There is large-enough consensus on this drug for its main use cases (treating diabetes and obesity), but more importantly for this conversation: it's actually quite common for drugs to get new indications after their initial one --- at which point, there might be a new, broader consensus on what the drug is good for.
Clinical trials are designed to treat a very specific subclass of individuals; pharmaceutical companies very carefully choose that subclass in an attempt to help ensure the clinical trials are successful, which is a combination of the following:
- Positive, statistically-significant results.
- FDA approval with those results.
- Insurance companies willing to pay for the given treatment.
- A decent-sized addressable market.
Examples of drugs/medical technologies later getting other indications:
- Minoxidil was a drug that only later got its approval to be used as a hair loss treatment; there are currently clinical trials for a more "advanced" minoxidil oral pill for this use case.
- Re: GLP-1s: Tirzepatide later got an indication that it effectively treats sleep apnea. There are very many other clinical trials ongoing for GLP-1s, but perhaps most recently, Semaglutide (ozempic) failed to show statistical significance as a treatment for Alzheimer's.
- The Galleri blood screening/test. The initial indication they are going for is folk who are at highest risk for cancer (I believe that's individuals between the ages of 50 and 70); however, that's not to say it would be bad for individuals younger or older. But, this is a way to help ensure the earliest product has a successful outcome.
These are ones I know off the top of my head, but I suspect an LLM can give several more examples.
I was going to comment that "tirzerpatide study for apnea is bullshit because it's just weight loss which causes apnea so naturally it works just like any other method of weight loss would" but apparently NOT, and it helps, somehow, beyond the effect that a simple weight loss of the same magnitude would have!
>pharmaceutical companies very carefully choose that subclass in an attempt to help ensure the clinical trials are successful
You mean that they mainly choose middle class white males with degrees? It's not some racism, it's just an observation (which one may call a clinical meta-study of a sort), that this is the group that follows doctor's advice best of all thus making results the least noisy. Which in turns makes trials many times cheaper because doing otherwise would have required much larger patient groups to compensate for higher noise.
Going beyond that will be many *-isms at once, but google it up.
This is a major factor impacting quality of drugs. For instance, GLP-1 itself should be probably prescribed to Blacks starting with lower threshold BMI because they appear to benefit more from it in 27-30 BMI range, and are more susceptible to weight-related health issues than whites in these "overweight" ranges, and more likely to develop diabetes from it, and overall. Doing so would have increased overall society's benefits from GLP-1 a lot. But no one knows for sure because clinical trials almost didn't include them.
It really doesn’t, at all. Every sentence has a clear, non-equivocative meaning and it doesn’t use any LLM tropes. Your LLM sensor is seriously faulty.
I didn't get any LLM vibes from the comment at all. I'd heard of "off label use" and other incidental use-cases. So the comment makes a lot of sense...
I did my PhD in Atomic, Molecular, and Optical (AMO) physics, and despite "optical" being part of that I realized midway that I didn't know enough about how regular cameras worked!
It didn't take very long to learn, and it turned out to be extremely important in the work I did during the early days at Waymo and later at Motional.
I wanted to pass along this fun video from several years ago that discusses HDR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkQJdaGGVM8 . It's short and fun, I recommend it to all HN readers.
Separately, if you want a more serious introduction to digital photography, I recommend the lectures by Marc Levoy from his Stanford course: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7HrM-fk_Rc&list=PL8ungNrvUY... . I believe he runs his own group at Adobe now after leading a successful effort at Google making their pixel cameras the best in the industry for a couple of years. (And then everyone more-or-less caught up, just like with most tech improvements in the history of smartphones).
Try capturing fire with a non-Sony phone and a Sony phone. At least Samsung doesn't color correct blackbodies right and the flame looks nothing like reality.
I think Canon makes at least some of their sensors, and Nikon designs theirs and makes it at a third party I forget the name of that isn't Sony or Samsung but they still do use Sony stuff in a lot of their cameras.
I don't know about Pentax, Panasonic or OMD (formerly Olympus)
I think folks here have some idea how expensive chip fabs are. That's why only Canon is able to make their own sensors.
Sony makes sensors for pretty much everyone else. But it's well known that other folks e.g. Nikon have been able to get better signal-to-noise with Sony-made sensors than Sony themselves. I think Panasonic used to make their own sensors but with some recent re-org, that got spun out.
It's been widely rumored that Leica uses Sony sensors, but this gets repeatedly denied by people claiming inside information. We know that Leica was getting 24MP CMOS sensors from CMOSIS in the 2012 timeframe, but CMOSIS has since been acquired by OSRAM, and there hasn't been any verifiable information since then, whether confirming or denying a continued business relationship.
It might be (as long as we expand that definition to cover tech workers or tech industry aware people in other areas as well). I live an hour North of SF, and even there, if I mention I don't like to use Uber out of principle because of their past behavior and misdeeds, the question I invariably get is "Oh, like what? I haven't heard anything."
Whatever Uber did to paper over what news of their misdeeds reached general cultural consciousness (if any...) seems to have worked for the most part. That's a shame, since I truly believe there should be much harsher repercussions for their blatant disregard of the law over an extended period and the pain and problems it caused to many.
I suspect if the market was working efficiently, Uber would have a lot more problems and be in a much worse position than they are (efficient markets assume good information, and if people don't know what Uber's done, they can't make an informed decision).
Where do you go that doesn't have Lyft, but has Uber?
I travel regularly and it is very rare not to have Lyft available. Virtually any city with >250k has both from my experience, although that could just be where I travel, I don't know.
Kansas City, MO has both, but wait times have been much higher for Lyft when compared to Uber. At least that’s been my experience. I only try to use Lyft.
From the post: "Ray tracing was invented by Turner Whitted around 1980."
I believe that Turner probably did some great things, but somehow I don't think I believe he invented ray tracing. Ray tracing has been around for so long in physics...
Whitted published the first paper applying recursive ray tracing to the problem of rendering an image. Quibbling over this is like saying no one invented compute graphics because Renaissance artists knew how projection worked.
I often get asked about what my views on doing a PhD are (I am more-or-less finished with one now), and one of the ways I frame it is the following:
You know how you've take a course before where the professor was just surprisingly awful at teaching? These professors are often some of the most knowledgeable people in a subfield of the subject you are taking, yet their teaching ability is severely lacking and you have to scramble to learn the material some other way (or just never learn it).
During a PhD, there is a decent chance that your adviser is similarly a bad manager. Unfortunately, having a bad manager for 5-7 years of your life can be a fairly awful experience. You will work with someone who you, on the one hand, look up to, but on the other hand, who seems to not care at all about your mental health, your possible career desires outside of academia, your work/life balance, or the exact reason why this week was a rough week for research in your (human) life.
I have a lot of other thoughts on the matter, but I thought I'd try to keep this post more concise =).
not care at all about your mental health, your possible career desires outside of academia, your work/life balance, or the exact reason why this week was a rough week for research in your (human) life.
I wouldn't call that being a bad manager, but rather being an asshole.
As a professor, I often think that one of my biggest weaknesses is indeed management skills. After all, we suddenly find ourselves having to manage people without any training in the matter, and when our true call is typically science, not management.
To be fair by the time you have finished a PhD you should be capable of learning / doing research by yourself. I don't have a PhD but learning by yourself is a vital skill for any competent software engineer.
