lilies

Thoughts and ramblings
Physicist but very little physics here

[lilies @feldiswyth]

We are the only way the universe may observe itself. We are the most interesting specks of dust in existence.

[gaurav @gaxrav]

and here we are, specks of dust living in fear and paying taxes.

[lilies @feldiswyth]

(to be clear PRL regularly publishes excellent work; however, you cannot simultaneously seek the cream of the crop and have extremely fast turnaround. It will occasionally lead to mistakes and, imo, PRL should focus on the former more and the latter less)

[lilies @feldiswyth]

It turns out reviewing ostensibly groundbreaking papers in two months is bad practice for a journal. Who knew!

[flux @fluxtheorist]

This is ~130 year old math being passed off as novel research in one of the most prestigious journals in the field with what seems like a LLM slop visual attached to it

We have got to have higher standards here lmao

[lilies @feldiswyth]

@cremieuxrecueil I wouldn't support rebuilding them but if we had, this would have been the right choice.

[Liminal Warmth ❤️‍🔥 @liminal_warmth]

It’s extremely bizarre to me how ubiquitous phones are in everyone’s lives and how completely absent they remain in dreams

[lilies @feldiswyth]

@dioscuri @apralky This and a certain level of success can worsen taste

[arae @arae__1]

@usgraphics "boubaslop" is such a beautiful word for over rounding of things. The only rounding I will tolerate is that which is done in the KDE desktop environment for Linux

[lilies @feldiswyth]

@justalexoki @theghostofsf You joke but your tweets give short person energy (not derogatory)

[lilies @feldiswyth]

@juddrosenblatt @AEStudioLA If you’ve ever read DeLillo’s Zero K, this project reminds me a bit of that

[lilies @feldiswyth]

This goes for space colonization, asteroid mining, &c. too.

[Nick @nickcammarata]

to whatever extent when thinking about ai you can avoid putting an infinity term somewhere in your brain i think you should. brains are not typesafe and infinity terms anywhere tend to break them

[Art Encyclopedia @artenpedia]

1970s canned goods label designs, from The Art of the Label by Robert Opie.

[lilies @feldiswyth]

@rieszspieces I tried, failed, voted no, tried some more, succeeded. Thankfully there are enough responses mine doesn't matter, wouldn't want to contaminate the results of this serious study

[Jedi Master F’izz @MisterFizz]

@MartimusMcParti @mcmansionhell There’s exactly one way the line would ever make sense and that’s if they built it on top of an oil pipeline in order to use the people there as human shields

[grant!!! @GrantObi]

I admittedly have not been keeping up with this, but can someone explain why this pool stuff is partisan? How exactly do you keep a huge shallow pool filled with pond water from developing algae blooms in the summer sun? It just seems like terrible pool design or something idk

[lilies @feldiswyth]

@marcportermagee Caltech is so far left you can’t even find it

[Taelin @VictorTaelin]

I just accepted that doctors are bad at math

it is embarrassing that the field responsible for making life or death decisions just collectively agreed on the obviously false, grade-school disprovable statement that more information can be bad to a robust decision making process

[Scott Alexander @slatestarcodex]

I should probably learn more and write a post on this, but my first thought is that this isn't too interesting and the degree to which they're overselling it is a red flag.

Ultrasound can't look through bone or air. Many of the things in the body you'd use an MRI to look at are past some sort of bone or air. So this is limited to a few use cases - mostly breast, kidneys, liver, some parts of the digestive and reproductive systems, and metabolic things like muscle vs. fat.

You can already visualize most of these things with normal ultrasound, and the one case where it's already known to be really important to have some sort of 3D ultrasound (breast) already has a specialized 3D ultrasound system for it. So what this adds is convenience/repeatability/standardizability to visualizing these couple of organs. That means it can go from something you do every so often in the hospital when something is wrong, to something you can do all the time as a "whole body" (quotes because it excludes the brain, lungs, and everything else past bone and air) screening exam.

But whole-body screening exams are often bad. The medical community specifically recommends *against* getting whole-body screening MRIs, even though the MRI itself is mostly safe. In a healthy person, false positives so outnumber true positives that this is more likely to send people on wild goose chases that end up getting them unnecessary interventions than detecting something horrible that needs to be treated right away.

I think the bull case for this scanner is that if we got massive amounts of really great ultrasound data, we could put it in an ML model and train it to something something something and then advance biology. That's probably why an AI company is doing this. But the point is that they'd have to invent their own use cases as they go along, and the first patients - the people who are getting it before they invent the use cases - will have to be duped into thinking it's cooler than it is and useful right now. That's probably why they're starting by building a spa around it, even though spas are not generally known for being the sort of place that actually-cutting-edge medical innovations with clear uses cases get their start.

I am not a radiologist, this is all speculation, other people might know more.

[Hunter📈🌈📊 @StatisticUrban]

You could have a saltwater bowl full of pulsating alien-esque life on your desk, but you don't

[Robert Francis @rbfrncs]

How many birds would you like i can show you them in several quantities up to 18 or many

[Dane Albaugh @dane_albaugh]

@astrodanish Not quite every tumor

Ultrasound doesn’t penetrate air or bone well, so lungs, brain, marrow/bone, and gas-filled GI tract will probably not work. Many cancers start as flat/diffuse disease rather than a lump

Still cool - will be interesting to see the price-point