>On the insurance front - expect your insurance to decline this forever unless you are at serious risk of diabetes.
I'm not understanding this part. If these drugs have solved obesity and the whole host of associated diseases, including the number one killer; heart disease, shouldn't the insurance companies be clambering over each other to cover these drugs and heavily encouraging their use considering the cost reduction on the overall health system.
And if the incentives are misaligned with insurance companies why are governments not handing out GLP-1s to anyone who asks?
For chronic diseases that tend to be caused by obesity, the expensive bits tend to be towards retirement aged people - or are so disabling that people drop out of the workforce early.
In either case the vast majority of those costs will be incurred by either Medicare or Medicaid. Or at least the next insurer in line as the typical worker doesn’t spend an entire career at the same firm with the same insurance provider.
By the time any cost savings benefits have been realized (call it a decade later), chances are that insured patient is long gone and all they were was an additional expense.
By the time government gets involved you have someone who has been obese all their life and the damage is largely already done. Even if you paid for the meds now, the savings are limited.
Given the market already though - these drugs will be affordable to the average working person within a few years
Your employer (large employers usually dictate what is covered by their insurance benefit offerings) may not care much about whether you end up with obesity-related diseases in your 60s and above.
> Recent studies have shown convincingly that vaccines against shingles (Herpes zoster) reduce the risk of dementia. The shingles vaccine now in widespread use (Shingrix) has more of an effect than the previous one (Zostavax). A key difference between these vaccines is that Shingrix contains an ‘adjuvant’, an ingredient designed to enhance the vaccine’s effect. It is therefore possible that the adjuvant contributes to Shingrix’ greater effect than Zostavax on reducing dementia.
This is something I've stuggled with for my site, I made https://aimodelreview.com/ to compare the outputs of LLMs over a variety of prompts and categories, allowing a side by side comparison between them. I ran each prompt 4 times for each model with different temperature values available as a toggles.
My thinking was to just make the responses available to users and let them see how models perform. But from some feedback, turns out users don't want to have to evaluate the answers and would rather see a leaderboard and rankings.
The scalable solution to that would be LLM as judge that some benchmarks already use, but that just feels wrong to me.
LM Arena tries to solve this with the crowd sourced solution, but I think the right method would have to be domain expert human reviewers, so like Wirecutter VS IMDb, but that is expensive to pull off.
I've suffered from dry eyes for many years and have tried all the over the counter options available in the US with no success, especially for overnight dryness. Could you please share a hint for the Irish pharmacy delivering to the US?
I believe you may correct; the final point is still absent (since the link chart predates the data in the story) and would (I think) continue the downward trend, but by how much is not clear.
Yes, they put this in footnote 1: "Throughout this article “training” can refer to either pre-training, or fine-tuning." But the article is just talking about fine-tuning.
I posted this on HN back in 2023, reposting now because I don't think this article goes far enough:
I’ll make the bold claim that the following industries / companies would not exist without the USPS:
The Airline Industry: In the early days of American aviation, air transportation was unproven and not financially viable, until the USPS built the necessary infrastructure and gave contracts to airlines to allow them financial feasibility… starting in 1918! [1]
Machine Learning: In 1989 Yann LeCun wrote his seminal paper “Backpropagation Applied to Handwritten ZIP Code Recognition”, which used the USPS’s data set and has today become the hello world of machine learning tasks. More importantly this is the first commercial or industrial application of machine learning. [2]
Netflix: Before Streaming became a thing, Netflix was shipping DVDs via the USPS. The Postal Service adapted its processes and equipment to make this financially feasible, supporting Netflix through its transition to streaming. [3]
Amazon: Early Amazon was only a book vendor, the USPS offered special rates for books that made it possible for Bezos to be profitable from his garage … in 1994, thus birthing the behemoth it is today. [4]
Chickens: okay, not really. But the USPS ships millions of pounds of live chickens and other animals each year! [5]
The International Space Station was an international effort by multiple (of the richest) countries specializing in different areas. There is no one country that does it all.
You would think people like HN User corimaith would have learned from the ISS fiasco.
I've gotten to the point where I no longer even listen to people who underestimate the Chinese. Whatever points they're making can be safely ignored. Indeed, strategic sense demands we ignore them. The time for underestimating the Chinese is long past. That's not the reality we live in any longer.
On the contrary, the use of sanctions precisely recognizes the Chinese ability to innovate and the need to not give them our technology on a silver plate while they are it. Tens, if not hundreds of billions are already being funded into the chip industry's r&d and bringing manufacturing back home.
"Against the power of Mordor there can be no victory. We must join with him, Gandalf. We must join with Sauron. It would be wise, my friend."
I've seen this argument before with some pro-China voices and it's the same circular reasoning in arguments like Roko's Basilisk. It is is futile and unwise to oppose China's ascent at the risk of incurring their future wrath when said rise is inveitable, better that we pledge loyalty now for future favours". It's nothing more than intimidation.
The difference is that future of China's hegemony is far from inevitable. They are strong, but they're not stronger just yet. Their innovation hasn't really broken through in red oceans when paired against competive incumbents, and they are just as prone to hype bubbles as we are. And their massive investment is coming at the cost of a resulting maligned consumption balance and destructive price wars. So there still moves to be made that can radically alter the trajectory of events.
Which argument is right really depends on a realistic evaluation of the situation.
To me I just have a bad gut feeling when we (the west) force China to oppose us.
I also had a bad gut feeling when we outsourced our technology there. We let the buy our companies while China only allowed joint ventures with state controlled companies.
Why didn't we pick up the fight 10 years earlier if they are so evil that we cannot let them win?
Thanks for sharing your real world experience, it helps in seeing how regular folk are affected by policy decisions.
I understand from your post that you are a business person, buying product, performing value added services and selling for profit. Although I know little about business, I would guess that if one of your suppliers raised the prices on one of the inputs to your finished goods, you would likely increase the price of your product to preserve your profits and continue your business as a venture. I would guess that you would not pay the additional cost out of your own pocket.
My question is; why did you not expect the same logic to play out in the tariffs situation? That any country would pay the additional cost of doing business out of their own pocket and not pass it on to the consumer?
I'm not understanding this part. If these drugs have solved obesity and the whole host of associated diseases, including the number one killer; heart disease, shouldn't the insurance companies be clambering over each other to cover these drugs and heavily encouraging their use considering the cost reduction on the overall health system.
And if the incentives are misaligned with insurance companies why are governments not handing out GLP-1s to anyone who asks?