your choice.
The point is we're comparing against a car that has 150 miles of range brand new, 120 or less by the time you'd replace its battery. A Tesla battery at 60% is still better.
> Idle draw/phantom drain of 5-10% a day seems like a common complaint with Teslas as wel
That's a more serious problem, among many others. I'm not advocating one way or the other, just focusing on range.
I have a Model 3, and phantom drain is virtually non-existent.
Like anything used, or new, what you'll get is random. In general, Tesla seems to have their batteries sorted out compared to other manufacturers, but you can be unlucky.
The accuracy of range varies a bit, like most cars. If you have your foot in it, you'll do worse, and if you drive efficiently you'll do better.
Eligible subjects underwent 1 week of screening, 2 weeks of exclusive oral PED, and 2 weeks of follow-up after returning to their regular diet (Supplemental Figure 1). The primary endpoint was the change in stool microbiome after PED and regular food reintroduction. Secondary endpoints included tolerance, LBT normalization rate, stool form changes, symptomatic response, and adverse events. The PED (mBiota Elemental, Good LFE, Santa Monica, USA) was provided in 300-calorie packets, adjusted eucalorically to each participant’s caloric needs (Supplemental Figure 2).
Additional packets were provided for hunger, with daily consumption documented. Water intake was unrestricted, but other foods were prohibited during the diet phase. After completing the diet, participants transitioned to bland foods (e.g., rice, potatoes, eggs, chicken, beef) for 2–3 days before resuming their regular diet.
It’s amino acids, fats, and sugar in a ratio that mirrors the elements of a standard diet.
It’s not a supplement. It has to replace your diet completely for 2 weeks, no exceptions.
By consuming amino acids instead of proteins (which are composed of amino acids) and omitting fiber it starves skips straight to absorption and starves the bacterial overgrowth.
It’s an old concept. The unique part of this one is that it supposedly tastes okay.
Yeah, the taste matters if you are going to eat it for 2 weeks :). You will probably still hate it after the first week, but it is just one week of misery instead of two. I did some fasting in the past, leaving only water, tea (no sugar) and peeled apples in my diet. Had to do it for 2 weeks, but only made it to the 11th day. The issue with that one was the low calories, which doesn't correspond well with active work (I did not plan properly to take the second week off). Nevertheless, it helped solve the colitis issue, with which I'd been struggling for a few months. An interesting observation was that up to say day 4 or 5 you actually have more energy and sleep less. But after that it was a bit of a struggle to retain the same levels of energy and be productive at work.
The secret sauce, so to say, is that it's not a supplement, it's all you eat for the duration of the treatment. As someone who was on a liquid only diet for six weeks following a surgery, I can't imagine this being anything short of absolutely miserable.
> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be
Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed?
> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive
Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.
That said, thank you for introducing me to Giordano Bruno, his ideas seems very interesting and worth thinking about
>> Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be
> Huh? What about things that were never alive? They never existed
No, he means that when something dies, it ceases to be what it was. When a dog dies, it's no longer a dog, but a corpse, and pretty soon will be earth. Same with a person (assuming no afterlife). He doesn't mean that a dead thing is nothing at all, only that a onetime-living thing ceases to be what it was when it dies.
>> strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive
> Strictly speaking, you're confidently guessing at something you don't know and have no way of knowing.
Everything we observe about the difference between living animals and corpses tells us that the living body ceases to exist at death. It's a very basic observation. More systematic observation of the onetime-organism's biology or biochemistry will reveal the same thing, in more detail.
They obviously did not write OP and 'just' machine translate it, because no one writes like that (and if they were being honest, they would have disclosed that upfront). A LLM came up with most of that... and maybe all of that... and how much of that is true? (What do you know about coffee in the Safavid era, or tea in the Qajars? Is 'Ethiopian Yirgacheffe' even a thing? Is there a coffee culture in Iran at all? How would you know? Only 1 or 2 commenters on this page even seem to know anything about Iran to begin with.)
> Seems like the same tired take on third wave coffee, without much specific to Iran.
> This article is a bit whiny about the new, and doesn't talk enough about the qualities of the old.
> Funny how even a repressive theocracy can seem so familiar. I guess that's globalization for you.
> One thing the author fails to take note of here is that Iranians have historically been extremely precious about their bougie little drinks.
> This is a poor take on what's actually a rich cultural shift towards variety seeking.
Ok, maybe. They could definitely have prompted "Turn this tweet into a clickbait blog post"
Yes, they should have disclosed how much of it is pure LLM vs. prompt.
I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the article.
I was in Iran in 2008 and half of my family visits all the time. Copying Western consumptions habits was already a thing when I was there, and it makes sense that it's kept up. Probably as a way for young people to signal their alignment with Western culture and/or signal having disposable income in a time when the economy is in a tough spot.
So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible. Which makes sense since it's based on a real tweet from an Iranian resident.
> I don't know what the rest of your comment is talking about. Googling "Yirgacheffe" shows it's a real thing. The Safavid coffee/Qajar tea claims seem accurate as well. So you at least learned something from the article.
No, I didn't learn anything from the article (except how susceptible HN has become to even 4o-level LLM outputs, of course). I learned something from your comment, and you learned that from a Google search. Do you see the difference?
> So the actual content of the article is perfectly plausible.
So in other words... it added nothing to even a superficial familiarity with the topic.
> I learned something from your comment, and you learned that from a Google search
But I wouldn't have thought to look into Qajar tea/Safavid coffee if it wasn't for the blog post (by the way, I find 4o to be pretty good at history).
What I can't figure out is why you seem so confident that the OP didn't verify the LLM output and/or would have published anything written by the model, whether it was faulty or not (which again, in this case it wasn't).
You're clearly allergic to basic LLM-style or at least the masquerading of LLM text as human, so I'm curious what you'd consider worse: 1. LLM-generated text reflecting an accurate prompt/input, or 2. genuine human BS wanting to be taken seriously? (e.g. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman if it wasn't in jest)
Personally, I prefer #1 since I can still learn something from it.
Let me give you an example I just ran into now which illustrates why #1 is so pernicious.
I was just linked, by an intelligent, educated, skeptical person who regularly uses AI generative tools, to an interesting report on the darknet markets (which I used to be an expert on): https://tornews.org/legendary-darknet-vendor-crimsonlotus-ta... I was not familiar with this site, but I figured it was probably one of many successors to DeepDotWeb, and I've been out of the scene for a long time and wouldn't know about it; but I eventually realized, after several minutes of reading and then checking, that this was an AI slop website. This is because 'Obsidian Bay' doesn't appear to be real, the photo is obviously AI-generated, and the closing commentary by 'Ella Vargas, darknet researcher at the Cyber Crimes Institute' appears to be a fake person at a non-existent organization. Is anything in the article real? Probably not.
Ahhhhh, but you say you don't care about it being real, you say you only care about the prompt - in which case you're fine: some things in it are old events relabeled. (eg. there really was a large darknet market which was famous and had eluded LE and was taken down in a global operation in part due to packet timing attacks! You did learn something true from that accurate prompt/input yielding that slop output! It was just called 'Silk Road 2' and that happened over a decade ago.) So, I guess you have no issue with tornews.org. Maybe you should subscribe. All these articles sound quite exciting and there's a lot of them...
Personally, I think it's a bad site. I could have fallen for it - I simply got lucky that this one was so easy to note the style, factcheck, and debunk. For example, I could have instead read https://tornews.org/massive-dark-web-drug-operation-busted-i... : if you read this, this sounds very plausible and exciting, and it doesn't immediately come off as AI slop because it is so detailed and doesn't sound too much like 4o.
(Why does this week-old site exist at all and even has a Twitter account? https://x.com/tornews_org It's almost certainly either for the affiliate marketing revenue, in the best-case scenario, or is a phishing scam, in the worst-case scenario. Since it's so young and so reliant on fake content, likely the latter. I didn't check any of the onion links they so helpfully provide, but even if they are all legit right now, that simply means they are not yet scamming. To pay for the AI and ___domain name and labor here, you only need to phish one DNM user who will deposit a few hundred dollars of cryptocurrency. And this site has already started to pollute Google with its 'facts'.)
> Ahhhhh, but you say you don't care about it being real, you say you only care about the prompt
I definitely did not say I don't care about it being real. For the submission that we're commenting on there actually was no incorrect factual information, so it seems you're now using outside examples to support your point.
> So, I guess you have no issue with tornews.org. Maybe you should subscribe. All these articles sound quite exciting and there's a lot of them...
You're suggesting I would apply the same level of scrutiny to a personal blog post about coffee trends as to a news site talking about criminal activity?
Well, you're kind of right. I don't blindly believe any information. I research to confirm or learn more about anything that's worth remembering (e.g. the Safavid/Qajar coffee/tea). That's why in terms of learning new things it makes no difference to me whether the post is LLM-generated, LLM-embellished, LLM-edited, or raw human output. I'm not going to use it as a source and it's not going to change my mind about anything unless I can find support for the important claims.
The main problem with the darknet articles you linked to is not the fact that they're LLM slop but that they are masquerading as news outlets while not citing any sources.
That level of journalistic rigor is not something that I expect (although I would appreciate it) from a personal blog post about coffee trends.
> What I can't figure out is why you seem so confident that the OP didn't verify the LLM output and/or would have published anything written by the model, whether it was faulty or not (which again, in this case it wasn't).
Because I routinely catch people, often very intelligent and educated people, confidently posting LLM materials that they have not factchecked and which are wrong (such as, say, about history, where they might make an argument about human evolution based on cave-dwelling where 4o was merely off by a few hundred thousand years), and I still find confabulations in my own use of even frontier models like o1-pro or Gemini-2.5-pro (leaving aside o3's infamous level of crimes, which I think is probably unrepresentative of reasoning models and idiosyncratic to it).
And in this case, the prompt looks like it was very low quality. The author had plenty of chances to put in details from his own real experience as an actual Iranian - any intelligent, observant college undergrad routinely buying coffee ought to have plenty to say - and instead, it's super-vague waffle that... well... an LLM could have written about just about any country, swapping out a few clauses. ("Why drinking coffee in America has become so complicated")
> You're clearly allergic to basic LLM-style
This is not a 'basic' LLM style. It is a very specific, recent chatbot style. (Note that visarga was able to instantly tell it was the recent 4o, because that style is so distinct compared to the previous 4o - never mind Claude-3, Gemini, Llama, Grok etc.)
Further, there should be no single 'LLM-style'; it makes me sad how much LLM writing capability has been collapsed and degraded by RLHF tuning. Even my char-RNN outputs from 2015, never mind GPT-3-base in 2020, showed more occasional sparks of flair than a 2023 ChatGPT did.
> or at least the masquerading of LLM text as human, so I'm curious what you'd consider worse: 1. LLM-generated text reflecting an accurate prompt/input, or 2. genuine human BS wanting to be taken seriously? (e.g. The Areas of My Expertise by John Hodgman if it wasn't in jest)
#1 is worse (if unedited/factchecked/improved etc and just dumped out raw), because there will be much more of it and the intermingling of fact and fiction makes it harder to factcheck, harder to screen out of future training corpuses, and overall more insidious. Human BS serves as costly proof-of-work and because it is costly, once you recognize you are reading BS from someone like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, you can switch modes and ignore the factual content and ask, 'why is he writing this? what purpose does this BS serve? who is the audience here and how are they using it?' and get something quite useful out of it. I have learned a lot from statements by humans where little or none of it was factually true. Whereas a LLM output may mean nothing more than 'some unattended code spent $0.0001 to spam social media with outputs from a canned prompt', if even that.
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could
No way. Not if you're washing with a scrub sponge and scraping the corners of everything. The argument for the dishwasher is that you're not using an old sponge. If your sponge is not nasty, washing by hand should be as good or better.
Dishwashers, with rare exception, are much better at washing dishes than people are. They can use water temperatures that would burn skin, pressures that would bruise, and can keep going at it for HOURS without getting tired.
People are lazy. They only look for dirty spots and go for those. They intentionally or intentionally avoid cleaning some areas. Dishwashers don't care what 'looks' dirty - they just keep washing.
Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.
99% of the problem with dishwashers are that people use them wrong:
* They don't clean the filter and spray arms regularly
* They use the shitty pods instead of powder, which is the most effective since it can have bleach
* They don't put some detergent in the pre-wash
* They have a unit that doesn't pre-heat the water and need to just run the faucet for a bit to get the water hot
* They don't use a rinse aid
If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing. Even dirt cheap basic units you see in low end apartments will do an amazing job if actually used correctly.
Tablets still can't be split into pre and post-wash and they tend to WAY overdo the amount of detergent, because the manufacturer has no idea how hard your water is.
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about people lazily washing their dishes by hand. I'm talking about focused hand-washing of dishes with many corners, vs. sticking them in the dish-washer.
Like the article mentioned, to get the best result you need to have your dirty dishes line up with where the water is coming out. So if you need to wash something on multiple sides (including top), handwashing will be better.
Hot water is not what cleans your dishes, it's the pressure from the water washing things out (helped by soap). Heat just softens the gunk and oil. Plus you can wear gloves and/or let dishes soak in hot water so that's not even a factor.
By the way, many microbes can survive heat (in spore form), even boiling hot water. Nothing can survive being washed away by soap though. Well, they could survive, but they won't be on your dish.
As a microbiologist I'm aware that what looks clean can have leftover residue. How are you measuring cleanliness out of a dishwasher? I'm guessing by eye, the same way you're measuring hand-washed dish cleanliness.
The way you talk about dishwashers is like you think they're autoclaves, which can actually break spores down using a high heat only achievable in a high-pressure tank (higher than boiling temperature, around 120 celsius). Your dishwasher is only getting about 50 to 60 degrees celsius.
So no, a dishwasher will not always out-perform hand-washing. And if you're using a new sponge, I bet you the result is comparable or better if your hand-washing technique doesn't suck and you should get about the same result with cold water if you use enough soap.
> As a microbiologist I'm aware that what looks clean can have leftover residue. How are you measuring cleanliness out of a dishwasher? I'm guessing by eye, the same way you're measuring hand-washed dish cleanliness.
So how are you measuring, if not by eyeballing it? Can you swab it and check for microbes? Did you?
Why would that matter? I'm not the one who stated opinions as fact:
> If you can avoid those 5 mistakes, a dishwasher will always way out-perform hand-washing
> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with.
The inverse statement is just as likely to be true depending on the shape of the dish used, where it's placed in the dish-washer, etc.. You think just because the corners of a weirdly shaped dish doesn't have obvious gunk after coming out of the dishwasher that they are clean? Well, I trust my hand scrubbing method more since I don't have a camera to see where and for how long the water landed in the dishwasher.
You could swab a plate, do a dilution series and count colony forming units but there's no guarantee that the growth conditions of your petri dish will reflect what can grow in your body (i.e. will the spores germinate in your petri dish?)
What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius), and you don't need to kill bacteria for a surface to be clean (in fact it's better to wash them off than to kill them). The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test: https://imgur.com/a/wfnxMnZ
You did in fact make several claims of fact, and then followed up with an appeal to authority as a microbiologist. Having those credentials means you probably could have verified your claims, but you don't appear to have done so, so we get to hand-wave at each other.
> What is well known is that washing with soap trumps heat (except 120+ degrees celsius)
The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.
> The fact that hand-washing is better for scrubbing corners with soap is obvious. Case in point, this burnt/sticky rice leftover on a pot that I stuck in the dishwasher a few hours ago as a test
I will happily agree that hand washing tends to win on mechanical grounds. I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well (again, hot water and soap and spraying is compelling to me), but if there's stuff stuck on the dishes then yes obviously a person scraping it off is going to be better at removing it.
I find it hard to believe that you're still doubling down but only selectively detecting unsupported "claims of fact" without support especially since I made weaker, more situational claims. The original poster commented:
> machines wash 1000 times better than hand ever could, uses less water, and doesn’t dry out your hands
"Ever could"? "1000 times"? And yet you have a problem with me saying hand-washing CAN be better when have dishes with corners or need to wash both sides of the dish. The next commenter said:
> Even if you think it's clean by hand, chances are there's far more residual residue and bacteria you can't see that a dishwasher wouldn't have any trouble with
I invoked being a microbiologist to make the point that I'm already aware of the fact that looking clean doesn't equal being clean. None of my arguments rely on my authority as a microbiologist. Anyone with decent reading comprehension can evaluate the broken logic: he's mixing up the fact that cleanliness is not just what something looks like with the idea that the dishwasher must do a better job than hand-washing because you can't tell if something is really clean or not. That makes no sense, and seems to be some kind of appeal to technology or modernity.
> I think that if the machine can spray off the dishes to the point of being visually clean then it probably left them sanitized as well
This is the exact point that the guy was saying is NOT the case, and as a microbiologist I agreed with him even though it's irrelevant to the argument since neither of us has tested the dishes.
>The dishwasher uses heat and soap. And it sprays things off, while we're at it.
My whole point was that soap and mechanical washing trump heat. My faucet sprays water, and I can evaluate the cleanliness without waiting 2 hours to see if the probabilistic machine jet spray left residue on my dishes or not.
Glassware looks yuck when washed by hand - even with a lot of care. A dishtowel will get glassware mostly shiny but it takes way more work and dishtowels are just icky (past trauma of smelling a rank dishtowel, or watching someone wipe their mank hands or face on a dishtowel, plus you know most people wash them with underwear, fabric can't be hygienic).
It most certainly does not in any dishwasher I've ever interacted with. Glassware is one of those things that I can very easily get cleaner than a dishwasher.
> I just don’t buy this argument. By global standards, even the poorest Americans (with obvious exceptions like the homeless) are relatively wealthy. Comparison is the theft of joy.
Define wealth. The cheapest option for many foods in other countries is often not only much cheaper, but also of much higher quality than the cheapest option for the same type of item in the US (bread, rice, etc..) in fact their cheap version could easily be pass for the US premium grocery version.
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